Baptism and Membership in a New Spiritual Reality

Part One On Baptism and Church Membership

In 2010 we in Immanuel Fellowship are giving more significance to Baptism as incorporation of new believers into the life of the Fellowship. By this we mean that we are seeing Baptism not only as an individual's public affirmation of private faith in Jesus Christ but also as an initiation into the life the Fellowship. In other words when we speak of membership in the Fellowship we mean this to come primarily through Baptism.

Reading the New Testament we see the importance that it attaches to Baptism. Our response to the call to salvation through repentance towards God and faith towards the Lord Jesus (Acts 20:21) leads us to Baptism. Through Baptism we identify ourselves with or participate in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Romans 6:4). In answer to the question, “Shall we persist in sin so that God’s grace may abound in our life?” Paul answered: “How can we?” In baptism, he said, we participated in Christ’s death, burial and resurrection. So the Christian life is not a constant demand for the grace of God for forgiveness but the outworking of our participation in the life of Christ unto righteousness (Romans 6). Beset by a temptation we can always look back to Baptism and ask ourselves the same question, “How can I?” Baptism is the watershed from which flows the entire ethical dimension of the Christian life.

This life “In Christ” has another dimension, however. Christ has a Body, the Church. Participation in Christ also involves participation in the Church. This participation also begins with Baptism. In 1 Corinthians 12:12 and 13, we read, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

The Christian life is not only a life of prayer and worship or a matter of personal integrity. It is also a life that we live together with other believers in the context of the local church. Everybody passes through the same gate when we enter into Fellowship and that gate is Baptism. It is not the signing of a membership card or the public profession of the church’s tenet of faith. It is the joining of our life into a new spiritual reality—the Body of Christ.