Driving back to Alabama from Ohio after Christmas, I took some back roads through Tennessee and Alabama.

One thing that struck me was how many old wooden Baptist churches were on the sides of the country highways. The signs and everything looked like they’d never been updated.

I just wondered if they still even half-way filled the pews at these little tiny structures. A lot of times, you go into a church on a Sunday morning—and this was certainly true of some of the churches I visited in New York City—and only about 1/5 of the sanctuary contains bodies warming it.

My pastor, Richard Jordan, recently made the point that while Chicago is mostly Lutheran and Catholic, the South is mostly Baptist and Methodist.

He said, “The Baptists down South—at least the ones I’ve been around—are very clear that you get saved by ‘grace through faith plus nothing,’ but after you’re saved, the first thing you need to do is follow the law in baptism.

“The mentality is, ‘If you really want to get everything in your Christian life, you want to be obedient to the Lord, and the first step is to be water-baptized in obedience to the Lord’s command to follow Him in baptism, and you never can follow Him successfully unless you do that.’ And that’s a common statement.”

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In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis outlines what he thinks are the three crucial factors to the Christian life: “baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, Mass, the Lord’s Supper.”

Rick Warren, pastor of the gargantuan Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., which is technically classified as Southern Baptist, wrote once, “Now understand that I am pastoring a church in California, a church where maybe 77 percent of the people were saved and baptized at Saddleback. Without question, Saddleback is the most evangelical church in America. We baptize more than 1,000 people every year.”

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As Bible teacher and Chinese missionary R. Dawson Barlow writes in his 2005 book, The Apostasy of the Christian Church, “Since most ‘Christians’ have never read the Bible (in its entirety), what they believe is based on ‘personal opinion’ and traditional religious teaching.”

This explains people following baptism traditions which don’t at all fit into the biblical age we live in.

Barlow continues, “To put it as simply as possible, water baptism was part of the Kingdom Gospel. When God gave to Paul, through a period of years, the revelation of the Mystery, it became very clear that water baptism was not a part of Paul’s commission to the Gentiles.

“Today there is only one baptism, and it does not involve a drop of water. It is a baptism ‘made without hands,’ and is performed by the Holy Spirit himself. . .

“It all goes back to the church’s failure to discern the difference between those two gospels: the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom,’ Israel’s message, and the ‘Gospel of the Grace of God,’ the message given to the Gentiles of this age while Israel has been (for awhile) set aside. These two messages were never meant to be blended together.

“Therefore, when we read through the Scriptures and fail to differentiate between the two, we could expect nothing but chaos, and GUESS WHAT? That is just what the Christian church has/is/will be facing until the Lord comes. So it is with many people who read their Bibles concerning baptism.”

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In Galatians 3, Paul asks two blatant questions:

1. Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

2. He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

Jordan explains, “Obviously the Galatians got saved by the hearing of faith and not by the works of the law. And when they learned that, they learned everything they needed to know, but then they forgot all that because somebody came along and said, ‘Okay, now you’re saved, but you need to do something else to make God happy with you and grow and make your Christian life all that it can be.’

“For them, it wasn’t baptism, it was circumcision. They were taking scriptural things (from Israel’s program) and imposing them upon the Believer, and that’s why Paul says in verse 3, ‘Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?’

“He’s saying, ‘You learned better than that when you got saved! You were made perfect, so do you now think your Christian life is going to be made complete and mature through your intellect, your emotions, your activities?! That’s foolishness! Why? Because you are complete in Christ!’ ”