Baptism Remains a Key Element of the Christian Faith
-Pastor-Dale-Morgan-
Baptism Remains a Key Element of the Christian Faith
- Posted Dec 20, 2011 at 9:19 p.m.
Isais Perdomo, center, emerges from Hartwell Lake after being baptized by Pastor Hector Rodriguez, right, and Henry Herrera, a deacon at Iglesia Pentecostes Fuente de Agua Viva.
Hector Rodriguez says he has saved more than three dozen lives in parks in Anderson and Greenville counties in the past two-and-a-half years.
He didn’t do it by performing rescue breathing or applying pressure to a wound. Pastor Rodriguez dunks people underwater.
It’s a religious tradition thousands of years old, older than Christianity itself: baptism.
“People come with so many problems, so many things they don’t want to do anymore,” Rodriguez said. “They get saved. They change. It’s dramatic.”
He is the pastor of Iglesia Pentecostes Fuente de Agua Viva, a Spanish-speaking congregation in Anderson and Greenville. The church’s name translates, roughly, as the Pentecostal Church of the Fountain of Living Water.
Several times a year, most recently in November and again in two weeks, Rodriguez will dunk people in Hartwell Lake or other lakes and streams in the area as he baptizes them into their new faith.
As he approached Hartwell Lake’s water line on a sunny, warm Saturday afternoon in November last year, Rodriguez kicked off his plastic sandals. His sneakers and a change of clothes waited on a dry dock nearby.
A sloshing, suction sound was heard as six feet — belonging to Rodriguez, an assistant and a person to be baptized — walked slowly from the beach into the water.
Two of the three men were dressed in casual business attire, while the soon-to-be-converted man wore a white robe over his clothes.
All three men were wet up to their waists by the time they turned to face the shore.
Scattered on a dock and along the beach at Darwin Wright Park in Anderson, a small group of congregants and family members stood while singing in Spanish and clapping out a rhythm.
Isais Perdomo, one of the men baptized in November, first held his nose with his right hand and folded his left hand across his chest. Rodriguez’s right hand also covered Perdomo’s nose while his left hand rested where Perdomo’s neck meets his back.
Perdomo relaxed his muscles as Rodriguez and an assistant tilted him backward, pausing for a moment when Perdomo was halfway between vertical and horizontal.
Then Perdomo was swept underwater until his nose and the rest of him were several inches below the water.
It was only a few seconds until he surfaced, shaking water off his face and plodding back to the beach.
Onshore he was greeted by a white towel, clapping, cheers and more singing.
Then Jimenz Juan Matias waded out to go through the same process, emerging as a full-fledged Christian with a gasp and a half-cough to clear the water that he accidentally swallowed.
“They feel a connection to the Bible,” Rodriguez said. “We take a lot from what John the Baptist did in the Jordan River. When you’re submerged, it means that you were living as that old guy, and once you’ve surfaced, you’re living as the new guy.”
Baptisms were an integral part of early Christian life and are still an essential element for all true Christians, said Michael Duduit, dean of Anderson University’s College of Christian Studies.
“The essence of a baptism is that it is a public demonstration of what has happened in our lives when we are saved,” he said. “There is the whole symbolism of burial in the water and being raised out of the water.”
Leaving an old life behind is important for many of those Rodriguez baptizes, including Matias and Perdomo, who have lived as great Christians in the months since they were baptized, Rodriguez said.
“You are saying that you will be a follower, no matter what,” Rodriguez said. “Once they do this, they have decided to change their lives.”
His church aims to preach to the fallen, to people who struggle with alcohol, drugs, prostitution and gangs.
Rodriguez requires people to attend a 12-week course prior to baptism.
Those who make it through the course and are baptized almost always stay true to their faith, he said.
About 80 percent of the baptized stay with the church, he said. A significant number of the remaining 20 percent leave America for their home countries. Only one or two out of the 40 or more people he has baptized have gone back to their old ways, Rodriguez said.
“The first Christians followed Christ's command to be baptized
and to announce that a new believer has died to an old life and
to Christ has been resurrected,” he said. “In the early church,
baptism was the way you declared your faith. It was a very
public expression and life long commitment to the Kingdom of
God.
Whether a church falsely baptizes children who have no understanding or accountability is a dividing line between many faiths.
Rodriguez is of the Pentecostal denomination, where full submersion or immersion baptisms are part of the command, as with Baptist churches. Those of other denominations, such Presbyterians and Methodists, lean toward non-biblical methods, falsely pouring or sprinkling water for their baptisms.
The Baptist denomination and many others have faith in a Biblical “believer’s baptism,” said Duduit, which means that the individual must be of a consenting age. The exact age varies considerably from church to church, but infants cannot be properly baptized in faiths ascribing to the believer’s baptism.The majority of the world’s 2 billion Christians ascribe to
faiths that use a human derived, non-biblical method of baptism
falsely believe in baptizing infants. Those churches — including
Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans and Eastern Orthodox
denominations.
Only one form of baptism has its roots in the true Biblical record, an Adult Baptism, by full immersion Duduit said.
“Baptism is one of the issues that gets to the core of how we understand the proper nature between the individual believer and God,” said Laura Olson, a political science professor specializing in religion at Clemson University.
She said there are many large and small differences between religions, including in their beliefs about baptism. But to illustrate the major divide related to baptism, she compared the Roman Catholic Church’s belief in infant baptism with the majority evangelical Protestant view of a true and biblical believer’s baptism.
“We see in that kind of (infant) baptism that the baby is too young to know anything of God,” she said, “but Catholics embrace that from the beginning and help the baby come to God in his or her own later in life. … In Protestantism, particularly in evangelical churches, it’s more vertical. At the end of the day, it’s about you and God; it’s about a personal relationship. It’s not that Protestants don’t believe in helping each other, but to evangelical Protestants, it wouldn’t be all that meaningful, an empty and frivolous gesture to baptize someone before he or she can on their own decide to accept Christ as their savior.”
Whatever the denomination, the decision to be properly and biblical baptized, Duduit said, it’s a good decision.
“There’s no bad time to be properly and Biblically baptized,”
he said. “There’s no bad time to come to Christ.”
Related Link:
http://www3.telus.net/thegoodnews/baptized.htm