Several denominations within Christianity follow the practice of baptism by immersion as a means of professing faith and for becoming a full member of a congregation [1]. Even branches of the Church that usually practise infant baptism, retain immersion of believers as an option, and services are conducted by the Church of England in some coastal parishes [2].
I
was brought up as a Baptist and attended Winner Street Baptist Church in
Paignton until I was eleven years old. Although I only attended two services of
baptism, they left a strong impression and this in my description in Walking
with Gosse [3]
Services of baptism at Winner Street were unsettling, although I only attended two. One was for my elder brother and I’ve no idea who was being baptised in the second, but it was likely to be a relative, or close friend. After some preliminaries, the minister conducting the ceremony walked down the steps into the pool followed, one at a time, by each candidate. Then came the solemn “I baptise you (or was it thee?) in the name of … (I can’t remember the rest)”, followed by a backwards dip to be completely immersed. Each successful candidate was then lifted up and made a soggy walk to the back vestry, accompanied by a supporter and the sound of joyous hymn singing. With my fear of water, I hated the thought of immersion, so didn’t think that I would ever be baptised. I was too young to be a candidate anyway, but if the idea of sending me to the services was to encourage me to think about a future baptism, it had the opposite effect. It wasn’t just the immersion; the whole church seemed to be filled with an unpleasant emotion. Or perhaps the emotion was fine, but there was too much of it? I still feel uncomfortable with the emotionality associated with evangelical Christian movements, yet a heightened state that borders on mild hysteria seems to be important to many believers.
This
was in the confines of the church building in the 1950s, but in the Nineteenth Century
at least one local group of Brethren held services of baptism in the sea, as
their small chapel did not have a pool [3]. These Brethren were led by Philip
Henry Gosse, the famous natural historian, and the party would gather on the
shore at Oddicombe (see below in a more recent view) for the service, a practice
that was stopped after onlookers started jeering and mocking the spectacle.
Henry
Gosse’s son, Edmund, was baptised in 1859 when twelve years old, but not in the
sea. It was unusual for one so young to be baptised in the Brethren and large
numbers turned up at the main Brethren chapel in Torquay to witness the event
(the room in St Marychurch probably did not have a pool, even though it had
been newly constructed in 1859). In his famous book Father and Son,
Edmund describes the baptism as being “the central event of my whole childhood,”
and one would imagine it to have had an even greater impact if it was conducted
at Oddicombe. As Ann Thwaite has remarked [4], Edmund relished being the centre
of attention and I read his account with special interest, as the ceremony he
described was almost identical to that which I had observed at the service of
baptism in Winner Street. It is an event that invites an emotional response
from the audience and I can imagine the comments from the jeering crowd of onlookers at Oddicombe in earlier times.
[1] https://christianindex.org/baptism-around-the-world/
[3] Roger S Wotton (2020) Walking with Gosse, e-book, available widely.
[4] Ann Thwaite (2002) Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse
