From one pastor to others: what is your experience of advising and exploring baptism with younger than  ¢â‚¬Ëœnormal-age for baptism ¢â‚¬â„¢ (whatever that is) children?

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One response: I recently baptized an 11 year old girl. I asked her about her interests and
whether or not there was a way that she could express her confession of
faith so that it would be meaningful to her. She loves to sing! So, with
our worship leader’s help she wrote words of confession to a well known
song and she sang her confession of faith in the service. The process of
thinking about the words she would sing was the most important part of
her formation for baptism. It was a really positive, and I hope
formative, experience for her.

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Another: I think the most important thing in dealing with this is not the explanations we can offer them, but the alternative rites we can offer them. Often this problem is created by our lack of imagination. Many years ago, in my previous church, the diaconate and church spent weeks tearing itself apart over a request from a eight-year-old to be baptised on the same day as her father. After a ridiculous amount of angst, someone finally spoke to her and suggested that we have a special rite for her where she expressed her faith and received prayer with laying on of hands, and she was immediately perfectly happy with that!

If we recognise that young people growing up in the church usually grow into faith rather than suddenly convert into it, then we should develop patterns of regular rites which enable the church and the children to acknowledge and honour that journey and celebrate its progress. Often children are asking for baptism because they don’t know of anything else to ask for to express where they are at.

As to what age is appropriate for baptism, I have two rules-of-thumb that I keep in mind, though with plenty of flexibility. They are ways of judging our judgement of the maturity of the decision

The first is to ask, “Would I regard this child as being mature enough to make the decision if they were asking to undergo the initiation rite into another faith, perhaps Islam or something?” If the child is not mature enough for me to respect their decision when I don’t agree with it, then the fact that I agree with the decision doesn’t change their maturity. Actually, thinking out loud, another angle on that might be to ask whether this child still needs their parents’ permission before making binding religious commitments. Do you think you still have the right to veto your child’s decision if she/he wished to join and begin participating in another faith tradition? If you do, then you are not yet regarding such faith decisions by your child as independent adult decisions, and therefore the baptism of such a child would still be an infant baptism.

My second rule-of-thumb arises from my conviction that a baptism is a bit like a wedding: it is the public vow-making ceremony through which we are inducted into a lifetime commitment, a vowed life. Therefore, as a pastor, I ask myself whether I would regard this person as too young to comprehend what “for life” meant if they were asking me to conduct their wedding. If I would not be confident that they were mature enough to sign up for life to a binding commitment to another person, then why does the fact that Jesus is the other person change that. Now, in reality I do cut some more slack in the case of baptism, because at least in that case I can be really sure that “the other person” is up to sustained faithfulness!

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My response: You might like to think about another angle on this: my practice has
been to never baptize anyone under about 16. The biblical situation –
where baptism was a conscious decision to defy alien authorities, even
at the threat of death – is, in my view, better replicated if young
people have had their faith tested a bit before mid-teenage years. I
know most Southern Baptist pastors I’ve spoken to don’t agree, but I’ve
never had a reason to resile from that position. I’ve known more adults
to regret being baptized too early than too late (as older teenagers).

Rowland Croucher