QUESTION

Is it appropriate for someone who is a Christian, but not a pastor or elder, to baptize someone? A friend of mine was recently baptized by his father, who is a committed Christian but not in an official church leadership role. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this practice.

ANSWER

tl;dr

Here’s a brief summary of the lengthy answer below:

• One purpose of the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) is to be visible signs to show who is a member of the church and who is not.
• The church as a body has the authority (from Christ) to declare who is and who isn’t a member; this requires making judgments about who is allowed to participate in the sacraments. This authority does not belong to individual Christians.
• According to the teaching of the apostles in the New Testament (and as is the case with most human societies), the church exercises its authority through officers, i.e., particular men in whom the members of the church, as well as God Himself, invest the authority that belongs to the church as a whole.
• In recognizing this authority, the Westminster Confession of Faith—which our church follows—states that baptisms should be performed by “a minister of the Gospel, lawfully called thereunto.” Our ministers (pastors) only administer baptism to those who have been approved by the church through the examination of the elders.
• Different denominations handle the details of church oversight in the sacraments differently. What’s important is that baptism be administered under the authority of the church. This helps communicate something that is important for the new believer to understand: that baptism joins us to the body of Christ, and that membership in that body entails certain obligations, among which is the duty to submit to the church’s authority.
• The reality of the church’s authority is especially important for American Christians—who naturally hate authority—to understand and embrace.

The Full Treatment

To answer this question well, we must first understand what baptism represents. It is one of two sacraments (along with the Lord’s Supper) given by God to His church. The Westminster Confession of Faith defines sacraments as “holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace, immediately instituted by God, to represent Christ and His benefits; and to confirm our interest in Him: as also, to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the Church and the rest of the world; and solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ, according to His Word” (27.1).

The Confession goes on to define baptism as “a sacrament of the new testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church; but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life. Which sacrament is, by Christ’s own appointment, to be continued in His Church until the end of the world” (28.1).

In reading those statements above, pay special attention to references to the church:

• The sacraments exist to “put a visible difference between those that belong unto the Church and the rest of the world.”
• Baptism is “ordained by Jesus Christ … for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church.”
• Baptism is, “by Christ’s own appointment, to be continued in His Church until the end of the world.”

Scripture teaches us the sacraments are not just personal expressions of faith; they signify our union with the church, which is the body of Christ (see 1 Cor. 12:12–13). And we must understand that the church is not just an invisible mystical fellowship of people who have believed in Jesus; it is manifested on earth as a visible society of people who profess faith in Christ. Baptism is the physical initiation rite by which we are admitted into that visible society. (Once initiated, we then visibly demonstrate the ongoing fellowship of this society as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.)

If we understand that baptism is not simply a personal expression of faith, but represents admission into a distinguishable society of people on earth, we should ask (as indeed you are asking): Who has authority to initiate someone into that visible society?

The answer is, the church itself has that authority.

Of course, someone is admitted by God into the invisible mystical fellowship of His people as soon as they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but God wants this fellowship to be visible on earth, so He tells His church to use a physical sign—baptism—to set apart those who profess faith in Christ.

All of a sudden, we should realize judgments need to be made. Should someone be baptized if they say they believe Jesus was a good teacher, but that He was not the Son of God? How about if someone believes Jesus was the Son of God, but also believes that their own good works get them into heaven? How about if someone says they believe Jesus died for their sins, but they are also living in sexual immorality and don’t seem willing to repent? Who’s to decide?

These questions help show that it actually matters who is let in and who is kept out. In fact, the church is not doing its job if it doesn’t exercise discernment in admitting some into, and excluding others from, its membership. As a matter of fact, declaring membership is so fundamental to the authority of any corporate body, I’m not sure we could even say the church had any authority if it didn’t even possess the power to declare who its members are.

The authority of the church to determine who is in and who is out may actually be clearer to us in Jesus’ instructions for removing someone from our fellowship:

If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. (Matt. 18:15–18)

The church has the authority to judge someone as no longer visibly belonging to the society of God’s people. We call this excommunication, and it necessarily involves cutting someone off from the Lord’s Supper to show that, in the church’s judgment, the judged person is not living as one of God’s people.

It should be plain to us that such grave judgments are not to be made by us as individuals. No single Christian has the authority to declare that someone is no longer a member of the church. That’s only something the church as a body can do. (It’s what the Apostle Paul exhorts the Corinthian church to do in 1 Cor. 5:11–12.)

This principle applies to initiation into the church as well. No individual Christian has the authority to initiate someone into church membership. Only the church has that authority.

How the Church Exercises Its Authority

As is the case with most human societies, and as Scripture teaches, the church exercises its authority through its officers, i.e., particular men in whom the members of the society, as well as God Himself, have invested the authority that belongs to the society as a whole. The New Testament teaches that the church is to have “elders” who “exercise oversight” among the flock of God (1 Pet. 5:1–2). Christians are then commanded to “obey” those “leaders” and “submit to them” (Heb. 13:17).

