When Jesus inaugurated his kingdom on earth, he gave the church the “keys of the kingdom”: the authority to speak for heaven on earth, to representatively declare who belongs to him (Matt 16:18–19; 18:18). And the initial and initiating means by which the church does this is baptism. Baptism, then, is both the passport of the kingdom and a kingdom citizen’s swearing-in ceremony. It’s how a church publicly identifies someone as a Christian and unites that person to itself.
