Driveway Baptism
By Hannah Lewandowski
At the beginning of this school year, at a meeting with students on our campus leadership team in Pullman, I heard a story about a young college student baptizing his friends in his bathtub because they accepted Christ and wanted to obey scripture immediately. That story stuck with me, and I continued to think about how God could be at work in my home or even in my neighborhood. This story he shared so fervently revived the vision of ministry I had previously for the place I lived. I began asking God to use my home for His glory, and sure enough, in due time, He answered.
Several weeks ago, during that springtime of the same school year, my neighbor mentioned to me about holding a baptism service in our shared driveway. At first, I thought she was joking with me, asking me to clear some space for a different reason, but after she asked multiple times, to my surprise, I finally realized she was genuinely asking.
My neighbor, Jen, leads a small group, or village, for upperclassmen students at Washington State University, and has helped foster a sense of family beyond the high number of freshmen reached through our church. Despite working over 40 hours a week more often than she’d like to admit, Jen takes the commandment of Christ to make disciples seriously. She wasn’t sure how the Lord would move in a village she didn’t have as much time as she’d wish to invest in, but He has proven to be faithful.
At the beginning of the school year, a girl named Maddie began attending the village Jen leads, and she became interested in what a relationship with Jesus would look like, but she was not super sure about the reality of that. She wanted to know why the Lord brought her to Pullman and Resonate Church, because she felt confident that there must be a reason. After experiencing much change throughout the year in her personal life, she decided to draw nearer to the Lord, experiencing God’s love and freedom through vulnerability in a village setting. She agreed to go to Jen and her village to Resonate Conference, and after returning to Pullman from that weekend, she had a growing desire to stand in front of her church family and declare that Jesus is Lord of her life through the sharing of her story. She wanted to take Acts 2:38 seriously: "repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”.
Jen and her co-leaders, Joe and Adam, were overjoyed to see the change in Maddie’s heart and her desire to publicly declare her faith. Unfortunately, Maddie had to move out of town before the prescheduled baptism service in Pullman, but she kept bringing up her desire to get baptized. Jen knew she had to do something about this and began to plan a way for this to work. They picked a Sunday afternoon, got Maddie’s parents to come, acquired an animal trough to dunk her in, and invited people to celebrate afterwards.
“The gospel reunites families, Jesus makes them whole, and He makes us complete in Him. There truly is nothing like it.”
The day arrived, and I walked next door, unsure what exactly I was entering into, but eager to celebrate Maddie and her new life in Christ. But something felt different about my neighbor’s living room that day; the trough in our cul-de-sac felt significant. Our campus pastor, Jacob, got to share with the small group gathered in Jen’s living room the reason for baptism and the new creation we are made into as the blood of Christ covers us. Following that, Maddie got up and began to share her story. The vulnerability and depth with which she shared her story allowed us to see her, our sister in Christ, in a new light. So many details of her story paralleled mine, and I couldn’t hold back the tears that began to well in my eyes as I sat on the couch and listened. She shared about the healthy relationships she now had with her parents and herself, all the while they watched with tears of their own. The gospel reunites families, Jesus makes them whole, and He makes us complete in Him. There truly is nothing like it. The impact of living to reach others with the gospel through sacrificing your time and resources establishes an eternal impact; why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that?!
After she boldly shared her story with the people in her village and Jen’s neighbors, we made our way outside, circling around the metal trough full of lukewarm water. Jacob and Jen got to pray over her and then proceeded to baptize her in the middle of the driveway. We all continued to weep with joy as a new sister in Christ joined our eternal family, all the while I was hoping that people within our cul-de-sac were peeking through their windows out of curiosity. To this day, I’m not sure if anyone saw us gathered around the neighborhood, worshipping Jesus, but I could feel the presence of God orchestrating something greater than I could imagine, because that’s just who our God is. Our neighbors need not know our names, jobs, ages, or hometowns, but I hope and I pray that they, too, know the same Jesus that is Lord of our lives.
So be a witness to God's glory. In your neighborhoods, in your driveway, in your home, at work, on a road trip, on campus, to your family, to your friends, spread His glory far and wide, for He is worthy of our praise, our adoration, our devotion. There is none like Him, and surely the people in our spaces and spheres of influence need to know this truth just as much as we do. So go, live sent, share His redemptive love with all those who will listen. And celebrate, often, and without inhibition at the work of His mighty hand, for there is none like our God, Resonate!
