Moist & Methodist: Baptism in The United Methodist Church

Of the researchstudies on spiritual practices in The United Methodist Church that were suspended when my job got eliminated at the General Board of Discipleship the one I was most disappointed by was our look at baptism.  Following twelve years after the adoption of “By Water and the Spirit” by our General Conference, this research offers both a snapshot of how United Methodist leaders view and understand baptism, as well as a way of seeing what impact our denominational study in the 1990s has had.

Our initial survey included 471 United Methodist pastors, divided into three categories:  pastors having served for more than 20 years (212), pastors having served 7-19 years (141), and pastors serving less than 7 years (118).  This arbitrary division was set in place to see if thinking and/or practices about baptism have shifted in the past two generations.  Interestingly, a few distinct differences do emerge, though no firm conclusions can be drawn based on what we learned.  Also, we kept track of pastors who came from a faith tradition other than United Methodist or its antecedents to track theological differences.  These were less pronounced and virtually inconsequential.

Additionally, a survey was conducted of 1,655 laity leaders across the denomination concerning their understanding of baptism.  Special effort was made to create a diverse response pool, and if anything we erred on the side of both racial/ethnic and age minorities.  The percentages of African Americans (14%), Hispanic/Latino (13%) and under the age of 40 (58% — we especially wanted to talk to people who have had children baptized more recently) are all much higher than either church or national demographic ratios.  Based on the consistency of responses across all ages and races, we believe there is negligible bias.

That said, the fundamental conclusions are dramatic and simple.  98.3% of the total sample — both clergy and laity — believe that baptism is an essential and non-negotiable aspect of the Christian life.  Baptism is a must for anyone wanting to be Christian.  No pastors and only 36 lay people say that baptism is not necessary in order to be a Christian.  However, why it is important varies greatly among clergy and laity.

Clergy are almost evenly divided into three main understandings of Christian baptism:

1. it is a rite of initiation into the Christian life conferred on the individual as God’s blessing, and once offered can never be rescinded. (165, or 35%)
2. it is a rite of initiation into the Christian life conferred on individuals by a faith community which receives the person into fellowship and promises nurture and support for the Christian journey.  (160, or 33.9%)
3. it is a form of “spiritual Scotch-garding” that protects the individual/infant from evil and sanctifies the person as a child of God.  (146, or 30.9%)

Both 1. and 3. above define baptism as an act done for an individual (65.9%), not fundamentally as a sacrament of a community of faith (33.9%).

On the laity side, #3 shifts to the top spot by a huge margin.  The basic understanding of baptism is as spiritual protection for infants.

1. it is a form of “spiritual Scotch-garding” that protects the individual/infant from evil and sanctifies the person as a child of God.  (1,175, or 70.9%)
2. it is a rite of initiation into the Christian life conferred on the individual as God’s blessing, and once offered can never be rescinded. (345, or 20.8%)
3. it is a rite of initiation into the Christian life conferred on individuals by a faith community which receives the person into fellowship and promises nurture and support for the Christian journey.  (135, or 8.1%)

What does it mean when only one-in-twelve of our lay leaders see the sacrament of baptism as a corporate (rather than an individual) experience?  Our baptismal services are very clear that there is a mutual vow made before God and with one another.  Both the newly baptized and the community of faith bear responsibility, each to the other.  The lack of understanding appears simply explained:  less than ten percent (159, or 9.6%) of active church members remember any teaching being offered to the congregation about the sacrament of baptism.  (Compare this to the 131, or 27.8% of clergy who claim that they teach the congregation about baptism on a regular basis.)

Further confusion and lack of clarity may rest in some of our general approaches to baptism:

• while 80% of pastors require a meeting with a family prior to infant baptism, only 46% do a sit-down orientation and explanation of what baptism is and means.
• 76% of pastors report that they will baptize any child, whether the family has ties to the church or not; 96% will baptize any child related to an existing church member (though the child and his or her family may have no direct ties); only 14% place any kind of expectation on the family of the child to be baptized that they should become active or involved in the community of faith.
• 44% of pastors say they will do a baptism outside of the church; 51% say they will do a baptism apart from a normally scheduled service of worship; and 57% say they will do a baptism without any other member or representative of the congregation present.
• 79% of pastors do not differentiate between “baptism,” “christening,” and “dedication.”  60% of pastors will receive gifts, payments, or “donations” for baptisms (though three-quarters of those report that this only applies to people/families not affiliated with the congregation).
• There is a clean 50/50 split between pastors who fully explain baptism to adults, and those who will baptize and receive into membership “anyone who responds to an open invitation.”
• 97% of clergy and laity were baptized as infants or children; 95% do not remember receiving any instruction about baptism at any time in their life.  Clergy learn about it in church and seminary as part of their training; laity learn what they know by participating in baptisms over the years.
• The concept of “spiritual Scotch-garding is pervasive.  9-out-of-10 clergy and laity confess that they worry about the souls of the unbaptized, and they believe baptism affords some measure of spiritual protection.
• Interestingly, older and younger clergy are least likely to carefully explain the meaning of baptism or to require any kind of involvement in the community of faith by the family of the infants.  The clergy serving 7-19 years take the most time explaining baptism, and they are the most likely to tell a family that they cannot “do” their child for them when the family has no real interest in providing Christian nurture and support for their child.  The longer a clergyperson has served in ministry, the stronger the sense of baptism as “spiritual Scotch-garding” (as you can tell, I love this term…)

