The number of young people raised in Mennonite families, nurtured in Mennonite congregations and baptized into the faith who eventually disaffiliate themselves from the church seems to be rising.

One Sunday this past spring our congregation gathered, as we do each year, to celebrate a baptismal service. The event is a highlight of the church year and an important part of our congregational identity. We gather in the fellowship hall for breakfast. Then, as the tables are being cleared, someone leads out in the folk hymn “I Went Down to the River to Pray,” which we sing with gusto before piling into cars to caravan to a local pond. As the sun rises, the congregation assembles on blankets and folding chairs for the service. At some point, a member of the church—for youth, it is often their mentor—offers a short introduction and recommendation for each baptismal candidate, followed by a statement of faith and seriousness of intent from the candidates themselves. After the formal baptismal vows, we focus our attention on the dramatic high point of the morning: baptism by immersion and a welcome of the sputtering new member with a white towel and a congregational prayer of blessing. As in years past, the service this spring was joyful and moving—by the benediction more than a few of us were pulling out handkerchiefs.

Yet beneath the evident joy of the occasion are some troubling realities. At our service this spring, nine young people presented themselves for baptism. If the general trends within Mennonite Church USA apply to our congregation, we can assume that 10 or 20 years from now about half of those baptized will not be attending a church. Several will likely be participating in other denominations; but only a few will be actively involved in a Mennonite congregation. Trustworthy statistics on these matters are hard to come by, but by all accounts the number of young people raised in Mennonite families, nurtured in Mennonite congregations and baptized into the faith who eventually disaffiliate themselves from the church seems to be rising. In 1989, 45 percent of our members were under the age of 45; now only 30 percent are. Meanwhile, the average age of membership has risen from 45 to 54. One well-placed observer suggests there may be as many as 2,000 “ex-Mennonite” young adults in the greater Denver area alone, a reality likely replicated to some degree in virtually every major city in the United States.

The decision of young adults to leave or distance themselves from the Mennonite church is part of a much larger pattern in the broader church, and the reasons behind this exodus are complex and multifaceted. Still, without pretending to offer a definitive analysis, I want to focus on one possible component in this troubling trend: our attitudes and practices regarding baptism.

Baptism has always been central to Mennonite identity. The Anabaptists of the 16th century were executed for their insistence that following Christ required a conscious commitment of the believer and that baptism was a symbol of that commitment—“the outward sign of an inward transformation”—rather than a sacrament with miraculous powers residing in the rite itself. Understood within a broader framework of Christian convictions, Mennonites continue to regard believer’s baptism as biblically grounded and theologically coherent. Yet today there are at least three areas where our attitudes and practices around baptism merit closer reflection.

First, our general practice of catechetical instruction prior to baptism is good but woefully insufficient. My wife, an elementary teacher, was required to take a prescribed set of courses and a formal exam prior to her licensure. But the state also assumes that continuing education is crucial for her ongoing success as a teacher. In fact, her teaching license is contingent upon continuing education. Yet this principle that seems so obvious in the professional world appears to have been lost in the church.

We make catechism class mandatory for baptism, but continuing education following one’s entrance into formal membership is completely voluntary. Sunday school classes and small group book studies are fine, but they generally tend to be unstructured exchanges of opinion about topical themes, with relatively little attention to the confession of faith or the teaching positions of the church. Having once met the requirements for membership at the front end, most of us could go our entire life without ever being held accountable for a refresher course.

Second, our emphasis on the importance of individual choice in baptism captures a crucial aspect of what it means to follow Jesus—God does not coerce belief; accepting God’s offer of forgiveness and becoming a disciple of Jesus is a genuine decision. But in our contemporary Western context, our emphasis on the need to say yes to God’s gift of grace can easily be confused with the individualism and single-minded pursuit of liberty that defines modern consumerism and liberal democracy. In the Anabaptist understanding, baptism by consent is always a public statement of allegiance—a profession of loyalty to Christ and the church—not an assertion of individual rights. To be sure, we enter the journey at different levels of maturity and with varying understandings of what it means to submit to the discernment of the gathered community. But nothing in our theology regards it as a normal stage in spiritual development for a baptized member to unilaterally leave the church for an undetermined period of time. Yet I sense that many congregations have simply come to accept the fact that young people will go through such a “phase.”

