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Baptism

In Blog, Book Reviews, Church on
July 14, 2024

A Short Guide to Church

It’s becoming increasingly common for Christians to skip church on Sundays. There are numerous reasons for this. Some are traveling on Sunday mornings, whether that be for work, for pleasure, or for their children’s sports tournaments. Others have such busy lives that they just want to sleep in and rest on their one day off from other responsibilities. Some have been hurt by a church in the past and don’t want to find a new church to attend, lest they be hurt again. And still others don’t see a need at all to go to Sunday worship services (after all, the Church isn’t a building, right?).

According to Ligonier’s The State of Theology survey in 2022, forty-four percent of professing Evangelicals do not believe that every Christian is obligated to join a local church, and fifty-six percent believe that worshipping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regular church attendance.[1] This means that about half of self-proclaimed Evangelical believers today do not believe it’s necessary for Christians to attend church regularly or become a member of a local church. This fact is both alarming and problematic, and it’s one reason why Dean Inserra wrote his newest book, A Short Guide to Church.

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In Bible Study, Blog, Colossians on
April 27, 2020

With Him

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, buried with Christ in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life.”

Baptism is one of the two ordinances that was instituted by Jesus during His life on this earth and is practiced by the Church today (the other being communion). The act of baptism, being immersed in a body of water and being raised up out of it, is an outward symbol of an inward event – salvation, the death of the old self and the birth of the new self.

When pastors perform a baptism, they say something like the quote at the top of this blog – “buried with Christ in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life.” Those, like myself, who have been attending church since childhood tend to not pay attention to these words. We hear them, but we hear them so often that we usually don’t contemplate their meaning or origin.

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