CSBC Ranks 7th In Baptism: What’s The Real Story?

On June 9, 2006, Randy McWhorter, Healthy Church Group Leader at the California State Baptist Convention, reported that CSBC ranks 7th in the nation for total baptisms in 2005 of 18,849. Of special interest in the report is the breakdown of the 18,849 baptisms.

• 126 were preschoolers
• 4,644 were ages 6 – 11
• 3,835 were ages 12-17
• 3,922 were ages 18-29
• 6,322 were ages 30-59
• None in ages 60 and older

Chief concerns are whether the underage baptisms are equivalent to pedobaptisms and how many of the over 18,000 baptisms are doctrinally erroneous, like Saddleback’s baptism where they baptize unrepentant unregenerates and view baptism not as an entrance into church membership.

Compare Saddleback’s position on Baptism with the 2000 BF&M:

• Saddleback: Will Saddleback Church baptize a person who lives unmarried with another person? The short answer is yes… While we will baptize unmarried persons living together without benefit of marriage, we will not accept them into [church] membership
  2000 BF&M: Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer… It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.
• Saddleback: At Saddleback Church baptism does not confer [church] membership to a person.
  2000 BF&M: It is a testimony to his faith in the final resurrection of the dead. Being a church ordinance, it is prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord’s Supper.

Yet, as one CSBC official stated in his email to me, “Praise God for 18,849 new believers…” This is a great shock. While credobaptists would certainly be leary to claim all pedobaptist baptisms are believers, CSBC is ready to jump the gun by claiming all the pedobaptist baptisms are genuine heaven-bound regenerates.

As the SBC is so concerned about low baptism numbers in 2005 (a vain concern, I might add), it appears that their desperation has led them to see how close they can flirt with the minimal age requirement without being labeled “pedobaptists.”

So can professions of faith in children be seriously taken? John S. Hammett says it well, “…quite often children at a tender age will make professions of faith. Parents will then frequently speak with their pastor. They want to do nothing to discourage their child’s love for their Lord or act like they think the child is lying, yet they know that children’s decisions can be made out of a desire to please parents or because their friends have made a similar decision. Also, they know that in other areas of life, they do not take a child’s decision to be a firm commitment. A child may say at the age of seven that she has decided she wants to be a doctor or wants to marry the boy next door, but experience shows that such decisions are often modified over time.”[1]

According to Gregory Wills, historical Baptist churches in 1640 required baptismal candidates to give a narrative of their conversion before admission to membership. These baptist churches sat in judgment to discriminate the true from the false conversions.[2]

Of another concern is the disconnect between baptism and church membership. Baptists throughout history have always affirmed that baptism is the entrance into membership with the body of believers – the church family. This is not so at Saddleback, it seems. As Mark Dever notes in Together For The Gospel blog, “Saddleback so separates baptism and church membership that they will baptize someone they know to be in unrepentant sin, though they will not admit such a person to membership.”

CSBC and responsible SBC churches can keep doing what they’re doing: boasting great numbers of baptisms, thinking that it gives glory to the name of Christ by giving false assurances to children that they are saved but in reality, they may not be because CSBC and local SBC churches have not attested of witnessing any marks of genuine conversion beyond mere profession and by endorsing baptisms apart from church members. And all the while, CSBC and respective SBC churches may well be held responsible for producing more hell-bound wet baptists that Jesus will well say to many on that Day, “I never knew you.”

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[1] John S. Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications: 2005), p.271.
[2] Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.20.