“They need space to work things out for themselves,” we say. Or, “We don’t want to meddle” or, “Pushing the issue would only drive them further from the church.” These impulses may be pastoral in their intentions, but the implicit message is that a public commitment about the most important decision you will ever make in your life doesn’t really matter all that much. In our desire not to make our young people feel guilty about a commitment that has gone out of focus, we inadvertently communicate that the commitment itself was trivial, and we reinforce the logic of individualism that runs completely counter to our understanding of baptism into a community of faith.

When couples are wavering in their commitments to each other, someone in the church needs to speak up for the marriage. If baptism as a public commitment means anything at all, then we should regard baptized members who are AWOL from congregational life with the same urgency and pastoral concern that we would bring to those members contemplating divorce.

Third, Anabaptists in the 16th century had good reason to reject a view of baptism as a “magical” ritual—controlled by clergy and done to infants who had no memory of the event—that somehow, in and of itself, permanently changed one’s status before God. We have regarded baptism as a sign rather than a sacrament. But that same antisacramental impulse has encouraged a view of baptism today as “merely” a sign, as “just” a symbol—as if the event itself really isn’t all that important. Yet, as with marriage, our vows at baptism are more than merely a sign. Obviously, a wedding doesn’t make a marriage; the real work of marriage is still ahead. But the public pronouncement of wedding vows is a performative act that changes reality.

One’s status before God and before the congregation is different after a wedding from what it was prior to the event. Our baptism is not merely a splashing of water. In it we have been marked by the cross and claimed by Christ. We have been “tattooed” by our baptism in a way that changes us forever.

I encourage congregations to do an internal audit of your baptismal assumptions and practices, reflecting especially on these three points of concern.

To what extent have we made continuing education in the central teachings of the church a normal and normative part of church life—something integrated into the spiritual diet of every baptized member throughout our adult lives?

To what extent are we taking seriously our collective spiritual responsibility of “binding and loosing”? The church honors the commitments of members by actively inquiring into the circumstances whenever a member moves to a new community or quits attending church altogether. Such a gesture is not punitive or intrusive but simply a caring response that emerges from the conviction that Christian discipleship is unimaginable apart from the gathered body of Christ.

Finally, to what extent do we see baptism as not just a symbol but a public response to God’s invitation to discipleship, marked by the transforming presence of the Holy Spirit, which we need to consciously recall and renew? Over the past decade or so, I have participated in ecumenical conversations with representatives of the Lutheran church. Although we have fundamental differences regarding the baptism of infants, I have been impressed by one aspect of Lutheran baptismal theology. At some point in virtually every worship service I have attended, someone pours water from a pitcher into a basin while offering an encouragement to “remember your baptism.” Most Lutheran churches also have a receptacle with water just inside the entrance so that worshipers can dip their finger into the water, not because the water is holy, as I used to think, but as a gesture of consciously remembering ones’ baptism. Woven into Lutheran liturgy and practice are frequent and concrete reminders that because our baptism into Christ is for life, it needs to be continually called to our attention. The irony for me as a Mennonite is that, unlike most of my Lutheran friends, I actually can remember my baptism. Yet I hardly ever am reminded to do so.

At the end of our baptism service this year, we were introduced to a new element that points helpfully in the right direction. Following a prayer of blessing, the nine new members spread out among the rest of us, each holding a cup of water. Baptized believers were invited to receive from one of the new members a blessing in the form of a cross traced with a wet finger on our forehead and a spoken admonition to remember our baptism.

We are forgetful people. Remembering our baptism—in the form of ongoing catechism, intentional follow-up with distant members and regular reminders in worship that we have been claimed by Christ—will not in itself turn around the exodus of baptized members from our congregations. But it may help at least some of us recall our commitments and awaken a fresh sense of God’s presence in our lives. And it may remind us that participation in Christ, and in the body of Christ, is a lifelong event, in need of continual renewing.

John D. Roth is professor of history at Goshen (Ind.) College and a member of Berkey Avenue Mennonite Church in Goshen.