Episode 34: The Invitation System, Childhood Conversions, and When to Baptize

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the

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Ruled Church Podcast, episode 34. I'm your co -host,

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Alan Nelson, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas. With me is my good friend, co -labor in the ministry,

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Eddie Ragsdale. Say hello, Eddie. Hello, everyone. How are things going at the big city of Marshall, First Baptist Marshall?

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Man, they're going great. We're just—I was just sharing with you, and I don't want to get into details, but we had a conversion in the last couple of Sundays at our church.

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Y 'all are going to the metric system. That's right, converting. We had a profession of faith this last

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Sunday that actually the conversion happened the Sunday before. So it's just a joy to see people coming to know the

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Lord, and this one specifically is a child in one of our families in our church.

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And so, you know, it's—we believe what the Scriptures tell us about raising our children up in the nurture and admonition of the

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Lord, but to see God in His faithfulness bring children to Himself, it is a great blessing.

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It's encouraging. Amen. That sounds like a great show topic. In fact, let's talk about that today.

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On today's episode, we're going to talk about childhood conversion. We're going to talk about the invitation system.

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We're going to talk about baptism a little bit with children. We're just going to throw all this in together, and I think we'll have a good conversation on these matters.

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The first thing that we'll talk about, Eddie, is the invitation system. And by the invitation system, what we mean is the

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Billy Graham, which, by the way, there's a quote floating around somewhere on the interwebs that you can find that Billy Graham said something like he thinks 80— or the late

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Billy Graham said he thought like 85 % of people in churches weren't converted, 85%.

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Oh, I thought the number I had seen, which this is many years ago, but it's the same quote from Billy Graham, and I thought it was worse than that.

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I thought it was like—well, I think it is a different thing that we're talking about because I once seen a quote from him saying that he thought that as little as 5 % of the respondents at his crusades were genuine conversions.

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Well, no, that's an article from Christian Communicators Worldwide. I can't remember who did it. It wasn't

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Jim Maliff, but one of those brothers did it, and it was lower. It was like 3 % to 4%. Studies have shown 3 % to 4 % because I cited that in From Death to Life.

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Anyway, the invitation system is basically what happens at the end of the service.

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And it can be used in—I know some dear brothers who incorporate something like this, but the worst of it is—I think even—what's that comedian's name?

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John Crist or something. Even he was making fun of it the other day because it was like, when we were younger, you had to get up and walk the aisle.

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He's like, then a few years later, you just had to raise your hand. And then he said, I was at an event the other day.

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You just had to send a text message. It's too easy to get saved. But the point is, this kind of manipulative pressure focus at the end of a message to try to force people to make some sort of decision.

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Do you guys do anything like that? We do not. I tell people that we call people to the front every week, but it's the

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Christians that we call to come and receive from the Lord's table. It's not the non -Christians that we call to come and profess faith.

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Amen. At the end of our service—I've done it since I got here—at the end of our service, we sing a song, and I'm down there in the front, and we sing a song.

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I usually grab the hymnal. If I don't know the song, I'll grab the hymnal, and I'll sing along with it. If someone were to come forward for church membership or they wanted to pray or something like that,

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I wouldn't be like, no, you can't come. But we don't do any kind of, you need to come up front.

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Because there's really a few reasons. One, there's really no biblical precedent for that.

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Two, theologically, the altar is— But Quatro, Acts chapter 2.

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Yeah, honestly. That's what I always hear. A couple of things that I want to point out real quick on that.

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I didn't want to interrupt you. No, go ahead. I don't want to lose this. One thing we must admit about Acts chapter 2 is, first of all,

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Peter didn't issue a call to them to do anything but believe the gospel. He preached the gospel.

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They interrupted him and said, what must we do to be saved? Amen. So it wasn't like Peter was saying, come up here.

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It was rather them saying to him, you're telling us that Christ was crucified for us and that he's resurrected.

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What do we need to do now? And then the other thing we need to realize about Acts chapter 2, that wasn't a church meeting.

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That was open -air preaching. Yeah. That was the proclamation of the gospel in the public.

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And you and I both believe that we need to be, in our churches, dedicated to taking the gospel out into the world.

