In my budding vocation as a priest, I have played a role in a dozen baptisms and twice as many funerals. These rites serve as bookends to human existence, offering liturgical symmetry to life: birth and death, water and dust, first breaths and last. I have guided families through these sacred transitions, offering counsel and advice. On my best days, I am clear on my role in these pivotal moments.
Yet now, faced with the question of my own 20-month-old daughter's baptism, I find myself uncertain.
Wrestling with Tradition
This is an honest confession from a priest who was adopted into the Episcopal tradition as an adult. My early experiences of church were rooted in the Southern Baptist tradition, and my formative teenage years were shaped by evangelical Christianity. My wife, Annie, shares a similar background. Together, we now stand at the crossroads of two traditions, asking whether to have our daughter, Rowan, baptized.
Our uncertainty is not from ignorance or indifference. We know the history of infant baptism: how the establishment of Christianity provided stability for Christian families, how confirmation evolved into a separate rite, how fears of original sin created urgency to baptize. We are familiar with the theological arguments on both sides—covenantal theology (infant baptism) vs. personal witness (believer’s baptism); Acts 16:15 vs. Mark 16:16.
This is not a trivial decision, but sometimes it feels like an obligation rather than a conviction. If we are honest, we are not sure what to do.
Annie and I grew up in a tradition where baptism was a personal response to faith, an act of obedience undertaken by the individual rather than a rite performed on their behalf. It was about claiming one’s faith, not inheriting it. We were taught that salvation came by our faith through grace—not through parents, godparents, or pastors.
I vividly remember my own baptism at age seven. After a week of Vacation Bible School, I was full of questions: Why were the Roman soldiers mean to Jesus? Why did He die? How did He come back to life? I imagine my mother, as faithful as she could, answering those questions. Her instinct was to take me to our pastor, Brother Kevin. I don’t recall the conversation, but I remember feeling it was important. I didn’t fully understand baptism’s mystery (who does?), but I knew Jesus loved me enough to die and rise again. That love, expressed through a community that told me the story, helped me say “yes” to Jesus.
Years later, I heard my mother’s salvation story. She said it was the best day of her life. It's a similar story, her father (Papa T, rest his soul) took her to see their pastor, Brother Ford. That conversation led her to say “yes” to Jesus. She told me that on the way, it stormed, but after the meeting, a rainbow appeared. She smiled through her tears as she recounted it. The peace and comfort she received as a child, she passed down to me—a legacy of questions, important conversations, and the presence of a holy figure at pivotal moments. How could I not accept such a gift?
The Challenge of a New Tradition
I believe in the efficacy of infant baptism—I have done my seminary homework. I have taught it, defended it, and administered it. But I have no personal experience of practicing it as a parent. There is no accumulated wisdom in my lineage to draw from. Annie and I are navigating uncharted waters, and that unfamiliarity gives us pause.
When my faith feels stripped down to the studs, what remains is a primal trust in a goodness larger than myself. I want Rowan to know such goodness has a name: Jesus.
I want her to hear the stories of Scripture, experience faith in community, and struggle with her own questions. And when crisis inevitably comes, I want her to be grounded in a language and a liturgy. For me, part of that grounding comes through the waters of baptism.
I want that for her. I just don’t know when.
Theological Meaning and Lived Reality
I do not worry about purgatory or the damnation of an unbaptized infant soul. My concern is meaning—the theological significance of what we do, when we do it, and what it says about the God we worship. I care about how baptism aligns with our material reality and liturgical life, how it provides order and direction in a way that makes sense and builds upon itself.
This is not an abstract thought experiment—I confront it almost every Sunday as I intentionally pass over Rowan with the communion bread. (I say almost because, let’s be real, some Sundays, getting Rowan to church is not in the cards.) I freely practice open-table communion—I do not withhold communion from anyone who comes with open hands, baptized or not. Yet, I also recognize the logic that the waters of baptism lead us to the communion table.
Instead, I mark Rowan’s forehead with the sign of the cross—perhaps preemptively practicing what will one day be her baptismal sealing, or perhaps because I believe Christ’s love for her is already a prevenient reality. I don’t know. I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth! “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
I believe it is a beautiful thing for a child to belong to a baptismal community and never know a day when they were not embraced by the faith and welcomed at Christ’s Table.
At the same time, I know the value of making faith one’s own, of wrestling with it, of claiming it personally. My story is one of choosing belief, remembering the feeling of being submerged, of finding freedom in owning my voice. That story is familiar. To practice infant baptism is to wade into unknown waters, to complicate what is already the complex endeavor of raising a child.
While infant baptism is the common practice in the Episcopal Church, theologically, the normative form of Christian initiation is that of an adult believer. There is, therefore, room for us to wait, to discern, to trust that faith unfolds in time.
Trusting in Grace
I trust that the path will become clearer in time. But for now, it is not. And maybe that’s okay.
Regardless of the path, I think Meredith Miller’s advice on parenting is wise:
"What if our aim for the kids in our life is to be with them as they get to know God and can discover God can be trusted? What if we think about our role as presence and process, not behaviors that we can watch and say they did or didn’t do, not doctrines we can hear them say and be glad they agree, but that they would have the chance to get to know God and be given time and space to go through that process? Because even if you as an adult are sure of God’s trustworthiness, kids don’t know that yet. They haven’t had enough time."
Time and trust. I don’t have many possessions, but time and trust I have. And maybe that is enough.
Trey+