Word: baptismal
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...with Japanese pastors and three marimbas, an organ, harp, chorus, a public-address system and a portable stage, they had encouraging results for such a stubbornly non-Christian country: an estimated 88,520 people reached in 140 public services, and 45 baptized, with another 89 being prepared for baptism...
...raise some $50,000 to pay for it. "During the occupation," he tells his audiences, "there was an abnormal Christianity boom. The Japanese are adaptable and wanted to flatter the Americans, so many pretended to become Christians. They would have their weddings in churches. But the real test was baptism. Few would do it because it was a cultural break with ancestors, and sometimes with inheritance...
Since Vicar Perry came to his Hackney parish four years ago, his policy of no baptism without regular church attendance has boosted the average number of Sunday communicants. Backed up by his bishop, Perry said last week: "To a lot of people, who have not been inside of a church since they were married, baptism is a good excuse for a party. But they have to realize that this is one of the church's great sacraments . . . If a man is to become a bus driver, then he has instruction. A Christian should have the same. In a pagan...
...bright light of freedom in 17th century Amsterdam, the little band of Jews from Spain and Portugal still felt afraid and hunted. They were marranos (meaning "swine" or "accursed"), victims of forcible baptism as Christians under the terror of the Inquisition; now that they could practice Judaism openly in their new home, they did so with ferocious tenacity. When in 1656 a young scholar among them dared to range his brilliant mind beyond the confines of the faith-he doubted the existence of angels, the incorporeality of God and the soul's immortality, later recognized Jesus as a bearer...
...first large gift from a young minister--John Harvard--in 1638. But liberalism clashed with orthodoxy even at its inception. This time liberalism lost out. The college's first president, Henry Dunster, was forced to resign because of his doubts as to the validity of infant baptism. Cotton Mather, a later president wrote of him, "he fell into the briers of Antipacdobaptism...