Going Public: Why Baptism Is Required for Church Membership

by Bobby Jamieson

Another reason we’re essentialists is that to one degree or another, all of us have imbibed from our culture a deeply pragmatic mind-set. Modern Americans, and many of our neighbors throughout the postindustrial West, prize efficiency.

Pragmatic efficiency now trumps biblical fidelity

We see a guy with eight feet of eschatology charts on his office wall and say, “No thanks. I’m all about the gospel.”

If you get the flu, don’t act like you’re having a heart attack. Yet if you went to your doctor with flu symptoms, what you wouldn’t want to hear is, “I don’t get bogged down in secondary issues. I’ve decided to only treat heart attacks.”

Further, baptism is not unrelated to the gospel. Instead, as we’ll see, baptism is a picture of the gospel, and baptism plays a role in confirming the gospel to the Christian, the church, and the world. To say we need to sacrifice baptism for the sake of the gospel is like saying I need to neglect my children in order to love my wife.

Another reason open membership is particularly appealing today is that secularism continues its militant advance, pushing evangelical Christians farther into the margins of society.

“Flexing” a principle for the sake of results assumes it’s finally within our power to grow a church. Yet if you can simply flip a switch that results in church growth, that “growth” is never the kind that matters. Instead, the growth and strength of a church depend on God’s sovereign blessing from first to last. We shouldn’t be afraid to obey a biblical principle that seems

So we baptists are the odd man out, and no one likes to be that guy. It’s one thing to be called intolerant for being a Christian; that’s a burden we can all bear together. But to be called intolerant over baptism begins to make open membership look pretty appealing.

The first is that if credobaptism is true, then those “baptized” as infants haven’t been baptized.

defective version of baptism, like a broken arm is still an arm. Instead, infant baptism is simply not baptism. Again, this means we baptists think a large portion of the Christian world is unbaptized, whereas no one disputes that we’re baptized.

Great analogy on what baptism is in comparison to a broken arm

Second, paedobaptists who level this charge are guilty of precisely the same exclusivism they decry. Virtually all paedobaptist churches require baptism before membership; they simply understand infant “baptism” to be legitimate baptism.

evangelical Quaker or member of the Salvation Army who wants to join your church. He believes the same gospel you do. He lives a godly life. You’re convinced he’s a genuine believer. He understands himself to have been baptized, by the Spirit, upon conversion, rendering an act of water baptism unnecessary. What could possibly justify excluding him from your church?

Jesus is saying there are no secret Christians. To be a Christian is to be a public witness to Christ.

In the New Testament, baptism is where faith goes public.

Yet to allow paedobaptists to join a church on these terms is to grant infant baptism a status other than “not baptism.” This grants infant baptism sufficient theological weight to qualify a person for membership who would not qualify if they had never been “baptized” at all. Thus, in these circumstances, infant baptism is allowed to stand in for a valid baptism. The church counts a person as baptized on the basis that the person considers him- or herself baptized. But a church can’t have it both ways. If baptism isn’t required for membership, then any professing believer should be admitted with no questions asked about baptism. Yet if baptism is required for membership, then when the church admits a paedobaptist to membership, it effectively declares infant “baptism” to be true baptism—whatever their statement of faith may say to the contrary.