25. First Baptism

There will be a baptism ceremony next Sunday. For those who are wondering why baptism is so significant in our church, let me explain. Our church mission is to help people to follow Jesus and the major starting point of following Jesus is baptism. As the common saying goes, “what gets measured gets done”. The primary measurable indicator of the health of our church is the number of “baptism”. It is difficult to measure someone’s spiritual maturity but it is easy to measure how many people who publicly announced that they have decided to follow Jesus. What is more significant is that this is the first time a VIP came to house church first and then getting baptized. This also shows that our mission is being fulfilled through house church ministry.

We started our very first house church (Lampang) in 2013, with 5 people. Since then, a total of 19 VIPs have visited our house church and a few of them are attending regularly. There were a couple of moments when Jennifer and I were ready to have house church meeting with no one else but someone always showed up. (Though it wouldn’t be too bad to have no one once in a while^^). There were times I wondered if all effort to host house church meeting and feeding people is worth it. We often felt our effort was in vain. But through God’s encouragement and strength, we now feel so glad we decided to keep going. Even without any visible fruit, we became thankful for learning to stay patient and trust God. Also in the meanwhile, God placed amazing ministry partners in our house church as well.

For a completely non-Christian to make a decision to receive Christ and get baptized is nothing but supernatural. It requires a lot of prayer and love from a group of people. But it demonstrates that God made evangelism a team effort so that everyone can play a role to make an eternal difference in someone’s life.

It is becoming more and more difficult to bring unchurched people to Christ. However, I’m confident that house church is what God is using to bring non-Christians to the loving arms of God, through the warm and caring community of people who follow Jesus.