A Texas church baptised 882 people in one Sunday. The argument started on Monday.
Lakepointe Church runs eight campuses around Dallas. On Sunday 27 September it baptised 882 people across them, two hundred more than it managed on the same Sunday a year earlier. Its senior pastor, Josh Howerton, posted afterwards that he felt like a "kite caught in a hurricane of grace."
Two weeks before that, Biltmore Church drove its congregation out to a lake on private land in Fletcher, North Carolina, and baptised 458 people in an afternoon. That is the most in the church's 137 years. Biltmore began in 1889 as Fern Hill Baptist Church, with twenty-five members on the roll.
Back in May, Church of Eleven22 in Jacksonville baptised 2,552 people on a Florida beach in one go.
Is this a revival?
Depends what you are willing to count. Baptist Press has been tracking the figures and reports churches across the United States seeing more baptisms than they are used to. The same wave is running through the universities, where UniteUS has been filling arenas and baptising students in troughs outside. Nobody has the number that would actually settle it, which is how many of those people are still turning up in a year.
The criticism going round is not that the numbers are inflated. It is that they are quick. Several of these were spontaneous baptisms: the invitation goes out mid-service and people come forward the same morning, no class, no waiting list, no interview. Howerton answered that head on. "Every baptism in the entire New Testament is a spontaneous baptism."
He is not wrong about Acts. The Ethiopian official in chapter eight asks to be baptised from a moving chariot, sees water by the road and gets in. Philip does not send him home with a workbook.
The objection still has a shape to it. If someone gets into the water twenty minutes after deciding, nobody has sat down and asked them what they are agreeing to, and a fair number of them will not be able to tell you in six months. Howerton's answer that morning was to preach on 2 Timothy and tell the room, "You don't need a second chance; you need a substitute." Then: "Today's your day."
The Monday problem
Biltmore's executive pastor, Devin Goins, said something in an older interview that reads differently next to a 458. "Baptism is a great step for a Christ-follower, but it is often just the beginning." Of this year's event he said only that it was "very humbling for us."
That is the honest version of it. A trough and a queue make a good photograph, and the photograph is not the hard part. Whether a church has 882 people willing to sit with 882 people through a February nobody writes about is the part that decides whether any of this was a revival or a very good Sunday.
Sources
- A Hurricane of Grace: Josh Howerton's Lakepointe Church Celebrates 882 Baptisms in 1 Day, ChurchLeaders
- North Carolina church baptizes 458 people in a single day, The Christian Post
- Revival rising: nearly 900 baptized at Texas church, latest mass baptism, CBN News
- More churches seeing surge of baptisms, Baptist Press
- 2,552 baptized on Florida beach, CBN News
5Talents
Written by the 5Talents editorial desk.