How is it, a decade after our denomination adopted a very clear, concise and theologically balanced statement on baptism that a large majority of our Christian leaders hold views that are starkly at odds with our core beliefs?  How is it that one of our two sacraments is primarily viewed as a personal, private, and individual act (or a family act) instead of a celebration of the community of faith?  Let me be clear: United Methodists love baptisms.  They love babies, they love the symbolism, many go to great lengths to make the experience memorable and “meaningful,” but for the vast majority it is a one-time, single event — done, then over.  A significant number of infant baptisms are conducted where the child and family are never seen again.  Only 10 percent of our churches have a structured, intentional process of follow-up for baptized infants and their families.  More than half of the pastors do not even print baptismal certificates any longer (though 70% offer a token gift to the family, usually a flower) and only half keep a registry of baptized infants in the church records.  Most do not keep contact information updated on families of baptized infants after the baptism occurs.  Everyone says it is important — vital, even — but how important can it be when it is conducted in such an off-hand manner?  Sadly, almost 5% of the clergy responded that they were speaking in general terms — they hadn’t conducted a single baptism in 5 years or more.

This is a study I would have loved to continue.  The brief, initial responses were surprising and raised more questions than they answered.  I was able to do almost no follow-up by phone, working only with survey data and open-ended written answers to a series of questions.  I initially thought what we found was too bleak and unrepresentative — until I started sharing the results with leadership groups around the church and found that people in the midwest, southeast and northeast all agree that it’s pretty accurate.  A few folks have vehemently argued that this isn’t true of them, that baptism is one of the most important things they do and they take it very seriously.  I applaud them, but I am afraid they are a silent minority.  Very few like them appeared in the initial response.  Some have claimed that we should have limited our research to “worship leaders” or “Christian educators,” but these are small segments in the church, and all this would accomplish is to skew the findings in the other direction.  No, this provides some evidence that baptism is a beloved, but deeply misunderstood, practice in The United Methodist Church, providing us with yet one more sterling opportunity to educate, inform, and inspire our members and those we serve.

Within the next couple weeks, I will attempt to post a short series of articles pulling all the pieces of research together — on worship, prayer, the sacraments, Christian education, evangelism, and stewardship — and see what the composite looks like.  At first glance, it isn’t pretty, but on deeper analysis, there are some pretty clear directions and challenges that emerge that any United Methodist congregation can begin to address.  As always, your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.

Holy Communion in The UMC

For the past four years, I have been researching the practice of the means of grace in United Methodist congregations.  Here is a report from 2006 examining attitudes and understanding about Holy Communion in The United Methodist Church.

Broken for You… But Definitely Broken

The Celebration of the Lord’s Supper in The United Methodist Church

You might think that people who do something repeatedly over a period of years would come to know its practice and meaning intimately.  In the case of the celebration of Holy Communion, you would be wrong.  Each month (the preferred schedule for the institution of the Lord’s Supper in United Methodism) millions of worshipers in our congregations participate in one of the two seminal sacraments of our faith.  But what exactly does this “holy mystery” mean to those who partake?  For most, apparently, it remains a mystery.

From December 2005 through July 2006, 1,200 United Methodists (200 clergy, 1,000 laity) were surveyed to better understand the perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and understanding held by those who celebrate communion.  961 surveys were completed (163 clergy, 798 laity) and a series of phone interviews followed with 95 pastors and 247 lay people from the survey sample.  What follows is a brief summary of our findings and a series of questions yet to be explored.

All participants were asked to rate the importance of participation in the Lord’s Supper as a spiritual discipline/means of grace.  They were given five options: essential, important, not very important, unimportant, and don’t know.  Twenty-one (13%) clergy said it is “essential,” with one hundred eleven (68%) saying it is “very important.”  Two troubling results were the eighteen clergy (11%) saying “not very important,” and the thirteen clergy (8%) who responded “don’t know.”  At least none said, “unimportant.”  This is not so for laity.  The celebration of the Lord’s Supper is much less important to laity than to clergy.  Communion is “essential” for 72 of the laity (9%), “very important” for 141 (18%), “not very important” for 219 (27%), “unimportant” for 135 (17%), and 231 (29%) responded “don’t know.”  For 2-out-of 5 of our lay people, communion simply isn’t important, and almost another third don’t know if it’s important or not.