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Yeah. That people would respond in faith and be converted. And that's not a church meeting.

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And they didn't even have a piano. That's right. That's right. And no one was asked to recite a prayer, those kind of things.

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So the point is, and we could spend the whole episode on the invitation system, but the point is, if we don't do the standard sort of altar call thing, then how do people get converted?

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Well, a few things. One, we preach. And like you say, we do preach invitations.

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Yes. And commands. Yes. God commands all men everywhere to repent.

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So we do that. But also, we encourage evangelism.

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And by the way, it's actually a whole different view of the church, really, honestly. It's not that lost people can't get saved on Sunday morning.

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Praise God, they can, and many have. Yes. But it's just that your gathering of the church is for believers.

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That's right. And so, yes, we're preaching the gospel because believers need the gospel.

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And you can go and listen to my sermons, almost every one. I'm assuming I'm preaching to unbelievers somewhere in the congregation.

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I know we have children, or maybe there's hypocrites. So you're preaching, and you're making sure people understand.

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But you're not preaching for a decision. It's a whole convoluted system that's kind of sadly been abused.

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And I know, again, there's well -meaning brothers out there who desire people to be converted. But the idea is that we preach for invitation to the response of the gospel to be right then and there, upon the preaching, not to come forward, but to repent in your heart.

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Yes. Call upon the name of the Lord and be saved. Yeah, and you know, I've received criticism over the years about my approach to this specific issue.

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And one of the things I've always told people is I'm inviting you.

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I'm pleading with you. If you hear me preach a message where I do not proclaim the gospel and call on people to repent and believe in Christ, please call me out.

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I need to be called out. That's a sin. If I stand before God's people and open his word, and I just give them 10 tips to a better life, or I just tell them how to handle their money better or something, even if I'm talking about what the scripture's talking about, if I fail to tell them that they need to repent and put their trust in Jesus, then

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I need to be called out for that. But that's not the same thing as a manipulative system where we're trying to get them to.

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And I think one of the problems is that the person begins to believe that something other than trusting in Jesus was how they got saved.

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They prayed a prayer, they walked forward, or they raised their hand, or they sent a text message. And so they got saved as opposed to, no, the gospel call is to believe it.

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That's how you're converted. You believe it. And that belief is going to be manifested in genuine repentance and a transformation of life.

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But it's got to all start in your heart. Yeah, amen.

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Amen. So, again, maybe we could circle back on this. This is really what From Death to Life was about.

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And you don't just say a prayer, raise your hand, sign a card. Hey, look. Oh, yeah.

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Did I give you some of those? No. I'm going to get some. I probably won't need them until summer.

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It's all good. It's all good. So now what

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I want to talk about then is if we don't do that, how do people get saved? And specifically,

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I want to talk about childhood conversions. I have five children, six children, but one in the womb.

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And I believe that possibly four of them, maybe more like three of them, are converted.

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And I'll talk about that in just a minute. But why don't you start us off about can children call upon the name of the

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Lord and be saved? They can. They can. As a matter of fact, the

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Scripture is clear that the Lord Jesus even instructed that we needed to be more childlike in the way that we have faith.

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I don't think that Jesus was telling us to be immature, but I think he was encouraging us that there's an innocence to genuine faith, that our children are maybe even more predisposed to just because they haven't, even though they are sinners, they're vipers and diapers, as Voddie Bauckham says.

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We know that they have depravity because they are our children. But with that being said, yeah,

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I think that when we preach the gospel to our children, they can believe it and they can be born again by the power of the

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Holy Spirit. What we want to be intentional about is instructing them in the gospel.

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And the word that I like to use, both in the way that we think about our homes of the families in our church, my own home and our church family, is that we want to be saturating our homes and our children in the gospel.

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And then we believe that that will bear fruit in the Lord's time. But yes, I don't think that we should have this preconceived idea that our children have to wait until they reach a certain age before they can be converted.

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Yeah, I think, first of all, this distinguishes us from the

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Presbyterians. They're not in the covenant until they're converted.

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That's right. They're in the covenant by virtue of their first birth. And we say, no, no, no, they're not in the covenant until their second birth.

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That's right. And so what's interesting, though, is that some

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Baptists have gotten very close to Presbyterians and that they'll baptize a three or four year old, five year old, and give maybe accept some sort of extreme situation.

