Please allow me to present to you Rangernetters this line of thought,
seeing that you are no strangers to controversy and debate:
The bible says to baptize. (Matt. 28:19) The purpose of Royal Rangers is
pretty much synonymous with this command. Reach, teach and keep boys for
Christ. Yet, at Camps, we don't baptize, and it has been my observation,
over the last two years, that most of the boys we lead to Christ have not
been baptized, nor has much effort been made to do so.
Are we obeying the great commission in full?
The reasoning behind NOT baptizing seems to be that someone (namely
parents) will be offended. True, some parents have thier children
to be baptized. I personally know of three young people whom I have led to
Christ in these last two years whose parents have refused to let them be
baptized.
While discussing this with some other commanders the other night, one said
that he would be disturbed if his son came home from a camp and had been
baptized without his knowledge. This line of thinking disturbs me, in that
we live in a country in which our children, at any age, can go to a clinic
and get birth control without our knowledge.
So are we obeying God, or man? Are we afraid to obey God because of man? A
generation ago, even a few years ago, we would have thought nothing of
baptizing kids at a youth camp. Why don't we do it now? Are we going to stop
sharing Christ with boys because thier parents don't want us to? Remember
the Jewish boy's parents who sued the baptist church? Would Peter, James and
John have followed our line of thinking?
Are we on the right track? Where is this track going to take us two years
from now? Ten years from now?
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