Home Worship Planning Planning Resources United Methodist Baptismal and Membership Practices in Ecumenical Perspective

United Methodist Baptismal and Membership Practices in Ecumenical Perspective

It is my task to speak about our baptismal and membership practices as these are viewed by our ecumenical dialogue partners, particularly those within the other sacramental churches. To understand where we are now, we must first go back some distance.

It has taken the churches a long time to overcome the effects of the fight between Pelagius and Augustine in the early fifth century. The understanding of baptism that ultimately sprang from that debate resulted in the notion that baptism primarily is the eradication of original sin and guilt from an individual. This post-Augustinian understanding eclipsed the earlier emphasis on baptism as an ecclesial event — one that has more to do with the nature and mission of the church than with the fate of an immortal soul destined for heaven, purgatory, limbo, or hell.

At the Reformation, the Anabaptists did throw out the idea of salvation procured almost automatically at baptism; but with it many of them (as also their Baptist descendants) threw out the idea of baptism as a sacrament: a faithful action of God on behalf of the church and the world. For centuries after 1517, those churches that retained the sacramental character of baptism to a greater or lesser degree retained with it notions of salvation from original sin. Remnants of that are with us today.

Some of the residue results from an intense reaction against the older notions both by extreme liberals and extreme conservatives, for differing reasons; liberals have difficulty believing in sin. Conservatives believe in sin, but have difficulty believing that baptism can have anything to do with it or with the personal conversion that — in their view — is the real and sole escape from sin. So both groups tend to dismiss baptism as being of any great consequence. Meanwhile, remnants of the old "baptism for the removal of original sin mentality" reveal themselves in a set of assumptions common even among secularists or very marginal adherents of the church. The old mentality asserts itself when parents with no interest in faithful discipleship come to us feeling the necessity of "getting the baby done."

Within the past few decades, the sacramental Protestant churches and the progressives among Roman Catholics have set forth in their revised rites something that more closely resembles the baptismal understanding of the church before the Bishop of Hippo [Augustine] than afterward. Baptism therein is not seen as a mechanical action for the sake of the infants sullied soul but as a dynamic action by God for the sake of the church’s self-identity and mission in a sinful world.

The acceptability of private baptisms conducted on Saturday afternoon or Tuesday evening apart from the congregation has given way to the insistence that the sacrament occur in the midst of congregational worship so that the ecclesial dimensions will be made clear. Further, rather than fastening on the sin of the individual candidate, the recent rites focus on the forces of sin that grip the whole human family, the "principalities and powers," to use the biblical term.

Granted there is among us United Methodists an often impoverished understanding of the theology assumed in our new services; and granted also, there is resistance by some of our clergy to the performing of baptisms at Sunday worship, at least in their full form. Even so, United Methodists are now in basic continuity with Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, The United Church of Christ, and others concerning the meaning and practice of the sacrament of holy baptism.

But those other bodies are puzzled by related things in which we United Methodists engage. "What," they ask with genuine curiosity, "is preparatory membership?" At least since 1964 our baptismal rites have said more or less directly that through the initiatory sacrament those baptized (at whatever age) are made members of Christ’s church. The current rite says in its introduction that "through the Sacrament of Baptism we are initiated into Christ’s holy Church"; but that does not make one a member of The United Methodist Church. In ecumenical discussions, this raises the perplexing question: "Is The United Methodist Church outside of Christ's holy church?" If so, is Christ’s holy church some kind of docetic entity that can exist apart from actual church bodies made up of congregations and the structures that bind them together? Is there an ethereal church out there somewhere that has nothing to do with the parishes in which we do our work? This is a puzzlement to our partners in ecumenical discussions, to whom the term "preparatory member" is an oxymoron.

The problem for non-United Methodists is that our current plan of "preparatory membership" and "full membership" seems terribly sectarian, and this sectarian aura is enhanced by two other matters, as follows:

First, preparatory membership can expire. Those baptized in infancy or childhood simply cease to be preparatory members at an age specified by church legislation. (It now expires at the age of 19, though it used to expire at 16.) Where, our ecumenical partners ask, does this leave the idea of baptism as a sacrament? Does God’s baptismal promise lapse? Do legislative bodies within the church have the power to specify precisely when it will lapse? If so, what does that say about divine faithfulness and human response to the covenant between God and the church?

