I 'm told that the following story was recently posted on the Christian Standard website:
Christ's Church of the Valley (San Dimas, CA) celebrated 478 baptisms during services this past weekend. You read that right!
Dane Johnson, associate pastor, shares the story: "With no prior notice to the congregation, Jeff (Vines, CCV's senior pastor) presented a very clear gospel message of God's grace and our need for obedient response.
Over six services, we baptized 478 adults (in their street clothes). You should have seen the looks on people's faces who were coming in from the parking lot, having encountered people leaving church in soaking clothes!
"Many of those baptized were making first-time decisions for Christ, while some were convicted to follow Christ's example of water baptism. It was an AMAZING sight, with three baptismal pools going non-stop for 40 minutes of every service. In a couple of the services, Jeff had to stand and tell people, 'Look, we're going to continue baptizing until we're done, but the rest of you are going to have to leave so the people coming in for the next service can have parking spaces and seats! You've gotta go now!'
"To put this in perspective, our adult attendance for the entire weekend was around 3,200, so about 15% of those in attendance were baptized. (We cleared out the towel and T-shirt section of Target over the weekend-twice!) We are hearing amazing stories of life change through the moving of the Holy Spirit. A couple in Holland were watching live streaming video of the service and contacted us about being baptized!
"Please join us in praising God for this powerful moving of his Spirit!"
For some video of this event see the CCV homepage.
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5 comments:
I saw this reported on the Christian Church Today site and posted it to Twitter a couple of days ago. Hope this turns out to be the real thing.
I was planning to preach on baptism this next Sunday even before reading this. I wonder if I'll have the same response? But why not be optimistic?
I watched the video at http://www.ccvnow.com/. Just a plain straight forward plea for people to "go public" in baptism. No deep theology, just a simple plea. What an encouragement and a joy to see.
Our tendency is to make things more difficult than the Bible does.
Thanks for the heads up Jay.
Royce
eFrank, good to see you yesterday.
I got an email today from Mission Alive, and it is detailing some church planting in hispanic communities. After your blog post a few weeks back, I thought you may find it interesting. It is probably the lead story on the front of their site right now.
Wow!
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