Baptism at River Valley Community Church

~ From Eli Suddarth - Director of Worship & Discipleship

Next Sunday, River Valley Community Church will once again meet for our yearly baptism service in Sugar Grove at the home of Jay and Gretchen Schuette. These events are always a fun and enjoyable way to reconnect and welcome new members into God’s family. There is also a very serious side to this occasion, and the meaning behind a person’s decision to publicly declare their faith in God and belief in His Son Jesus is not be missed.

The act of baptism touches the very core of Christianity in that it upholds the elemental characteristics of what it means to worship God: the total immersion of one’s life into a relationship with Jesus. And though it may seem to be a strange ritual, out of touch with today’s culture, that is another of the very reasons we employ it as the public signifier of one’s new allegiance to the kingdom of God.

The early church also struggled greatly with the public perception of its practices that not only seemed out of place in its host culture, but also was considered a threat to the Roman empire. They did not, however, use this as reason for altering important worship elements for early Christians. Historian Alan Kreider writes of the first-century church that...

Christian worship was designed to enable Christians to worship God. It was not designed to attract non-Christians; it was not “seeker-sensitive,” for seekers were not allowed in. If Christian worship did assist in the outreach of churches, it did so incidentally, as a by-product, by shaping the consciousness of the individual Christians and the character of their communities so that their lives - and their interactions with outsiders - would be attractive and question posing.

By holding to the practices of our belief in Jesus and the command that He gave to make disciples and baptize them into the family in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, we demonstrate to the world around us a unity among Christian brothers and sisters that cannot be broken and that will never be sacrificed for the mere sake of relevancy. This is what will be attractive to a world filled with increasing, middle-of-the-road mediocrity: Christians behaving the way Jesus did and said.

Join us next week to celebrate all of this in a time of corporate worship at the Schuettes’. 457 Haverhill Court, Sugar Grove at 10:00 a.m. Breakfast is included before. It’s also not too late to make this decision to be baptized - call the church office at 630.844.9115 for more information.