In December we decided to offer water baptism for our HS students in the gym (where we normally meet) during a Wednesday night service. In the past, the only 2 options for students to be baptized were in our Sunday worship services along with adults or at our Summer Camp in Panama City Beach, FL. We wanted to offer students an opportunity to go public in front of their friends in our worship context. So we bought a portable swimming pool and set it up in the gym. Several students were baptized that night, including one who took advantage of our spontaneous invitation toward the end. Below is a story I wrote for one of our church communication pieces about a young man who went public with his faith that night.

It all started with a conversation about religion.

That’s how Jacob Gillespie describes the events that led him to Mt. Paran North for the first time. Jacob is a 17 year old student at Sprayberry High School who began attending the High School ministry at North in the Spring of ’09. He was friends with MPN member Amy Sever and one night while they were talking she asked him about religion and his beliefs. He described his current views about the church and religion that he admits were not based on personal experience and just on perceptions since his family “never talked about church or religion”. However, Amy told him that his beliefs were similar to those of her church and invited him to come with her to a service. Though he claimed to be “afraid of church” and not wanting to get “sucked into the mess I thought it was” he accepted her invitation.

He goes on to say, “I had originally planned to wait until I was 18 to go to church just to avoid any influence from my family as to where to go and what to believe. I wanted my beliefs to be my own, but I knew I had an empty place in me that could not be filled by anything the earth has to offer.” So he began attending the High School Wednesday night worship service and Sunday School class with David and Helene Hindman before joining in the Sunday morning services in the Sanctuary. This thing he was once afraid of began to make him feel “complete” and “happy”.

After going to the HS summer camp in Florida his understanding of God began to grow. He said, “I learned that as a human I wasn’t too insignificant to matter to such a supreme entity because he loved me, and it was just that simple.” He started to use the skills he had been taught at camp to pray and read God’s Word, which brought on so many more questions.

Thankfully Amy’s parents, Charles and Sheila Sever were there with understanding and patience to answer his questions. Jacob said, “They would take any question I had, no matter how blasphemous, crazy, or disrespectful it was and calmly answer it because they understood my thirst was simply for knowledge and they were more then willing to help quench it.”

When we announced that we were going to offer water baptism in a HS Wednesday night service during December, Jacob knew immediately it was for him. He invited his family, and they enthusiastically agreed to be there for such a big moment in his life. On that December night Jacob was baptized and here is how he describes what he felt:
“When I finally came out of the water, I didn’t feel much different but somehow, I don’t know, I just felt clean. I know, ‘of course you felt clean that’s the point’ but it was weird. Like no matter how hard I could scrub in the tub there were these metaphorical crevices of muck and grime I just could not clean. I had never really noticed it before because it was all gradually accumulating, but when I came up I knew it was all gone.”

That night, the outward expression of baptism finally matched the inward change in his life over the previous few months. However, this story isn’t just about Jacob Gillespie. It’s about Amy Sever. It’s about her parents. It’s about the Gillespie family. It’s about the cross intersecting with a boy who’s family never talked about religion.

So he stepped into the pool with his family and friends sitting on the front row, and started talking about his new found religion!