Ordinance of Baptism
At Redding Christian Fellowship we believe that God ordained two ordinances to be observed by Christians. One of these is baptism. In the New Testament, conversion and baptism were closely linked to each other. When Jesus issued His “marching orders” to His disciples, He told them to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit as they went to make disciples of all nations. The book of Acts demonstrates that as persons came to faith in Christ, they were promptly baptized. Someone has written that the idea of an unbaptized believer is foreign to the New Testament.
While we recognize that the Church over the centuries has come to various understandings about both the mode and the meaning of baptism, our conviction is that baptism is an outward symbol of an inner reality. That is to say, at the point of salvation a person dies to the old way of life and becomes a new creation, with a new purpose and a new destiny. Water baptism by immersion symbolizes this reality.
In our understanding, the preferred mode of baptism is immersion. The most accurate definition of the transliteration of the Greek word, “baptizo” is “to immerse”. Furthermore, full immersion best represents the fact that a believer is presenting himself or herself as a person dead to the old way of life, in a sense buried with Christ, but then rising up from the water to symbolize a resurrected life in Christ.