The new website is here: Church of England Christenings.
Let’s start with a positive. The fact that the church is seeking to provide clear and accessible resources for those considering having their child baptised is much to be welcomed.
Enquiries about baptism continue to represent a vital point of pastoral contact in the parish, especially with those who might otherwise not be regular attenders at church – and anything which helps prospective parents and godparents to understand a bit more about the whole process is surely good news. It’s clear that a lot of work has gone into the website to make it both visually inviting and informative.
Unfortunately, problems start to crop up when we begin to read what the website actually says. As ever, the devil (if he survives into the new liturgy!) is in the detail. Two particular issues are, I think, a cause for concern:
Firstly, Jesus is absent. The website does speak of God occasionally, mostly in the context of bland generalities: ‘Your child is precious to you and precious to God; you want the very best for them, and so does God.’
But there is evidently a real reticence in mentioning Jesus. That in baptism a child might ‘put on’ Christ, or be made a member of Christ’s church, or undertake to confess the faith of Christ crucified and manfully to fight under His banner, seems to have passed the website authors by.
Even in the guide to the liturgy of baptism, the most Christ-centred parts of the service have been mysteriously omitted – parents do not read, for instance, of the promises to turn to Christ as Saviour, submit to Christ as Lord, or to come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life.
Secondly, baptism is made all about us. Jesus has been removed from the centre of the baptism service, and we have been put in his place. Baptism is consistently construed anthropocentrically – it’s all about your ‘first steps on an amazing journey’, it’s there to create ‘a special day for all your friends and family’, it’s ‘a commitment to start as you mean to go on’. All this suggests a lamentable failure of nerve: rather than confront the on-the-ground reality of a pervasive ‘folk-religion’ view of baptism (‘getting the baby done’, having a party, etc.), the website colludes with it.
Just as the character of baptism is obscured, so the demands of baptism are played down – we read nothing of the requirement for godparents to be themselves confirmed, and the concrete duties of the godparents given in the BCP (for instance, teaching the child the Creed, Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments) have been transformed into a kind of New Labour manifesto: ‘talk about the bigger questions’, ‘show them practically how to make good choices in life’, and so it goes on.
I do encourage you to visit the website and to see what you make of it – and if you’re in a more frivolous mood, you can always try playing the game of ‘spot the male clergy’!
It does, I think, raise some serious questions: when does ‘meeting people where they are’ mean that the Christian faith is emptied of its content?; when does a concern for ‘accessibility’ end up cheapening a holy sacrament?; when does a desire to be welcoming to outsiders begin to obscure the offence of the gospel?