Baptism: welcome to the family

Yes, I know that we are supposed to start highlighting New Orleans team members today.  What happened between last weeks blog and today is that our lead planter had his first daughter.  We are rejoicing with the Jagers and we'll wait to pepper them with church planting questions until next week.

Here is little Laynie!  She's the newest member of the NOLA plant team and we're glad she's here!

So, instead of highlighting team members, our blog today will discuss the goal of the church planter: Sinners convicted and then forgiven of sin placing their trust in Christ and joining a local body.  We saw this on display yesterday at the NFCC Baptism service.

We baptized several members yesterday and I was blown away with their stories as they communicated what their lives looked like before they trusted in Christ.  At this point, I should let you know that it is easy, as a staff person, to become consumed with the "grunt" work of the ministry.  It is easy to lose focus on the things that are important...on the reasons why we went into the ministry in the first place.

Each person communicated that they were trusting Christ for their salvation and they were entrusting themselves to the local body to hold them accountable and help them grow in godliness.  There were young folks and a few that were more seasoned, but they were all able to say that they had previously trusted in behavior or self-gratification, or any number of other things to make them whole.  By the grace of God, they have been transformed.

Yesterday, we saw a very visible symbol of that transformation.

Soli Deo Gloria