Outdoor Baptisms: Three Reasons They Are Vanishing
- Outdoor Baptism – A Fading Scene
- Outdoor Baptisms: Three Reasons They Are Vanishing
- 7 Reasons To Consider Outdoor Baptisms
A recent article in USA Today caught my eye and although the theology was very poor the title of the article grabbed my attention: Outdoor Baptisms Dwindling. Here is the section that if found most interesting and gives three reasons for the change.
“Outdoor baptisms are rapidly disappearing in America. Once prevalent in the rivers and deltas of the South, the ritual has been nearly extinguished by indoor pools, mega-churches and modernization, researchers and ministers say. Only a handful of churches keep it alive. “It’s a feature of American Protestantism that is vanishing,” says David Daniels, professor of church history at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.”
The article continues by saying:
“No one keeps statistics on outdoor baptisms, which are performed predominately by Baptists and Pentecostals. But officials at the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest grouping of Baptist churches in the USA, say of the 342,000 baptisms performed last year by its member churches, the majority were done indoors. “Most churches, even small ones, have indoor baptisteries,” says Rob Phillips, a spokesman for LifeWay Christian Resources, the SBC’s publishing and research arm. “That’s culturally the way folks do it these days.“
Gradually those little gatherings, that I spoke of in my first post, began to vanish almost unnoticed and as the article in USA Today states they have been “nearly extinguished by indoor pools, mega-churches and modernization“. The reasons for this shift in trends is summed up very well in one paragraph.
“In the 1950s, churches modernized to draw more parishioners and began constructing indoor pools for baptisms, Lee says. Later, as thousand-seat mega-churches began replacing smaller, rural churches, outdoor baptisms further dwindled, he says. “We now have a whole generation of churchgoers who grew up in mega-churches, where indoor baptisms are the norm,” Lee says. “Outdoor baptisms just don’t resonate anymore.” According to the article Shayne Lee is the assistant professor of Sociology and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University.
So, supposing the article is correct, the churches 50 to 60 years ago saw modernization as a means of gaining a larger congregation and consequently began building indoor baptistries to accomodate their swelling numbers. Thus the smaller congregations who could not afford modernization began to diminish and along with it the practice of outdoor baptisms.
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