Non Quid Pro Quo

Unless becoming the water of baptism is an authentic self understanding of the assembly, all attempts to offer parties and rehearsals and mentors will be corrupted and viewed as a calculation, a mere marketing ploy. Being the water of baptism, a community cannot but help to wash over a new family. It does so with no expectation of a return or an outcome so mundane as a pledge or an attending dues paying member of the club.  It offers itself as gift and sign. It spends itself, like the Kingdom, recklessly.   Most crucially, it is a wideness across the community that offers such mercy much rather than the professionally assigned incumbents.  The whole Laos both communicate and enact this presence and encounter.

Drive-by baptisms.   This blog exists to help treat this condition.  It is a total re-frame of the problem: It is not the problem of the parents, it is the self-understanding of the community of faith which is the problem.  That congregational self-understanding, if baptized, presents the conclusive, holistic, and most felicitous end to the experience of casual baptism.

Drive-by baptisms  are becoming less and less because less and less are choosing to baptize their children.  Those who do come requesting an infant baptism and who have not shown any previous interest or behavioral focus on a community of faith present a challenge to the leadership of  a community.

All too often clergy complain about these parents who seem to them as superficial non-churched folks wanting more superstition and social convention than active, mature religious life.  The newcomers are blamed or suspect while still craved!  Or as likely, condescended to as folks just coming to get the kid "done."  Active parishioners grumble about the falseness of the event, seeing as how these parents will never show up again even after all the attention paid.

To date, leaders are loathe to present any hurdles to the nascent inquirers, not wanting to be THAT church or THAT priest who dared to refuse them and treated them poorly and asked them to do all these things, etc.  So in the interest of wanting to nurture even the vaguest of inklings (possibly spiritual), these baptism take place built on hope and fear.  Fear that if we don't do as requested we'll look mean and unwelcoming  while hoping that the nicest of welcome and easiest of preparation will result in the nascent becoming normalized.  Fear that we are a dying church and we better get with it and welcome just about everybody in anyway they choose to stumble in through the door, and hope that if they hang around something might slip in that starts them on a path of lively communal faithfulness.

The umbrage taken at such slim-to-none catechesis spills over into open-table dispute and even the more literal drive-by Ashes-to-Go.  Advocates of a robust catechumenate can to lapse into pharisaic scolding while those who rebel against those scoldings lapse into a shallow promiscuous,"nice-to-see-you," trading as authentic hospitality.   And scared clergy, threatened by decline,  and/or burdened by the overwhelming heft of a liturgically correct catechumenal processes, surrender to the drive-by.

We can fix this.  There is a cure.  It requires a reframe.  Here it is:

• The whole congregation understands itself as Baptismal Water:
•  We are the wave washing over the parents and child   

Which means in practice

• Every infant baptism is planned like a wedding, with all the excitement, rehearsals etc. 
• i.e. "Baptismal Shower" thrown by the congregation.
• a congregational sponsor mentors the family sponsors
• The party/luncheon for the baptizand's family is sponsored and thrown by the congregation.

The reframe begins at the most basic level.  It is not a technical fix.  If clergy appropriate, concoct, overlay, build or otherwise import a catechumenal process, even with a "team," it cannot be sustained and will fail under its own weight. It is not a system, a series of books, blogs, or communications, or ritual actions.  It is, in fact, and in deed, a revolt against the unbaptized nature of the current church structures which misunderstand the laity to mean the non-ordained.

This blogspace will offer the immediately practical and deep mystical reframe to impact and end the unnecessary conundrum of current baptismal practice.

Next posts: 

Laos Means Whole Assembly with Leadership Among: Baptizing Our Ecclesiology

What to Say to New Parents on the First  Visit.

Offering Gifts not Demanding Compliance.

Stages of  Preparation -Home Blessing, Baptismal Shower, Parenting, etc

Planning the Party.

Parish Sponsors as Mentors.

Distance Learning.

At the Rehearsal.

How to Raise Happy, Confident, Faithful Children.

Rite and Wrong.