It is because of these scriptural teachings that the Westminster Confession of Faith—which we follow at our church—answers your question by teaching that baptism should be administered “by a minister of the Gospel, lawfully called thereunto” (28.2). God appoints shepherds in His church to oversee the flock, and one of the ways these overseers shepherd the flock is by administering the physical signs that show that someone is indeed a part of the flock.

But even in our church’s practice, understand that ministers are simply exercising the authority that Christ has given to His church. We follow traditional Reformed practice, which intentionally involves the will of the church in the admittance of someone into church membership. It’s not actually acceptable for me, by my own ministerial authority, to go out and start baptizing people at will. Before we admit someone into our fellowship, their profession of faith is examined by the church through its appointed officers, the elders, and then, once approved, they are baptized by an ordained minister.

Is That the Only Way?

Different Christian denominations—even different Reformed denominations—handle the details of this differently. Interestingly, your friend’s situation illustrates the kind of difficulties elders have to wrestle with in deciding whom to allow into membership and under what circumstances. For instance, the elders sometimes have to consider whether or not to accept a new member’s previous baptism as a valid baptism. Was a person who was baptized by their father baptized in the assembly of believers under the oversight of church officers? Or were they baptized in their backyard in a private ceremony apart from any church gathering? Were they required to make some clear profession of faith, or was it something they just felt like doing to make their family happy? These can be difficult questions to answer, and they demonstrate exactly why it’s important for the church to have wise and trustworthy elders who will make good judgments about such things.

Ultimately, because baptism represents membership in the church, it’s important that it be administered under the oversight of the church. When it is, it actually helps teach the baptized person something it’s important for them to understand: being joined to Christ in baptism means being joined to His body, the church, and membership in the church comes with certain obligations.

Obligations of Membership

The Westminster Confession of Faith teaches another, often overlooked, reason the sacraments exist. As stated above, one of purposes of baptism is “solemnly to engage [church members] to the service of God in Christ, according to His Word” (WCF 27.1). This is why we have someone take vows when they get baptized. The vows serve to demonstrate and confirm the new believer’s faith in the true Gospel, but they also serve to indicate the believer’s resolve to walk in newness of life (WCF 28.1; cf. Rom. 6:4). Anyone who is baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus is obligated by that baptism to live a life of obedience to Jesus’ commandments.

Among those commandments are duties to serve the church and submit ourselves to its authority, both of which are expressed in the last of our church’s membership vows:

Do you promise to support the Church in its worship and work to the best of your ability, to submit yourself to its government and discipline, and to strive for its purity and peace? (BCO 60.2.b)

Such a promise might seem crazy to our modern American sensibilities. It’s in our cultural DNA to hate authority, and that hatred of authority extends to the church. Unfortunately, when baptism is administered apart from the authority of the church, it reinforces the notion that we’re not obligated to submit to anyone in any way, which is what a lot of American Christians believe.

But membership in any human society always involves obligations to that society, and the church of Jesus Christ is no different. When we are baptized into the body of Christ, we are joining ourselves to a body of believers that we are promising to live at peace with, which includes submitting ourselves to the authority Christ Himself has established within that body.

Addendum: What about Acts?

Some might argue with a lot of what we’ve said by pointing to the way baptisms happen in Acts. There are numerous examples that don’t seem to fit the neat and clean mold of traditional Reformed practice. The baptisms in Acts happen immediately upon someone’s profession of faith, not after some period of examination by the church. Philip baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch out in the wilderness away from any kind of formal church gathering, and the Ethiopian eunuch does not seem to have been initiated into any kind of clearly defined local church (see Acts 8:26–40). Ananias baptizes Saul in his house, and there’s no clear indication of Ananias’s authority in the church, nor of the church being gathered in any formal way when it happened (see Acts 9:10–19).

These baptisms present real challenges to overly rigid prescriptions for how baptisms should happen. Nevertheless, we should keep a couple things in mind when reading Acts:

• God often does extraordinary things when He is inaugurating a new age in the history of His people. When the apostles show up in new places to establish the church for the first time (e.g., Cornelius in Acts 10; Lydia in Acts 16; the Philippian jailer in Acts 16; et al.), it makes sense that things might look different than when an established church is welcoming new members into its number.
• Baptisms in Acts, as far as we can tell, are still administered by men specifically commissioned by God.
  • The apostles baptize.
  • The Philip in Acts 8 may not have been an apostle, but he was ordained to office by the church (Acts 6:5–6).
  • We’re not explicitly told whether Ananias (Acts 9) was an officer in the church, but we do know He received a direct commission from God to minister to Saul.
  • We might wonder if the thousands of baptisms that presumably took place at Pentecost in Acts 2 were all administered by the apostles. Even if they weren’t, I think it’s safe to assume they were administered in the context of the assembly of believers which was being directly overseen by the apostles during that time in Jerusalem.