Izzie's Baptism

Two Sundays ago (7/20/2008), Sophie and I became members at our church, Redeemer Presbyterian Church of NYC. (Well, technically, we became members a couple months ago, when we were confirmed by the Deaconate during one of their leadership meetings, but for logistical reasons, we didn't make our vows in front of the Congregation until two Sundays ago.) Redeemer is perhaps most well-known for its Pastor, Tim Keller, who has been recognized for his theological teachings. Tim was actually the main factor that compelled me and Sophie to attend Redeemer for the past two years, although we've also been blessed with some wonderful community through our weekly fellowship group and also other church activities. We waited awhile before committing to membership because we had some uncertainty regarding our future plans, but with our recent decision to stay in New York for the time being, we decided now was a good time to take that step.

As part of becoming members, we were given the opportunity to have Izzie baptized. (By the way, I think I've mentioned it here before, but the name Isabella means "consecrated to God".) It was actually a bit of a tough decision for us, since I hadn't grown up in the tradition of baptizing infants, so I really had no idea what the theology behind it was. After all, infant baptism doesn't appear in the Bible. But after some further investigation, we decided to go ahead with it. It wasn't so much that we pondered over the theology and concluded that infant baptism was correct; a large part of it was just trusting the theological teachings of the church leadership.

But if you're like me and had no idea why infants get baptized, the (very, very basic) idea is that infant baptism is a sign given to children of believers (or in Redeemer's case, church members), bringing them into a covenant community, whereby children are held accountable to pray and worship in ways we would not hold unbelievers. This is the case even though infants are not born-again and have not received justifying grace. Infant baptism is a continuation of the Old Testament tradition of circumcision, which was never later repealed. Admittedly, this is a difficult issue of Biblical interpretation, and many highly-regarded Biblical scholars have come down on different sides. If you're interested in reading more, I found this post (http://jollyblogger.typepad.com/jollyblogger/2005/02/infant_baptism__1.html) by a Presbyterian pastor to be particularly helpful when trying to understand the practice.

So enough preaching. On to the fun stuff – the story itself!

Izzie getting baptized:



And afterwards:


Being on stage, and watching Izzie get baptized was absolutely amazing. It reminded both Soph and I, how everything really is in God's control - including Izzie's faith. We're both so glad that its not up to us (what a relief) and we realized how we are so blessed to be her parents. When we woke up in the morning, we listened to "How Great is Our God", and the words of the song kept going through my mind the whole day.

How great is our God, sing with me
How great is our God, and all will see
How great, how great is our God