October 11, 2021
For most of my time in the Church, I was a good little Christian boy. I didn’t question authority, I listened to my pastors, I tried to be like Jesus, I followed the rules, didn’t rock the boat, and was very concerned with everyone liking me because if people didn’t like me, then it would damage my capacity to lead them to Christ.
So it came as quite a shock to me when I experienced a particular incident of extreme rebelliousness, and it had to do with the issue of baptism.
Story time.
When I was in the sixth grade, my family attended a Methodist church. I got really into the youth group, had lots of friends there, and really enjoyed the program. I considered myself “saved.” Sixth graders, at the end of the school year, became fully confirmed as members of the church in front of the rest of the congregation during the service. There, the head pastor baptized us using the “water drop” method. He just went down the line and dropped a single, non-intrusive drop of water on all our heads. From that day on, I’d considered myself baptized.
Fast forward many years later. I was nearing the end of my college years and had been volunteering as a youth leader at my church for many years (different church than the aforementioned Methodist one). This church had recently brought on a newer teaching pastor who was perhaps ten years older than me. And for some reason, I just did not like this guy.
To this day I don’t know why I didn’t like him. He never did anything to me personally. I just got some sort of vibe. But everyone else in the church loved him, so I quietly figured I was wrong and buried all those feelings, assuming they were misguided. At the same time, I also felt guilty for not liking him. He was hired by the head pastor, who I liked and respected. Surely he saw something in this teaching pastor that I didn’t. We went to the same church and presumably had the same goals, so I just couldn’t understand my aversion.
One Sunday evening at the college service, this teaching pastor gave a sermon about baptism. In this message, he laid out his very firm opinion that full-submersion baptism was the only way to do it and that “water drop” baptism—which I’d done and had never before questioned—wasn’t the same thing.
I don’t remember all the points he laid out, but I do remember thinking he made a good argument. Despite that, I’ll never forget my reaction to that message:
“I will never do full submersion baptism only because you told me to.”
If the message had come from a different pastor who I liked, I may have actually redone my baptism as full submersion. But since it came from this guy who gave me such bad vibes, I found myself staunchly refusing to comply and redo my baptism.
At the time, I’d lived over ten years as a saved Christian, considered myself baptized, and never felt like my baptism was “wrong” or “didn’t count.” It sure counted in the Methodist church in which I’d done it. And now to have this asshole get up on stage on some random Sunday and tell me that “it wasn’t good enough” just really rubbed me the wrong way.
I considered that I was being petty. I probably was. I thought that me doing my baptism “correctly” as Jesus had been baptized was far more important than my silent personal feud with a teaching pastor I didn’t like for unknown reasons. But no. I told myself that my sixth grade baptism was between me and God, I had fond memories of that baptism, and that it “counted.” I doubled down on my refusal to redo my baptism.
I was very surprised by the sudden flare up of rebelliousness after so much time of following Church authority. I was very confused by it and even felt guilty. But still, somewhere deep inside me, I knew I would never redo my baptism, and if that made God upset, then oh well.
Fortunately, it turned out to be a nonissue because my own faith deconstruction started soon after that. Maybe that night was one of the very beginning steps of my deconstruction—the first time I consciously and obstinately refused to do what a pastor told me to do. Perhaps that marked one of the first times that the “good Christian boy” version of myself finally began to think for himself.