Growing Up

It hit me today as I sat in church.

Maybe, I'm finally growing up.

What brought this on, you ask?

Well, the Church I'm going to, Holy Trinity Brompton, is an Anglican church. Slightly different to the churches that I'm used to going to. Both in NZ and the one I went to while we were living in Witney. Maybe slightly is an understatement.

Anyway, those of you who are down with the 'evangelical' world of Christianity will know HTB is the church that started Alpha. Must do the course one of these days - maybe in the Autumn. Anyhoo. We had baptisms this morning, about 10 of them. Exciting huh? Indeed.

But...

There's always a but. They were infant baptisms. It was said that there are three things that have to happen to become a Christian, one is repentence, two is baptism and the third I can't remember - must have been listening very hard.

I'm not going to get into the debate about whether or not you have to be baptised to become a Christian - I know what I think, it's not really that interesting to argue. Which also adds to my conclusion which will be coming shortly - promise.

So they said the order of these three things doesn't matter, I guess in a way of explaining why they were baptising these babies before they are able to make concsious choice to follow Jesus or not.

And same old me, instantly wanted to argue. I mean how can the commandment 'repent and be baptised' be changed around? among other things.

This need or desire to argue lasted for about three seconds.

The following thought that went through my head was, what does it matter?

Who cares? I'm pretty sure God doesn't.

The point was, this was a church with families who had been blessed with children, committing to raise them as Christians and the symbol of infant baptism was just that - a symbol.

And as I was lost in my thoughts about the fact I no longer needed to argue about this, or object in any way, I realised that maybe, just maybe - finally, I am growing up. Just like I'm not interested in arguing about whether or not you need to be baptised to become a Christian, I don't care about small things that are different to what I have understood, or been used to.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I guess this remains to be seen. And of course, I'm not one to back down from an arguement that is worth having, and should something come up that I don't agree with that actually matters, then perhaps I would argue or question. But the little things that I'm sure would have bothered me in the past, no longer do.

Growing up, it had to happen some time.

PS - suppose that conclusion wasn't as soon as I expected - sorry.