Out with the Devil

I am not accustomed to posting photographs of myself on these pages, but here I am a couple of months ago with little Jocelyn at the font, an image kindly sent me by her parents. I now have a little archive of these baptism snaps, which form not only a record of my clerical career to date, but also the effects of time on the quantity of my hair.

The Church of which I have the honour to be an ordained minister is considering a range of experimental alternative texts for the baptism service, which arose out of a request by the General Synod a couple of years ago to come up with material in 'more culturally appropriate and accessible language' than the existing one contains. In particular, specific references to sin and the Devil disappear to be replaced by generic statements about evil. Of course our beloved conservative newspapers have delighted in fulminating about it and you can read a modest example of that here, or indeed, should you feel so disposed, check the actual texts and come to your own conclusion.

The lines of disagreement are fairly predictable. For my part I prefer to trust something that has a connection with the whole history of the Western Church rather than what a group of early-twenty-first-century middle-class clergy think speaks to their own momentary epoch, about which I suspect they know less than they imagine they do, and so if I'm allowed to carry on using the traditional texts, I will.

The mind-boggling thing is that anyone imagines that minor tinkering with liturgical language actually makes a difference to the evangelical mission of the Church: it's the kind of thing clergy do in order to avoid any real work, and I know because I'm continually tempted to do the same. One form of service may be marginally preferable to another, but it won't change the world; it just isn't the issue. The great majority of people who have little or no connection with the Church don't care what words it uses, and barely-churched families who want their kids 'done' are prepared to do and say virtually anything they can to allow that to happen. When I do baptism preparation I always ask whether the couple are happy with the language we use and whether they have any questions or things they'd like me to clear up, and they hardly ever do. I often find myself struggling to help them put into words why they want their children christened, and wonder whether there's something they're not telling me.

In baptism, like all the sacraments, words and symbols and actions only achieve what they are supposed to achieve - only become effective channels of grace, in traditional terms - if you are to a certain extent primed by a certain amount of prior practice and expectation. That's the context in which the traditional baptismal texts are intended to function. So you could argue that providing a more 'culturally appropriate' form of service for people who aren't steeped in the sacramental life is exactly what the Church should be doing. Except that expecting that people will turn up at a church service and be converted to faith by this or that form of words is to lay an unrealistic weight on your own efforts. Even the more modest aim of trying to guarantee that they're not actually turned off by what you do is a pretty hazardous exercise: I remember a conversation with a work colleague whose point of disgust with the baptism service was the priest carrying out the traditional gesture of turning a double-sided stole from penitential purple to celebratory gold after the dunking. It would make far more sense simply to insist that baptism families have to be regular church attenders, which is exactly what I would do were it not for reflecting that the sacraments belong to God and not the Church. As so often, I suspect the Church has got the wrong end of the wrong stick.