The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective was developed in 1995, and is the most recent systematic statement of belief for Mennonite Church USA. 

Over the course of the next several months, we will be releasing “roundtable posts”, featuring two to three members of Mennonite Church USA congregations reflecting on an article from the Confession of Faith and how it impacts their ministry, congregational life and theology. We’ll move through the articles in numerical order. You can read all the past posts online. 

Today’s authors are reflecting on Article 11: Baptism. Writers appear in alphabetical order. 

Bishop L.W. Francisco III is the founder and lead pastor of Calvary Community Church in Hampton, Virginia. He also serves on Mennonite Church USA’s Executive Board.

What does baptism mean in the context of our Confession of Faith and what significance does it have in the life of the believer? Does baptism make us complete, cleansed and affirmed  in the sight of God and man or is it a dated ritual handed down from generation to generation?

The plurality of baptism emphasizes the ethos, pathos and the logos of the Scripture revealed through the Trinity, which prompts an inward confession of an outward profession. The profound effect of being baptized is a type of confirmation that says to God and humanity that one is bound to a force greater than one’s own human will. For that reason, one chooses to serve and pledge one’s life to representing and building God’s Kingdom here on earth.

My congregation, Calvary Community Church in Hampton, Virginia, would view the act of baptism somewhat as a right of passage and an expression of profound faith and commitment to Christ, with an affirmation and celebration of the believers who embrace and walk alongside the newly baptized. A profession of faith for the baptized signifies that they have turned away from the world and now old things pass away and all things become new while walking with the Savior.

As with any sacrament, baptism is not an atoning action, but rather an expression of deep-seated faith that our sins are forgiven and that we are accepted into the body of Christ. Our salvation is not in baptism, but through the blood of the Baptizer, Jesus the Christ. Our confession affirms the root of our faith, not in works or words, but to a commitment of following Christ and allowing Him to have precedence in our flawed understandings and perceptions. We may not dot every “I” or cross every “T,” but we are always submitted to the Baptizer, Jesus Christ, who is the author and finisher of our faith. He whom the Son liberates is liberated indeed!

J. Alexander Sider is Professor of Bible and Religion at Bluffton (Ohio) University.

“I’m talking myself into baptizing my kid.”

That’s what I said a few days ago to my students in our class on Mennonite theology. We were discussing Balthasar Hubmaier’s claim in 1525 that Christian baptism must only take place after a personal confession of faith. He distinguished between baptism by the Holy Spirit and water baptism. The authors of the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective made Hubmaier’s distinction, too, although they didn’t name him as a source.

Hubmaier’s take on “believer’s baptism” in the 16^th century was startling to his contemporaries, but not for the reasons we’d expect.  It wasn’t that his was the “biblical” view, while every other reformer had sold out for social stability. Then, as now, debates about biblical interpretation often said more about group allegiance than they did about “what the Bible says.” Hubmaier’s view was audacious because he made the believer take the lead role in the narrative of salvation. His contemporaries, by contrast, based their entire understanding of faith on just the opposite: in the drama of salvation, God is the protagonist.

For Hubmaier, water baptism was the individual’s public commitment to a transformation that had already been wrought by the Holy Spirit in the believer’s life. But, that transformation was itself God’s response to a person taking the initiative to turn toward God in the first place. Hubmaier didn’t develop a doctrine of prevenient grace as later “free will” Christians did. Instead, he left it as what he thought was an observable sequence in the Christian life: the person turns toward God, God responds with the gift of the Holy Spirit, and baptism in water seals the deal.

What does this have to do with my kid? If I got to choose one thing I want my child to believe, it would be that everything (even his free response to God) is part of God’s story, not vice versa. But, when I read Hubmaier or the Confession of Faith, I hear a different theological accent: “Baptism is for those who are of the age of accountability and who freely request baptism on the basis of their response to Jesus Christ in faith.” In this teaching, baptism depends on a lot of things about the person who is being baptized—her age, accountability, freedom, request, response, and faith. These aren’t trivial features of human life, but I worry that this doctrine of baptism may stifle the good news because of what it prioritizes. Baptism is fundamentally God’s action in which we participate, not the other way around. By resisting a distinction between baptism by the Holy Spirit and baptism in water, those Christians of the 16^th century who insisted on retaining infant baptism got this much right: God is always acting savingly in human lives—at every age, every level of ability, every circumstance of freedom or bondage, whether we ask for God’s presence or not, and not just because of our responses to God in Jesus Christ but, perhaps especially, in spite of them.

Paula Snyder Belousek is Pastor of Salem Mennonite Church in Elida, Ohio.

I value the Mennonite emphasis on believer’s baptism that is described in article 11 as a, “covenant with God to walk in the way of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.”

This means that baptism is best understood as the activity of God in the person’s life, as well as their response to it.  However, if we are not careful to hold both of these aspects together we run the risk of reducing baptism to simply the individual’s decision rather than an act of God’s grace. Baptism can become about the ability to assent to a set of core convictions that we strive to live out perfectly rather than the beginning of a faith journey. I have seen this played out in the lives of teenagers who are highly anxious about taking this step in the fear they don’t measure up and with adults with developmental disabilities who were denied baptism because of their inability to make a verbal confession of faith.

In our life together at Salem Mennonite, we attempt to hold baptism as a both an act of God and a human response. One of the most joyful baptisms we have celebrated in recent memory was with a married couple, the parents of four young children. This service of baptism came after a near fatal illness and long road to recovery for the husband. During this time, the congregation faithfully prayed for healing, brought meals, visited, offered rides and showed up as they lived out their own baptismal vows as a sign of God’s grace. As this couple stood before the congregation to join their lives with the body of believers, this event was recognized as both their desire to walk in the way of Jesus and as a response to the gifts of God’s grace and love. This is the vision that the Confession of Faith points us to: we make our covenant to God to live as disciples of Jesus by first responding to the healing, forgiveness and love we have already so generously received.