“Water baptism is one of the things we really focus on at our church,” says James Moscardini, Worship Arts Pastor at Vineyard Church North Phoenix. “We do baptisms every six weeks, and recently we had 62 people signed up, which is pretty normal.”
The focus on baptism at Vineyard Church North Phoenix began a few years ago when, according to James, the lead pastor Brian Anderson, who has always felt his calling was to be the sort of pastor to “equip the saints,” began to feel that God was also calling him to be an evangelist—even though he didn’t feel like that was part of his gifting.
“We’ve been gearing our Christmas Eve and Easter services in a very evangelistic way, so we do altar calls on those holidays and throughout the year, probably six total, and we see like 100 people come forward each time to accept Jesus.” James says that their process after someone raises their hand to accept Jesus is very consistent, starting with a card they’re given with some next steps, including an invitation to baptism, regular church attendance, prayer, and reading their Bible. After they’ve gotten a handle on those things, people are encouraged to focus on small group attendance, possibly taking some of the classes offered at their church or joining the leadership track, volunteering in some capacity, and giving to God financially through the church.
“We used to just do a couple of big annual baptisms, but now we do them during worship, and it’s a big celebration. It’s always a big attendance weekend because people invite their families. During COVID, we shortened our worship time. Since we’ve had so many people signing up to be baptized, we’ve had to do them more frequently just to fit them into the service.
We’ve done everything we can to make it super easy for people to be water baptized. People used to have to attend an in-person class, but now it’s online and about 25 minutes, and really goes into everything someone needs to know about what baptism means before they sign up. We run marketing for baptisms the three weeks preceding every water baptism, so that’s half the year that we’re running a baptism announcement. Before baptisms start, we have someone explain what it means, and why everyone needs to be baptized.
Baptisms are really in the culture of our church now. When people are baptized they get a t-shirt and they wear them proudly! And we really celebrate baptism: we do a ‘win video,’ and our bulletin has a baptism focus, so there’s a lot we do to communicate that it’s a big deal.”
One of the most recent developments, now that they have an online presence, is that people sometimes fly in from out of state to be baptized. “They watch our online services and decide they want to be a part of it, so they fly in or drive hours to be baptized, and it’s often the first time they’ve ever been to our church in person. They just feel like they’re a part of our church community through our online church. I know a lot of people are starting to make the argument for shutting down online church, but I don’t know how we can while we’re seeing this kind of fruit.”
For James, the joy of getting to witness baptisms never really wears off. “I get to water baptize two people this Sunday, which I’ve never done before because I’m usually leading worship,” he explains, “and I’m really excited!”