Can Any Believer Baptize Another Believer?
Q: If a pastor delays baptism, can a Christian parent perform the baptism instead, and how can that be done in a biblically appropriate way? I’ve been a Christian for over a year now, and was very eager to be baptized from the beginning, but my pastor doesn’t seem in much of a rush to help me out. Can my Christian dad do it instead? How would he do this in accordance with the Bible?
A: Ideally, you should be baptized as an act connected with your local church. That’s the ideal. But I sympathize with you. If your church seems uninterested in baptizing you, then I think it’s okay to have a baptism sooner than that outside the church. Again, I want to stress that this is not ideal. Ideally, the church says, “Hey, you want to get baptized? Great. Next month we’re going to have a baptism. And even if it’s only one person, then it’s going to be you. Let’s do it.” But I would not indefinitely put off getting baptized just because it felt like my church was reluctant to do it.
I do not think that it’s absolutely necessary for baptism to take place in the confines of a local church and as the ministry of local church. But I do think that is generally how it should be done. I think that’s the ideal. We always want to pursue the ideal, unless it’s impossible to pursue.
I’m glad that you want to be baptized. I think that believers should have more of an urgency about needing to get baptized. There are a lot of Christians who think that they should put off baptism until they reach some level of spiritual attainment or maturity or perfection. Friends, that’s not the biblical idea. On the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2, people were baptized on the same day that they became born again. In Acts 8, the Ethiopian eunuch was baptized on the same day he was born again. There is no biblical necessity to delay baptism. I understand that it was a tradition in the early church to catechize believers, which means to teach or train them in the Christian faith, before they were baptized. And that’s not a bad thing, but it needs to be done with the idea of working towards fulfilling this act of obedience that we call baptism.