An open ended question asked repondents to explain the meaning of communion.  Clergy articulated answers both historically accurate and theologically defensible 91% of the time, but as to its significance in the lives of Christian believers, things get a little fuzzier.  About ten percent of our clergy (16) are closet Catholics, believing that the elements of bread and juice are transformed into the very body and blood of Jesus Christ.  Thirty-one pastors (19%) explain that communion is not something we do for God, but something God does in us.  What that something is varies from “uniting us as Christ’s body” to “forgiving our sins,” to “connecting us to the Gospel story,” to “transforming us from believers to disciples.”  Eighty-five (52%) describe the practice as a “sacrament,” and explain it as a ritual of the church that gives us our identity.  Another forty-four (27%) say it is a symbolic act, done in “remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice for us.”  (Some pastors gave dual answers – so the total is larger than 100%).  Ultimately, the answers given are reminiscent of the blind men and the elephant – each describing that part of the whole that is most meaningful to them personally.  One note: This Holy Mystery, adopted by the 2004 General Conference has yet to make much of an impact on our understanding of Holy Communion in United Methodism.  Most of the clergy are aware of the resource, two-thirds have a copy, but fewer than one-in-twelve (8%) have read it.

On the laity side, “a ritual of the church” is the answer of choice to describe the meaning of communion – 347 of the 798 (43%) offered some variation of this answer.  Another 19% (152) take the Roman Catholic option, believing that bread and grape juice become the actual body and blood of Jesus. About ten percent of respondents choose “an act of remembrance,” and another ten percent say it is “an act of solidarity.”  The remaining nineteen percent are all over the theological map – from “a monthly practice of church members,” to “a Christian vitamin pill,” to “an outdated, ancient, and irrelevant holdover from a pre-modern form of the Christian faith.”

We asked people if they “look forward to Holy Communion.”  On the clergy side, 40% look forward to it, 26% do not look forward to it, and 34% have no feelings one way or another.  Of the 1-in-4 who do not look forward to it, the primary reasons given are that it is a hassle, it makes the service run too long, it causes a drop in attendance, and too many people just go through the motions.  The laity are equally divided in thirds: 31% look forward to it, 35% do not, and 34% do not care either way.  Seventeen percent of laity respondents report that they often choose to stay home when communion is being served.  The number one laity complaint about communion is that it makes the worship service too long.

We asked if the overall church experience would be diminished if the church stopped serving communion.  Seventy-one percent of clergy said yes, but an additional sixteen percent said there were so many other important and meaningful practices in the church that communion wouldn’t be missed.  Thirteen percent report that overall, people’s experience of church wouldn’t suffer due to the elimination of the Lord’s Supper.  On the laity side of the question, only a handful – 14% — believe that the fundamental nature of the Christian church would suffer if we stopped offering communion.  For eighty-one percent of the sample, it would make no real difference to their faith were they to stop celebrating communion.

One other question posed to all respondents was “does celebrating communion make you feel closer to God?” For clergy, 86% say yes and 14% said it makes no difference. For laity, 62% feel closer, while 38% feel no different.

This summary reports a very cursory survey of United Methodist’s attitudes and understandings of Holy Communion.  We did not cultivate a representative or statistically significant sample.  It was decided that this was not a fruitful avenue for further exploration at this time.  However, I believe it raises some important questions, and while it may reflect my own personal bias, I believe it points to a theological identity crisis that does indeed invite further study.

Some of the questions I believe need answers:

• How do we teach church members and visitors about Holy Communion?
• Why does the Lord’s Supper hold such low significance for our communities of faith?
• What is the basic understanding of “sacrament” in The United Methodist Church?  (see my companion report on Baptism in The UMC.)
• What is the role and responsibility of the ordained leader to communicate the importance and significance of Communion?
• How has our understanding and practice of Holy Communion arrived at the state it is in?

What follows is a report first published in the fall of 2008 concerning the spiritual discipline of prayer in United Methodism.

The Place of Prayer in United Methodism

Results are beginning to arrive from the truncated research project on the place of prayer in our United Methodist congregations.  Though the initial response only represents 88 United Methodist congregations, it does include a broad representation of Anglo, African-American, Hispanic-Latino, Korean and Chinese participants, as well as children, youth, and adults young, middle, and older.  88 congregations, and the approximately 950 individual participants, hardly comprise a representative sample, but they do provide enough interesting information to warrant further inquiry and study.

