We visited Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho today. It just happened to be today that Deacon and Amy James’ baby girl was baptized today. As Dr. Leithart used words like “she is born again” and “she is now Your child” in his prayer, it was refreshing to look around and see that this view on baptism wasn’t offensive to the witnesses in the congregation. There is compatibility with this teaching of baptism and believing in salvation by grace alone.

If pastors had to take a linguistics course covering speech act theory and performative utterances as well as a sociology/anthropology course covering things like communitas and liminality, there would have been no AAPC pastor’s conference controversy. There, I said it.