National Baptist Evangelical Life and Soul Saving Assembly of the U.S.A. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The journey is easier at the beginning and the end than the middle when we are far from home and home. As I approach old age I find it hard to remember a time when ministry did not inhabit a large space in my inner life.  I was baptized at eight scared into the Kingdom at a Baptist revival. But that was only the outer thing, the thing that hooked my fear and plunged me into the fishpond at the White place almost fifty years ago.  It was at the same farm that as a three year old I sat in great-aunt Myrtie’s lap on the bank of Anderson creek as my parents were baptized down in the pool formed by a gravel bank.

 Thought some might doubt it, I remember it clearly. Like a scene from a movie people were standing and sitting by the water. The grass was green in the way it is in the South before being scorched by the August Sun.  Folk went down into the water lost and came up found. I’ve learned since then that found takes a long time. The pilgrimage to God is rarely dramatic it is mostly as an old timer in AA says, “the inevitability of gradualness.”

This was before the Baptist got “baptisteries” those walk-in bathtub artificial kind of “improvements” that keep us from nature and perhaps [they are unnatural which mates poorly with the] super-natural as well.  However well intended these innovations are, what is gained in convenience is lost in affect. There is something about inconvenience that is comforting in its discomfort.  Coming to God is not convenient.

I read today in Anglicans on line that a group of clergy, God help us, are bringing a resolution before the Synod of the Church of England that Easter be fixed on the same Sunday every year.  This is about as foolish a proposition as I’ve heard.  We will convenience ourselves into nothing at all. C. S. Lewis once said that “the Gospel can be of no concern. The Gospel can be of ultimate concern. The Gospel can never be of moderate concern.”  The convenience of moderation has the affect of warm water it is wet but not refreshing.

We cover the cross with so many layers that it is obscured from the casual observer. JWS