By David Lyle Jeffrey
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from David Lyle Jeffrey’s recent book, We Were a Peculiar People Once: Confessions of an Old-Time Baptist (Baylor University Press, 2023). It is a poignant, grateful, and often humorous account — a spiritual-ecclesial memoir of sorts — about growing up in the Scottish Baptist Church in rural Canada in the 1940s and 50s, and the many ways this “peculiar people” taught him to love the Lord and the Scriptures.
I recently attended a book reading with Dr. Jeffrey in which he described the whole book as a kind of example of his own catechetical formation. He noted that few if any churches today deployed the kind of catechesis he received. Today, we have many attractional programs and sophisticated church outreach methodologies. But we lack the kind of trust in the gospel that these “old-time” Baptists displayed. For all the quirks and quacks, these ordinary saints had a deep sense of the holiness of God, of worship, and of Holy Writ. They lived by the principle that “what you draw people with is what you draw people to.” And for this people, that was the gospel.
The following excerpt is from Chapter 4, entitled “Baptism.” Thanks to the fine folks at Baylor Press for permission to publish this excerpt, who have also provided the following code to get 20% off using the code 17SPRING23 at https://bit.ly/PclrPpl + FREE shipping in the US through June 30, 2023.
I had seen quite a few baptisms by the time I was ten years old; most hadn’t made much of an impression on me. I did note that the newly baptized left quite a trail of water after they climbed out of the tank to walk up the outside aisle. The first real catastrophe I witnessed was a church camp baptism. My uncle Bert, newly ordained and headed to central Africa with my aunt Lois, had been invited to assist in the baptism of several people. The Rideau river bottom by Happy Day Bible Camp was muddy at the best of times, but there had been a lot of rain, and that day there was a strong current and the thin sand beach was almost completely underwater.
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Nevertheless, the service got underway with a singing of hymns. A few of us kids were sitting up the bank behind the adults, as instructed. Though at a distance, we nevertheless had a pretty good view of the proceedings. The first two white-robed inductees were asked to say a few words each, which we couldn’t really hear very well. Then, with the usual formula, they were dunked into the muddy water. We boys were having a whispered conversation about whether the Rideau was more like the Jordan River or the mudhole that Philip would have used to baptize the Ethiopian eunuch (I was holding out for the mudhole), while the next person in white stepped forward, a woman of imposing height and girth. She waded into the water straight for Bert, whose small, skinny frame, waist deep in the river, immediately appeared to be inadequate to the enormity of the task before him. My guess is that she was more than 250 pounds; he was probably less than half that.
We kids stopped whispering. This huge Viking of a woman was herself almost waist deep when her robe billowed up dangerously. She gave a shriek and tried to push it down. It billowed on the opposite side. When she shifted to quell the malfunctioning garment, she seemed to lose her footing, and one shoulder went under. It took Bert and the other minister both to steady her. When she turned around to face the crowd on the bank, even from our distance we could see that she was quite distressed.
Then Uncle Bert asked her to say a few words. These seemed garbled to me, brief as they were, though I’m pretty sure I heard her say, “. . . and then I trusted myself completely to Jesus.”
“Therefore, Minnie McGilvray,” said Uncle Bert, “on your profession of faith, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” As he was trying to let her down into full immersion, his hand under her back, there was an audible gasp and a big splash and both Uncle Bert and Minnie went under the surface. A man in the crowd said audibly, “Holy Doodle!” Several other people said things I couldn’t hear clearly. There was more splashing about, and Uncle Bert’s head appeared a few feet away. Minnie was doing something like a windmill backstroke—headed downriver. By the time the other minister and one of the deacons onshore got to where they could safely get the preposterously named Minnie headed back and to her feet, Uncle Bert emerged in her wake to find his own footing again. It took a few minutes before the service could resume. The last baptisms went without incident, but the main event, as I came to think of it, was spectacularly unsanctified entertainment.
Going home I asked my parents if, from God’s point of view, a baptism like that counted.
“Shush,” my mother snapped. “That poor woman will never live it down.”
“Uncle Bert hurt his back,” said my father. Then, after a pause, “You can be pretty sure that from the Lord’s point of view, it is the intention in a person’s heart that counts.”
“I’m sure your shoes and tie will be ruined,” said my mother. Dad had been the deacon who leapt to the rescue, and he was still soaking wet.
I was going to ask about the difference between a “holy doodle” and an unholy one, but decided this was not the time.
I have not been witness to other baptismal mishaps, though among Baptist pastors there are some unnerving stories. I think many of them must have nightmarish apprehensions that such an event might happen to them. A good friend of ours and his wife both attended Southern Seminary in Louisville, where he took a DMin and she a master’s in Christian music. He seems himself thus far to have escaped calamity in the tank, but one of his pastor friends, right in the midst of sudden church growth and a new building program, wasn’t so lucky. It seems that there were several baptisms on a Sunday when areas adjacent to the sanctuary were still under construction. To accommodate, Sunday School divider partitions were set up on each side near the front of the sanctuary to permit changing of clothes, and the white-robed candidates, depending on whether they were male or female, would emerge from one of these temporary structures on cue. All was going well, the improvisation notwithstanding, until a middle-aged convert emerged from the water and, apparently confused, headed toward the wrong changing area. Gestures were made, but the pastor was so intent on helping the next person into the water that he failed to see what was happening. Until, that is, some female screeches of alarm erupted from behind the partitions and, in great haste to exit, the newly baptized fellow knocked over the most necessary of them. In the confusion and uproar, one of the ushers, in a desperate effort to preserve modesty, found the breaker switch on the main electrical box. Like too many newer big box churches, there were no very useful windows, and it was past sundown in any case. The disaster was suddenly veiled with merciful blackness, out of which an elderly gentleman seated near the front suddenly shouted, “Lord, I’ve been struck blind!” That particular pastor, my friend tells me, reports recurrent nightmares in which the whole thing replays slowly and he is paralyzed, unable to move or speak, until he too wakes up in the merciful darkness.