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You know, perhaps, perhaps, you know, you believe, you know, a young little boy is, you know, some sort of terrible situation where maybe they feel like they're going to pass away or something, but you feel like they've gotten converted.

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And, you know, maybe you could a five year old, you know, maybe some sort of extreme situation. But I'm saying for the vast majority of situations,

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I'm not going to baptize somebody that young, a child that young. Yeah, I agree.

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And I don't have a magic age because the Bible doesn't give us a magic age.

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But I will say historically, historically, Baptists have waited until adulthood to baptize.

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I'm not of that persuasion either, but I'm just kind of giving a little bit of historical context.

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But the point is that Jesus says, let the little children come to me. We should be pointing our children to Christ.

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And one of the things we get so concerned, conversion, by the way, is a moment in time.

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It's not a process. You know, you're regenerate, you put your faith in Christ, you repent. That is a moment in time.

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But I think that we've been indoctrinated to idolize that moment that we're afraid to just keep pointing our kids to Christ.

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Like we don't have to like just keep pointing them to Christ. Like one of the prayers I've prayed for my children before is that they would grow up and not really be able to pinpoint the exact date they came to Christ.

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They heard the gospel so much, but they would know that they're converted. And then later when we see the evidences of that and they're ready for that, that we would baptize them.

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So I have a couple of stories I'll share, but you want to start with yours or? Well, you know,

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I think I'll start by just sharing a little bit about my oldest son when he was converted.

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I baptized him when he was 10 years old, and this was just before I resigned from the church there in Shirley.

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So just before we came here to Marshall. And honestly,

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I believe he was converted when he was seven. Yeah. He came to me one night when he was seven, very repentant, very much under the weight of his sin as much as a seven -year -old can be.

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And we discussed the gospel and we prayed together. And I believe that's when he was converted.

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Now, he later at 10 years old, really, I believe that it was by the work of the spirit in him, we had seen what we believe was evidence of genuine conversion over that time frame.

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And he came to the conviction that he needed to be baptized. And so we felt like that was a scenario in which we were willing to baptize him.

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We have baptized a couple of other kids in our church that were 10, 11 years old.

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And then we just recently, just this last Sunday, I had this child that professed faith, and he's about to turn 11 years old.

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So he's 10 coming 11 years old. What is your church's, do you have any kind of formal process for that as far as, is it just, who's the ultimate determiner of whether you think they should get baptized?

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I would say that would be the determination of the elders to receive it as a credible profession of faith.

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Now, unfortunately, at the moment, the elders is a quorum of one.

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So do you interview them alongside their parents and talk with their parents and stuff?

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Yeah. Well, you know, each individual situation probably is somewhat unique.

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This scenario, I did sit down with this kid and his parents.

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But the way that his conversion came about, it was the Sunday before, and he expressed to his mom and then his dad that he had put his trust in Jesus.

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I believe his exact words were, I'm trusting in Jesus. And he immediately told his mom, his dad was doing security that Sunday.

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So as soon as the service was over, he went to him and told him that. And then they came to me during the week and we met last

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Sunday afternoon to discuss it. So that was the way it came about.

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And the amazing thing is, and I think that this is the value

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I would tell anybody, get in a church and get involved. Because one of the great things was not only was it true that his parents were able to see how

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God has been working up to this point in his life, a big part of his testimony was how the

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Lord has changed his attitude toward the worship gathering, toward the Word of God, toward their family worship, their family devotions, and his own private

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Bible reading. The Lord has increased all of that as he brought him to this point and increased his affection for those things as he brought him to this point.

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So that was amazing. But after that meeting with that family, I told my wife and she mentioned that her and another lady who helped to teach that younger age children in our church had both commented how they had noticed the

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Lord working in his life. And so we even see the church seeing the work of the

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Lord in the life of our children. Yeah. Amen. Yeah, that's encouraging.

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And that's why we're trying to build a culture of, you know, we pick up, so today's

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Wednesday, we pick up kids on Wednesday nights, kids from homes that their families don't come to church. And so we share the gospel and we just trust the

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Lord to work. But our main focus on children are those in the families of the congregation.

