BIC & Baptism

In the capital of Ottawa, we have a very large French Roman Catholic population. For many of our friends and neighbours, Anabaptism is very unknown and very new.

You can imagine their surprise, then, when we first hosted some baptisms on the back deck of our house. We rented a hot tub and had it delivered to our house, and many of our neighbours came out to watch this all unfold on the street. When they asked what the hot tub was for, I replied, “We’re going to have some baptisms in it this weekend.” They responded with looks of sheer horror. You have to understand that for our French Catholic neighbours, baptism happens when you are a baby, not when you are an adult. So my neighbours actually believed we were about to baptize babies in the rented hot tub!

I calmly explained that we only baptize adults in this hot tub. They still didn’t understand the point of it (Why do you need to be re-baptized when you were already baptized as a child?), but at least they were assured that we weren’t barbarians.

The four churches of the Acts Fellowship Network partner with Luz, Alegria, y Esperanza (York Springs, Pa.), and we do two baptisms a year. One of these takes place on Father’s Day at a state park, where we always have a giant picnic and soccer game. The other takes place in the Lions Club Creek across from Roxbury (Pa.) Holiness Camp. At both events, we generally invite a guest speaker to share with us, and we always grill thin Mexican steaks!

The first 10 years of our existence as a church, we held our baptisms during a regular morning service. People would share testimonies and the children would all gather around the baptistery for a closer look. Then, we would have a fellowship time afterwards to celebrate. This year, we changed that. Because we’re renting another building and have only a morning service, we had a Sunday evening baptism at a member’s home in the family swimming pool. We shared testimonies, had the baptisms, and then had a pool party/picnic.