Private baptism

I went to Mark Dever's seminar 'Healthy Christians, Healthy Churches' today, which was a great way to start the day. He had a lot of challenging things to say, and was very encouraging that churches should always just continue to preach the gospel.

In the Q&A I asked a question about Christian uni student groups (AFES groups for example) and whether he considered them to be churches. He didn't, and explained that he thinks churches must do four essential things: preach, baptise, have communion and discipline members. That ES doesn't baptise people was his main reason for not considering it a church.

Leaving aside the passages that describe the purposes of churches (why is serving each other not an essential?) I've been wondering how much baptism is something that should be strongly associated with public gatherings. There are nine times when baptisms are recorded in the book of Acts. Four of them are quite clearly large public baptisms when an apostle baptises a large number of people throughout a city: Jerusalem in 2:41, Samaria in 8:12, Corinth in 18:8 and Ephesus in 19:5. I think there are four situations when the baptisms are private, with only an apostle and those being baptised present, and no mention of further baptisms in the area: the Ethiopian eunuch in 8:36, Saul in 9:18, Cornelius and his gang in 10:48 and the Philippian jailer in 16:33. Although Lydia's baptism in 16:15 seems somewhat private, Paul's preaching to her was very much public, so I'll give that to the public baptisms.

So that makes five recorded public baptisms and four private baptisms. Although this is only a shallow investigation, and considers only descriptive and not prescriptive passages, I think it would be hard to argue that baptisms must always be performed in public gatherings. Nor does it disprove Mark's church essentials. What I think it does show is that the Bible presents a much more casual view of the sacraments than Mark, and most churches today, holds to.