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
- 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.
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.
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