Since we moved into the building of March of last year, our church has seen 54 baptisms.
And I'm referring to people who have literally visited our church because of a family or friend
that get saved and they get baptized the same day. And people have often asked me,
how is it that you're baptizing so many converts? Is it the demographics in the church in Southern
California? What is it? Well, the answer is simply this. Number one is that I believe God
is simply blessing our church. He's blessing us with soul winners, with salvations, with baptisms,
with people just getting acclimated to the Christian life. But on a practical level,
I believe the reason people are getting baptized is because we ask them to.
You see, I strongly believe that you should strike while the iron is hot. And we've created
a culture in our church that when someone gets saved in our church, we automatically follow up
with believer's baptism. Now, a lot of people want to shy away from that because they think that if
they follow up with baptism after salvation, that's going to confuse them. At which point,
I just tell them they need to tighten up their screws on their gospel presentation. Believer's
baptism is important. It's the first step of obedience, and we shouldn't shy away from asking
people.