You know it’s spring in Southern Kentucky when the Red Buds and White and Pink Dogwoods bloom and Drake’s Creek warms up enough to baptize all those who hit the sawdust trail at the previous fall’s church revival and accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior so when they die they will go to heaven instead of hell.
Each fall, many parents are either thrilled or just plain relieved or, conversely, anxious or just plain disappointed when their children, having arrived at the age of accountability (somewhere around twelve give or take), either are accountable or refuse the altar call.
Every fall Presbyterians in rural, Southern Kentucky forget their Calvinism and become Baptists of an Armenian persuasion.
For a week, God gives up some sovereignty and salvation depends on the will of twelve-year-olds (give or take) who decide whether or not it is time to heed the supplications of the visiting preacher during the seeming eternity of “Just As I Am Without One Plea,” sung longingly and pleadingly over and over from the choir loft by choir members hoping to catch the eye of young, uncommitted kinfolk and, by facial expression, urge them to commit to Jesus that night and not a moment later just in case they get killed in an auto accident on the dark, rural roads back to town after the service.
Oh, what joy appears on the faces of parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents as their children make their way to the kneeling bench or what sadness, not to mention a bit of irritation, on the faces of those whose children sit obdurately with arms crossed over their chests with no intention of budging from their pew.
Being from the North and raised in the Presbyterian tradition, the young pastor had a hard time with revivals – one, because they went against his theological grain and two, because each year at the fall revival the guest preacher would steal the hearts of his congregants: “Oh, my have you ever heard such powerful preaching and isn’t he ever so handsome?” seemingly always uttered within earshot.
The first spring of the pastor’s tenure when the water was warm enough, the congregation gathered on a Sunday afternoon on the bank of Drake’s Creek to baptize the three young people and two adults (one of whom was a repeat repentance, conversion and commitment believer because the first time or two didn’t take) who had given their lives to Christ back in late October of the previous year.
Nobody cared much if they waited a few months for the ice to melt on the creek because it was the decision that saved not the baptism, as they liked to say. The baptism, by immersion of course, was “icing on the cake,” so to speak.
A Southern Baptist minister friend of the pastor taught him how to do immersion baptisms. He knew well enough how to do sprinkling, but as the folks around town liked to say, “If you’re not dipped, you’re gypped.”
“Let the person being baptized hold his or her own nose and cup his or her own mouth with the same hand. If you do it, they are likely to panic once they are under water. You hold that arm above the wrist with one hand and put your other arm in the small of their back so you can gently allow them to fall backward into the water. Tell them to bend their knees so they can push themselves up and you keep you legs spread apart so the current doesn’t sweep you both down stream,” was his wise counsel.
The baptisms went just fine on that warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. Nobody panicked but the last, new, young disciple was a girl of about fourteen with very thick, curly, red hair piled high in the style of the day. When the pastor, who followed the instructions to a tee, lowered her into the creek, he couldn’t get her low enough in the water to soak all of her hair. It was like it refused to go under. She emerged soaking wet but most of her hair was bone dry.
The pastor never having had to face this particular predicament before (With sprinkling, the hair always gets wet.), decided to make a joke. Always, to his own mind, quick on his feet and, in this case, quick on bare feet on creek rocks, he announced that because the girl’s hair wasn’t baptized, it would always be unruly and unmanageable.
No one on the bank laughed and the girl almost cried as she trudged out of the stream into her mother’s arms. They somberly sang the last hymn and after the benediction retreated to their cars in silence instead of the usual baptismal jubilation.
When the pastor got home, his wife, who felt no need to attend such events outside of the Sunday morning service, was about to ask her husband how it went when, he, anticipating just such a question, said definitively, “Don’t ask,” and headed straight to the study and two or three fingers of Kentucky Straight Bourbon, a Southern taste he had no trouble acquiring and something invented by a Baptist preacher of an Armenian persuasion, no doubt.
bobdahl 