Showing all posts in Baptism

In Baptism, Ritual, Sacrament

Reflections on the LDS Sacrament (Part I)

Author LynnettePosted on 7 Comments

This has gotten ridiculously long, so I’m going to just start with the first half.

How many times did I take the sacrament in an LDS church? Weeks. Years. The sacrament hymns were almost mindlessly familiar. When I was a kid, the deacons seemed so old to me; later on, of course, they were strikingly young. As a girl who never participated in passing it, I wondered about the logistics of how they set up who was going to go where. Sometimes the experience was dominated by the awkwardness of figuring out how it was going to work, if I were perhaps sitting in the middle of an empty row. In singles wards, it was almost jarringly silent. In wards with young children, it was a dull roar. Read More

In Baptism, Conversion, covenants, Episcopalians, Ritual

Re-Thinking the Covenant Path: What Baptism in the Episcopal Church Meant to Me

Author LynnettePosted on 10 Comments

(This is adapted from something I recently wrote for a writing group.)

A phrase that seems to have become popular in the Mormonism of recent years is “covenant path.” It’s after my time; I don’t recall hearing the term much, if ever, during my years in the church. But even from my vantage point outside the church, I’ve noticed the phrase appearing more and more. Honestly, it makes me flinch. I have some old baggage with the notion of covenants, and the phrase “covenant path” seems to be used, as often as not, to weigh in on the failings of those who are not on it. People left the covenant path, and terrible things befell them; the tale is told in many ways and in many contexts, but the moral remains the same. Read More

In Baptism, Church Life, Conversion, Episcopalians

Getting Baptized

Author LynnettePosted on 3 Comments

I didn’t actually have to get baptized as part of my conversion. The Episcopal church doesn’t have a clear policy on what do with Mormons—while Catholics and some Protestants have ruled that Mormon baptism is invalid and converts from Mormonism must be baptized, Episcopalians have been rather less definitive. There are certainly LDS converts to Anglicanism who’ve made the religious transition without being baptized (perhaps most notably a former Episcopal bishop of Utah). When I first started playing with the idea of converting, I figured I’d do it via confirmation only; I liked the idea of holding on to my Mormon baptism as a way of maintaining continuity in my religious journey. Read More