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And we try to create a culture where the gospel is being shared with them multiple times, not just in our services, but in their family worship, you know.

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And it was a few years ago, it was 2020, December.

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I remember the date because it was my son's birthday in 2020. My oldest son, we were doing family worship.

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It was one of those nights. It was on a Sunday night, actually. And we normally don't do family worship on Sunday night because we already have corporate worship, but we were doing it during Advent.

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You know, we kind of light a candle and sing and read a text. And we were doing that and I was tired, wore out from the day and just kind of like, okay.

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And all of a sudden I look over, my son's just weeping, you know. I'm like, what's going on? He's like, I feel the weight of my sin, you know, and it's just like out of nowhere,

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I felt like. And so we counseled him. He was 13. We counseled him to read.

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Just the first chapter I thought of, I said, I want you to read Romans 10. He was still going to public school at the time.

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I want you to read Romans 10. I gave him Pilgrim's Progress.

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He like zoomed through that book. You know, you began to see some changes in him. And we talked to him some more and we felt, of course, 13 is a little older, so it's a little easier to communicate and we felt he was ready.

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Then my middle or not middle, my oldest daughter, she was reading a book, a fictional book actually about John Bunyan's blind girl.

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And she came to me one night and crawled up in the bed and said, daddy, I believe, you know.

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And so we've been talking through that and walking through that. And then last night, or no, a few nights, a couple nights ago during family worship, we're reading from James 4.

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We're talking about, you know, come now you who say, you know, tomorrow we're going to such and such city.

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And I just talked to him and I said, we shouldn't be presumptuous. We shouldn't think that we can plan.

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It's wise to plan, but we can't be presumptuous. And I said, y 'all need to think about that in terms of your salvation.

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You can't say, you know, when I get older, then I'll get saved. You know, I said, today's the day of salvation.

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And, you know, I was talking through like that for a little bit. And then I looked over and Piper is weeping, you know, and I'm like, what's going on here?

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You know, and I'm not saying that there has to be tears or whatever, but I'm just saying it, it appeared that she had come under conviction of sin.

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And so I encouraged her, I prayed for her. I let her pray.

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One of the things about children, it's very interesting if you allow them to pray, like, would you like to call upon the name of the

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Lord? You let them pray. Sometimes you can tell by the way they pray, if they're understanding, you know, because if they're just praying,

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Lord, thank you for this good day. And we pray we have a good day tomorrow. Thank you for all your blessings.

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Amen. Well, that would indicate that they don't, you know, the argument that some people say for the sinner's prayers, you have to help them know what it is they need to say.

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And my argument is if God is working, it'll come out of their heart. You know, they may not be able to articulate it in some sort of theological, you know, seminary style, but they'll be able to say something like be merciful to me.

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Well, and we don't believe people are converted because they say a particular incantation.

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They call on the name of the Lord. And that can be that language can be appropriate to them as a person, their culture, their age.

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We don't believe they're converted because they said the right words. They're converted because they're trusting in Christ.

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Well, it really comes down to your understanding, you know, because that's why we would say, you know, the calling on the name of the

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Lord is a response to the grace of God already at work in their hearts. And so you're just listening.

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You're not listening to see if, man, if they get the words right, then it works. What you're listening to say is if the words are coming out of what seems to be a penitent heart, then that's because of the grace of God that's working in there.

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Now, with my children, I have. I have another 13 year old now, an 11 year old, a nine year old.

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Out of those three, perhaps are converted. I'm not sure we talk about it. And I know it's weird for some people like what, you know, but we talk about it.

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We pray about it. I point them to Christ. And then I put the burden of baptism on their shoulders, if that makes sense.

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And that is, I could, all three of them, probably baptize them

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Sunday if I wanted to, because I could talk them into it. Like, come on, you know, and they would do it. But I'm a little bit hesitant because I want to make sure

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I understand whether or not they're actually converted. And Baptist, this isn't downplaying baptism.

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We think baptism is a big deal. But we want to make sure, especially with young children, we're not confusing them and making them think that they're in the covenant when they are not.

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We're making them think that they're born again when they are not. And so it's okay to be cautious and biblical and wisdom here.

