What Baptism and Confirmation Meant to Me

This might be a controversial thought:  I believe my confirmation means more to me than my baptism.  Or rather it was through my confirmation that I learned what my baptism means.  But it is also true that I am not finished learning what my baptism means.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked what my baptism means to me.  I have a clear understanding of what my baptism means in terms of the Episcopal Church's Baptismal Covenant, and actually, the entire liturgy of baptism is incredibly rich as a teaching tool.  The question, however, was what my Baptism means to me.  That was a more difficult question.  This may actually be a common issue among people who move from one denomination into another.  Sometimes we have to make sense of our baptism in a new theological setting. I wholeheartedly believe the precepts of the Baptismal Covenant, but I was not baptized according to it.   So the issue turns into a question of belonging and identity and it took some intentional work to adopt a new understanding of baptism.  This was made easier by the fact that the Episcopal Church's understanding of the sacrament encompasses more in terms of Christian duty…and the range of meaning attached to baptism is also broadened.

Baptism can have a myriad of meanings, and the experience affects people in significantly different ways.  In my studies this semester, I was directed to an ecumenical document from the World Council of Churches that detailed at least five meanings of Baptism: 

1.      Participation in Christ’s death and resurrection

2.      Gift of the Spirit

3.      Incorporation into the Body of Christ (the Church)

4.      Baptism as conversion, pardoning, cleansing

5.      The sign of the Kingdom, initiating one into the people of faith and into the reign of God. 

None of these meanings are exclusive.  Neither should one be considered more important than the others.  It seems to me that baptism is ultimately a mystery, so trying to lock down to one meaning of baptism does injustice to scripture (from which these five meanings are derived) and to the work of God.  The best part of this list is that it makes the implicit parts of the Baptismal liturgy explicit.  Just for fun read through the Episcopal baptismal liturgy; you’ll find all of these ideas in either text or symbol. 

What I mean when I say that joining the Episcopal Church widened my understanding of baptism will take some biographical work.  [Disclaimer:  I am writing about my personal experience as a Southern Baptist before I reached the age of eighteen.  I acknowledge the experience was limited in that I wasn’t paying very close attention and I was only in one congregation with short visits to other congregations.  I do not wish to pretend that I have a deep understanding of Baptist theology.]

I grew up in a Southern Baptist household.  Baptists hold to the doctrine of believer's baptism, meaning that baptism is only for those who can make a profession of faith of an understanding of God's plan of salvation.  I remember taking the walk from the pew to the pulpit during the altar call. But I also remember talking to the preacher before the service and making the sinner's prayer for Jesus to “come into my heart.”  This is difficult to remember from so long ago, but salvation seemed to me to be only a matter of loving Jesus and avoiding pain and burning of Hell.  I was baptized the next Sunday by full-immersion. Notice that this understanding of baptism only corresponds to meaning four listed above: “baptism as conversion, pardoning, and cleansing.”  I never had a sense of participating in Christ’s own death and resurrection, or that the Holy Spirit was an expected gift.  I understood being grafted into Christ and sharing in the Kingdom only in the sense that I would be going to heaven… and I would not recognize the concepts using Kingdom language. “Body of Christ” may have been a stretch.  Once again, I probably do not have a sufficiently varied understanding of the Southern Baptist denomination’s theology of baptism, but the other meanings listed above never seem to be made explicit.

From about the time I was thirteen to seventeen, I found myself “backsliding,” but it is also accurate to say that I left the denomination because of conflicting worldviews and a conversation with a racist preacher. Since I had been taught to think that the Baptists had Christianity uniquely “right,” I didn’t see much use in faith through any type of organized religion or denomination. I became a pretty good deist.

Through those years, I rarely thought about my baptism or what it meant. When I did, baptism stayed attached to asking Jesus to come into my heart—a personal thing. But I wondered if it was a once-for-all thing. Could disbelief nullify it?  Are sins performed after Baptism also covered?  If baptism can be nullified by one's actions, does one get rebaptized? Other people I know doubted the sincerity of their own conversation experiences—and if one’s salvation is uniquely tied to the strength of that experience, any doubt in the experience breeds anxiety. Along those lines, is a ten year old really able to understand baptism as much more than fire insurance? 

I found myself considering joining the Episcopal Church around the time I was twenty-four. Since my baptism is valid, I did not need a re-do. I would instead be confirmed. The theological rationale of confirmation is that one makes a mature profession of faith, which I felt that I may have needed from a baptism when I was ten years old and simply scared of Hell. It is also when the Holy Spirit bestows charism on the confirmand. By my call to ordained priesthood, that notion seems to hold true for me.

During catechesis, I understood that baptism is a complete rite within itself, needing nothing further for completion. While my sense of justification was secure, I found my confirmation to be a completion of the work that my earlier profession of faith and my baptism started. Until joining the Episcopal Church, I understood my baptism to be only about me, about my soul, about my relationship to Jesus, about my salvation from Hell. When I was confirmed—and in so doing affirmed a Baptismal Covenant that was not only about me and God, but about other people and my relationship to them through community—only then did it feel like I started to understand the breadth of meaning of my baptism. And so baptism means more to me now, after confirmation, both in terms of my relationship to God through Jesus and the Spirit and in terms of greater sense of Christian duty to the Church and the rest of the world. 

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A few loose thoughts about Confirmation:

I can’t stress enough how important Confirmation was for me, even if liturgical scholars rightly note it is something of a sacrament in search of a theology.  To make the long story short:  As parishes grew in the Western Church, the priest became the head of a local church.  The chrism that the bishop used to do immediately after baptism became what the bishop did when he occasionally visited.  Confirmation (the last act of baptism) had to wait until the bishop came around and became its own rite. It developed from more ecclesiological issues than theological. That does not mean that that confirmation is useless.  Now, priests perform chrismation after baptism, and confirmation is an act of making a mature profession of faith in Christ and affirming the promises made in the Baptismal covenant, which may have been made on their behalf in infancy.

Because Confirmation meant so much to me I hold that confirmation should be a choice initiated by the child, teen, and adult…as opposed to the notion that that it is important and every other 7th grader in the church is doing it. Even if this means holding off for years.

I liken the danger of forcing confirmation to be like going through an arranged marriage.  Parents and/or clergy tell the person that confirmation is important or that they will understand/love it later.  If we would not tell a bride the same thing, we should not tell it to our children.  Many a justifiable resentment to the Church seems to start here.