I hasten to add that such events are fortunately not common. When they do occur, however, they are a reminder that for Baptists it is more of a challenge than for some others to achieve and maintain the solemnity of decorum necessary to such an important and defining sacrament.
My own baptism was memorable, but not in quite this way. A high point in my memory of church life, preparation for it was formative for me intellectually as well as spiritually. In those days children in our Scottish Baptist church were pretty much held back from baptism until the age of twelve. I can find no biblical warrant for this, and cannot remember hearing one offered then. Jesus wasn’t baptized until he was thirty, after all, and no one argued for that as the proper time. Jesus stayed behind at the Temple and held a vigorous seminar discussion with the elders when he was twelve, and I reckon that may have informed the practice of theological examination before the Sunday of baptism by our minister and two elders. I remember being nervous about this interview, and my father telling me that the purpose of it was to show that I was adult enough and knowledgeable enough to give an account of the faith that was within me, in season and out of season. My viva voce exam took place in mid-February, just after Valentine’s Day.
Minister: “Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
Me: “Yes, sir.”
Elder no. 1: “Can you describe when and how this happened?”
Me: “It was in my bedroom after Dad read me from the Bible about how all have sinned and come short of the glory of God—even little kids. Romans 3:23.”
Elder no. 1: “What are the consequences of our sins?”
Me: “We could die and go to Hell. Romans 6:23.”
Elder no. 2: “Not could. Would.”
Minister: “Why did Jesus die on the cross?”
Me: “To take away the punishment for my sins and everyone’s sins in the whole world. John 3:16; Romans 6:10.”
Elder no. 2: “Does this mean that everyone is saved from the consequences of their sins?”
Me: “No. Only those who repent and ask God for his mercy. John 1:12; 1 John 1:9.”
Minister: “By what means are we saved?”
Me: “For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. Ephesians 2:8-9.”
And so on, till the minister said, “Well done, David. You have shown us that you understand sufficiently that we can declare you to be ready for believer’s baptism. The Sunday after next.”
Well, that Sunday morning arrived, cold and snowy, and I was more than a little nervous. It was the first Sunday in March, and the hard snow had drifted high around the church. I was the only one to be baptized that day, and when the sermon was over and the congregation was singing “Blessed Assurance,” I went, as instructed, to the side door at the left hand of the sanctuary. Dad went with me, to help with the white robe. It was too short, and I remember that my shins were showing. Dad watched at the door as Rev. McKendrie appeared. I saw that the trapdoor had been removed. He descended into the tank, and as he did so I could see he was wearing what I thought were oversized rubber boots but turned out to be rubber coveralls from the fire station. As the congregation began to sing “Shall We Gather at the River,” he turned his eyes in my direction. That was my cue and I stepped out toward the baptismal tank. The minister took my left wrist as I descended the stone steps into water that was so shockingly cold I gasped for air. People who have been baptized in a heated baptismal tank have no idea of what they were missing.
Rev. McKendrie asked me to give a brief word of testimony. It was very brief. Then, with his hand under my back he lowered me into the frigid water, saying, “David Jeffrey, upon your profession of faith I now baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” the last part of which I did not hear, being by then completely underwater. Someone later told me that at that time of year the temperature in that tank was about 39 or 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I doubted him. “Colder than that,” I insisted. It took an hour for me to stop shivering.
A feature of baptism in our tradition that I continue to value is that it makes you think about the meaning of it quite a lot, both before and after the experience. One of the questions that friends would ask me is, “Do you feel any different?” My Catholic friends especially, since they had the luxury of having just a few drops on their heads when they were too young to remember, wanted to know. Actually, I did feel different, though not perhaps in quite the way they may have expected. It wasn’t euphoric. Rather, I felt as though I had entered into the community of grownups in some way. My Jewish friend and classmate Alan and I were discussing this one day and he said that it reminded him of his upcoming bar mitzvah. He wondered if I had to read Torah, even in English, and I had to admit that I had not.
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Being able to read Torah in Hebrew is for men. It is for us the sign we have passed from childhood into manhood.”
“For us,” I said, “it is a passing from death into new life.”
“Wow,” he laughed, “that water sure must have been cold. If you hadn’t got right out of there maybe you could have died.”
“It felt like it,” I said. “Baptized in ice.”
But truth to tell, something really important had happened. I had entered the world of adult worship. I could now ask real theological questions, and people would have to take me seriously for a change.
Excerpt from We Were a Peculiar People Once: Confessions of an Old-Time Baptist by David Lyle Jeffrey. Copyright © Baylor University Press, 2023. Reprinted by arrangement with Baylor University Press. All rights reserved.
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