Baptismal covenant promises that expire according to the calendar constitute one barrier to ecumenical understanding. The second complicating factor is what I have come to call United Methodism's "loyalty oath." We use it so much we do not even think about it: "I will be loyal to The United Methodist Church . . . " It took me many years to realize that there is no corollary vow in other sacramental churches. Presbyterians do not ask their members to be loyal to the Presbyterian Church. Lutherans do not ask their members to be loyal to the Lutheran Church. Even Roman Catholics do not ask members to be loyal to the Roman Church. And so to those who have not come to take it for granted, this vow sounds like a very sectarian statement, reinforcing what they have already come to suspect about us on the basis of a preparatory membership with an expiration date.

Taken together, all of this arouses among those in other churches the justifiable suspicion that we United Methodists have not yet decided whether we are a church or a renewal movement within some other church — though goodness knows which one, since we departed Anglicanism nearly two hundred and twenty years ago!

The usual pattern in sacramental churches is that there is a roll of baptized members and a second roll that may be called "confirmed members" or communicating members, or "active members." But the unconfirmed, or non-communicating, or inactive people do not lose their status as baptized members. Our proposed rolls of baptized members and professing members correspond exactly to this pattern, and if adopted will put us on the same course as our ecumenical partners. This does not solve the matter of the loyalty oath, but it greatly diminishes its impact. Two of the three things that make us look sectarian are abolished by the proposed rolls of baptized and professing membership.

But now we must get back to the pre-Reformation issue, for I think the crucial misunderstanding we will face in dealing with this amendment is a spin-off of the old Pelagian-Augustinian debate. Some people will see a perduring roll of the baptized as implying automatic personal salvation. "Once baptized, always baptized" will inevitably be misconstrued by some to mean "Once baptized, automatically and always saved." It may be helpful to point out that this is not how salvation is understood in other sacramental churches, nor in ours. The need for personal profession is by no means denied by the existence of a baptismal status that does not expire.

The need for personal commitment is indeed strengthened thereby, since God's claim upon the life of the baptized does not end on a certain birthday but follows the baptized throughout the whole of life. If the baptized person does not become a professing Christian while yet a teenager, the invitation and claim of God are still there at the ages of twenty or forty or eighty — waiting to be taken up by a response of faith. And in virtue of its part in the covenant promises of baptism, the church is obliged continually to comb through its roll of baptized members to see which people thereon need to be encouraged to become professing members, no matter what their chronological age.

What is further strengthened by the proposed constitutional change and legislation flowing from it is a witness to the reliability of God. What God promises sacramentally can be counted on. The sacrament is an objective testimony to divine faithfulness. It is one way in which God's Word reliably comes to us. And a reliable God is surely more likely to call forth a profession with an active personal faith following than is a God who engages us in covenants that run out for individuals on birthday anniversaries as determined by legislative assemblies.

Therefore in supporting this amendment and the later legislation it makes possible, we do well to focus not on the fate of individual souls but on the dependable covenant promises of God offered to the church as a body, and through that church to the whole world. Baptism seen in this way is thoroughly evangelical, for it announces the Good News of divine faithfulness and love to which we can respond with joy. This is also a thoroughly catholic testimony — if we can understand catholic not in a narrow sense but as our connection with the Christian tradition handed on from generation to generation — with modifications and adaptations, to be sure, but also with continuity and faithfulness to the historic witness of the whole church.

If by a constitutional amendment and resulting legislation we can achieve all of that, other Christians will be able to look upon us as a church rather than as a sectarian movement trying to make up its mind as to whether it is really wants to be a church or not.

Copyright © 2001 Laurence Hull Stookey. Used with permission. Congregations, districts, annual conferences, agencies and ecumenical leaders may reproduce this article for educational or citation in written pieces as long as the copyright notice is given and "Used with permission." is added.

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