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And so I know the hardest thing about all this is just you want to just know and you want to just do it.

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And that's why this system of, you know, make them say a prayer, baptize them, add them to the church roll, send in your numbers to the

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Southern Baptist Convention. That's why it's so appealing, you know, because it's done. Okay, we've done it, you know, and now they're saved and maybe they'll backslide.

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But we know they're saved because remember when they went through this event. But actually biblical counseling with your children, walking them through the things of the gospel, pointing them to Christ.

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This can be a very conversions of one time process, but this whole thing surrounding it can be a slow, laborious, sometimes frustrating process.

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But to do it right is to unto the glory of God. And it's very rewarding.

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Well, and you know, even what you just described, I think what's so frightening is that we know the large numbers of false conversions.

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And we keep doing it. Right, right. And so honestly, I'm very concerned when a person goes through kind of that route, because just even if they're genuinely converted, it's so hard to have confidence in their conversion if it was a manipulative altar call.

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And then they just repeated a prayer. And even if they're genuine, I'm not saying nobody's ever been converted through that.

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I'm saying it's hard to distinguish the true from the false in that.

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Whereas when we're proclaiming the gospel, and like you said, we're kind of putting it back on, you know what we're really doing when we proclaim the gospel openly and regularly in our homes and in the

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Lord's Day gathering, and then we're leaving it with the hearers, especially our children.

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We are trusting the Holy Spirit to be a better counselor than we can be. And he will counsel their soul and bring them to conversion.

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And then I believe the Holy Spirit can counsel them. Amen. He is the counselor. Amen. That's why another thing we do with our children is we exhort them to read the scriptures.

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That's right. You know, it's like, because ultimately we want

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God to speak to them, and how God speaks to them is through his word. And so we help them, we teach them, we read scripture together, we explain it, but we also exhort them, the ones that can read, read.

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You know, read the Bible. And like you said earlier about your son, like, is that desire there?

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You know, if I'm like, have you read your Bible today? And they're like, no. You know, that's one thing. But I'm like, if you read your

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Bible today, and either they have or they're like, oh, no, oh, I want to, you know, because you can expect that a child is going to get distracted or busy, even if they are, you know, genuinely converted.

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But yeah, we exhort them to even good books and good, you know, and Bible reading.

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And then I encourage them to, one of the things I said about to my kids, you know, like, do you think

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God hears you when you pray? You know, you can call upon the name of the Lord, you know.

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I remember a number of years ago, my first pastor, there was this man, and he said, you know, my daughters are getting old enough.

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I'd really like you to talk to him about salvation. You know, and I said, hey, look,

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I'm happy to talk to him about that. I was like, but why don't you talk to him? That's right. You know about that.

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So we're kind of kind of winding down here. Any other thoughts? So we hadn't, you know, we touched baptism.

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I know, but maybe some people are frustrated because we don't have a there's not a hard and fast answer.

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The scriptures don't. We need to have wisdom. I think there is an age that's way too young, and I would

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I would caution strongly against that. But as you kind of get older, you know, getting around 10, 11, 12, you know, 13, you begin to to work through based on a kid's maturity and understanding and just going to take wisdom and prudence.

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And we're not saying that every kid is ready at 10 years old. That's exactly right. No, not everyone's ready at 30 years old.

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That's right. Not converted. And there's not. That's right. There's not a magic thing. Oh, when they're 18, now a baptism, it takes the wisdom.

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And that's why there's there's beauty and and wisdom in the plurality of elders as they can counsel and walk through that.

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But children can be saved and should be exhorted to be saved. And if they are saved, it's all by the sovereign and precious grace of our loving

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Lord. Do you have anything else to add? And I'd like to speak quickly to this issue of thinking about how how do we think about baptism?

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You know, my my younger son is is not baptized and he because he's not professed faith.

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Now, about a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago, my wife and I both both had noticed that he he was expressing some contrition, some brokenness over some sin.

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We believe that he may have been converted. We had some conversations and prayed together, but he never actually outwardly has professed faith.

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Now, could he could his heart have been transformed? And he and he's just not made a public profession yet.

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You know, possibly we're just waiting for the work of the Lord in his life.

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And so kind of like you were saying, do I think I could go to him and I could get him to get baptized?

