1 Weekend, 478 Baptisms. Really.

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.