Partnering with conference leaders in all five U.S. jurisdictions (no Central Conference congregations are in the sample), a survey on prayer went out to approximately 500 United Methodist churches.  88 congregations returned the survey and participated in follow up interviews and a second-level survey (Survey Monkey rocks!).  The initial survey asked five questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 5 (one being “not important at all,” five being “extremely important”), how important is prayer to the formation of Christian disciples?
2. Does your congregation have in place a process in place to teach people to pray?
3. Is daily personal prayer encouraged in your congregation?
4. Does your congregation have an accountability process in place that encourages everyone to pray?
5. Is prayer an essential part of the decision making process in your church?

Here are some of the findings from the initial survey:

1. 100% of the congregations identified prayer as “very important” or “extremely important” to discipleship formation.  (Whew!)  The range of scores was 4.15 to 4.88.  This indicates that there is no question in the minds of United Methodists of the centrality and importance of prayer.
2. Now it gets interesting.  16% of the congregations report having a process in place to teach prayer (14 of the 88).  40% (35 of the 88) report having offered classes, workshops, or seminars in prayer.  Far and away, however, congregations simply pray, and assume people already know how.  44% (39 congregations) report offering no special guidance in prayer.  Interestingly, 71% of the churches that intentionally teach prayer are predominantly racial-ethnic.  Both Korean churches and the one Chinese church teach prayer.
3. Once again, racial-ethnic congregations encourage daily prayer more than Anglo-Caucasian, but only 19% (17 of the 88) congregations regularly promote prayer.  In 75% of the churches (66 congregations) it is “assumed” that people know they should pray every day.
4. When churches define “accountability” in prayer to mean they pray before meetings, in Sunday school, at Bible studies, and in small groups for spiritual formation, then 91% (80 churches) say “yes.”  However, when “accountability” is defined as checking in with people about their individual prayer lives, the total drops to 11% (just 10 congregations — eight of them racial-ethnic).
5. When respondents defined “prayer as part of the decision-making process” to mean opening meetings with prayer, the affirmative response ruled the day — 100% of churches in the study pray before (most) meetings.  However, when we reframed the question to specifically mean that leaders and members were instructed and encouraged to pray before making major decisions, they almost flip-flopped (it is an election year, after all…), with only 8% (7 of the 88 churches) employing prayer as an essential part of the decision-making process.

Within two weeks of returning the initial survey, each of the congregations was contacted by phone for clarification and follow up questions.  Here are a few interesting pieces of information we gleaned:

• we asked people in a dozen congregations to name the different kinds of prayer in which they engaged on a regular basis.  Respondents identified seven different types of prayer (praise/adoration, penitence/confession, petition, thanksgiving, intercession, reflective/meditative, and consecration).  Pastors average 5 types, laity averaged 3 types.  With an additional forty congregations, we listed the seven types of prayer and asked individuals to define each type.  We received 315 responses, with some incredibly creative answers, but most telling is the fact that 84% (265) could not define more than four of the seven types, and only 5% defined all seven.
• Fewer than 10% of the churches report that they teach children how to pray.  It is assumed that children learn to pray at home.
• Only 3% of 741 responses (22 people) indicate that they have been asked to pray in church in the past year.
• Approximately 90% of respondents say that prayer in worship is either done for them by a preacher or lay speaker, or they do it themselves silently.
• 84% say that, while they pray whenever they are in church, they cannot remember the last time they heard anyone preach or teach about prayer.

Before I go further, I need to say once more, this is not a statistically significant sample, nor was the initial survey and interview process conducted under strict research protocols and methods.  That said, just this superficial pass raises incredibly important questions about the place of prayer in United Methodist congregations.  If, indeed, prayer is essential to spiritual development and discipleship formation, it should be a teaching/preaching/shepherding priority.  And if these results are indicative of the larger UM population, the majority of our people have an incomplete, confused, or less-than-masterful grasp of prayer as a discipline.

Is this a problem or opportunity?  Yes.  It is a problem that cries out to be addressed.  When I conducted the study resulting in the book Vital Signs, one of the most compelling shared practices of the healthiest churches was a deep, wide, and regular immersion in prayer.  Pastor, staff, and laity leaders often met for nothing other than prayer.  On occasion, meeting agendas were set aside so that the leadership could engage in prayer.  Discernment, meditation, devotional reading and learning about prayer were normal aspects of the leadership processes in these churches.  Reminders and admonitions to pray were both visual and verbal — printed on posters, bulletins, and banners, as well as proclaimed from pulpit and lectern.  Prayer, in all its many and varied forms, defines the shared sense of identity in vital churches.

The opportunity rests in the fact that there are already wonderful resources in existence to help us teach, preach, coach, and support prayer.  With just a subtle shift of focus, we can bring the discipline and joy of prayer to the center of all we do in the church.  We can be agents of transformation, not by adopting the latest and greatest new fad resource, but by returning to the core — employing a resource everyone can afford and no one lacks.

This research focus ended before we had time to really explore all the implications, but it is very easy to test, to evaluate, and to correct and improve in any congregation.