This Sunday we’re having baptisms at Gateway. We typically do baptisms three or four times a year. We have one of those big inflatable pools that we set up in a grassy area in front of the church and hold baptisms after the services. This Sunday we’re doing them all after our Sunday evening Deepen service.

For the last four or five years I’ve offered baptism classes. Before that, I usually met with the children and parents individually before they wanted to be baptized (this was also at churches that did baptisms every Sunday). On occasions (usually twice a year) I’d have a Kids Baptism Sunday were we would baptize 15, 20 or 30 kids in on one day. Leading up to these weekends I would hold a baptism class so that I could go through this just one or two times instead of 15, 20 or 30 times.

Now that we only do baptisms three or four times a year, I try to offer two or three baptism classes a few weeks leading up to the baptism. I want to give kids ample opportunity to be baptized. At my previous two churches my rule was that a child was not allowed to be baptized until they met with me or someone on staff. That’s a little different now at Gateway (I’ll explain later).

So, I thought I’d share a litte on how we do baptisms, specifically the pre-baptism process. So, my next 3-5 posts will be about baptism with resources, how we’ve changed them and where we feel we still need to go.