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Well, sure, I could, but I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the Lord doing his work in his life, and I'm confident that he's going to, you know, on this issue of baptism, something we ought to think about.

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And we've discussed this a lot, me and some of the other dads in our church.

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We've discussed that, you know, we we want to be careful that we do not become more or less paedo -baptist because we're we're rushing our three -year -olds into the baptistry, you know, so that we don't need as much water.

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We don't want to be doing that. But at the same time, we don't want to make baptism this almost unattainable thing.

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Like, man, you know, you got to be 25 and have a clean driving record before we're going to let you enter the water.

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We want to say, hey, do you have a credible profession of faith?

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Are you trusting in Christ? If you are, then we don't want to neglect taking you to baptism because that's what the

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Lord has told us to do. So I think either one could be a problem. Obviously, if people are baptizing very small children based on them simply saying,

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I love Jesus, well, most small children, you can get them to say, I love Jesus.

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That's not enough for you to baptize them. But we also don't want to hold out baptism as this thing that is almost unattainable if they don't have a

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Ph .D. or something. You know, we want to we want to baptize genuinely converted people.

33:50

Yeah, I think that's I think that's excellent. Very good, brother. And we this is why

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I would say in our teaching and in our family worship, we don't only teach. It's not like not all of our we try to read the books of the

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Bible or read through what I'm preaching in a family worship. So we're not just every family worship.

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Repent, repent, repent. We're talking about other things, too. And that's why, because we believe in the sufficiency of the scriptures.

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And so we talk about things like baptism and church membership and those sorts of things so that our children so that so that God will work through those things and our children will see not only the importance of conversion.

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I don't I never want my children to think, well, I'm saved. That's all. I don't have to worry about the church and all that. No, I want

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God to continue to work in those things. And so what I want to see is. My children saying, hey, dad, what about this?

34:46

You know what? Don't don't I need to be baptized? You know, so as I teach on a council and all those things, but but yeah, you're right.

34:53

You don't want to start. You don't want to you definitely don't want to do the system that's going on right now, but you don't want to swing the pendulum to too far and say, you know, well, probably can't get baptized to your, you know, as you say, 25 and can rewrite the 1689 from memory.

35:10

That's right. That's right. So, well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you something else, too. If if if there's anybody listening and you're thinking, well, what's something practical?

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I mean, of course, reading the scripture and praying family worship. What's something practical

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I can do with my children? I would tell you, read, especially biographies with their children.

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And right now, my children, I've mentioned this in previous podcasts, but my children are every night we're reading through two or three of the testimonies from the book

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Wonders of Grace, which is testimonies of conversions during Charles Haddon Spurgeon's ministry.

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And I'm loving it because here I've got my son. Right. Who, as far as I know, is unconverted, although, like I said, he could have been converted a year ago, but he's not yet openly professed faith.

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But every night he's hearing these testimonies from 150 years ago, right.

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160 years ago about people believing in Christ and coming to Christ and and how they left the life of sin.

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And he's hearing all these divergent testimonies of young people and older people, of men and women, of young men and young women, of older men and older women.

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So I think there is so much value in in exposing our children to the testimonies of others who have believed on the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. I think that's that's wonderful. I thought you were going to say, watch the

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Chosen. You should not watch the Chosen. You should absolutely not do that. Yeah.

36:58

I would have. I would have. I would have disparaged that in every way possible. It was it was a fictitious thing, but it's based on historical reality.

37:08

My oldest daughter, you know, about John Bunyan. I think her name was Mary. But anyway, her his blind daughter, you know, so that's that can be a very powerful real.

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It's like real life examples. So you see the conversion in the scripture. You see the scripture, you know, and but then in church history, see,

37:26

OK, what's it look like here? And you see that and you have some wonderful examples of of testimonies, you know,

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George Whitfield, John Bunyan, even even John Wesley, as much as I disagree with some of his stuff about, he says,

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I felt my heart strangely warmed, you know, great example. So I think that's that's a good word.

37:45

We're going to wrap it up there. Thank you guys for joining us this week on the Rural Church Podcast 2 .0.

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Say goodbye, Eddie. See you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This this is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemost, the masterpiece of God.