Our church has struggled through the controversy surrounding the new Baptism policy of the International Mission Board (IMB) with much fervor over the past months. This controversy hit home, strongly, this week at our church. You see our Youth Pastor (YP) and his wife are in process with the IMB to become Missionary Apprentices which would lead to career missionary status. They want to work with unreached people groups, probably Muslim peoples and very possibly in Central Asia which features some of the greatest lostness in the world, statistically. The hang up is that our YP was saved and then baptized in a church that is strongly evangelical but who belongs to a denomination that believes that you can lose your salvation, although the specific church does not. The IMB has stated that he must be baptized in an appropriate church in order to proceed and this caused a quandary for our church, and for me personally. Do we, and I, re-baptize them to satisfy the IMB or do we stand firm because we believe that his previous baptism was sufficient?

We finally came to the following conclusion and I thought it might be helpful to others to hear what we went through and so I thought I would describe our conclusions.

1. We believe that biblical baptism is by immersion, post-conversion as a symbolic testimony to our affiliation with Christ. Since this affiliation is with Christ, and not any specific church, it is not necessary that it be in a church that is doctrinally unified with our church. As long as the prescribed processes above are completed, it is biblical baptism.

2. As we believe in biblical baptism as outlined above, and as we believe that the current IMB requirements place extra-biblical requirements on baptism, we then interpret the decision to require extra-biblical baptism to mean that those who are espousing extra-biblical requirements are understood to be weaker brothers and sisters in the faith. (i.e. many of the IMB trustees. I realize that it is probably not popular to call the trustees of a SBC entity weaker brothers/sisters, but it is our understanding that in this issue of biblical baptism, for the reasons listed above, they would be weaker. This not a condemnation of their theology as a whole but a recognition that, in this area, we believe them to be weaker.)

3. Re-baptism of anyone would not be a sin (although biblically unnecessary) and therefore permissible if conscience is able to be complicit.

4. As the spread of the gospel among unreached peoples is a higher priority than a non-essential doctrinal/theological disagreement, and for the sake of building harmony among those of our fellowship (SBC) who are “weaker” we would go ahead with the re-baptism.

That is why we ended up participating in the re-baptism of one of our church’s most dedicated members, faithful Christians, and fantastic staff members last night. We did choose to do it on a Sunday night so as to do away with potential confusion for any non-believers or young, immature believers who might be in the audience. All in all, while I’m not happy with having to participate in the activity of re-baptizing an already baptized believer, I’m thankful that we can have a part in the propogation of the Gospel around the world.