How do you persuade a person to be baptized?
We don't know. We know it's important. We know that it will aid them in all manner of ways. We know that ultimately, without it, the person is "lost" no matter how much they may materially improve their lot in life. But as to how to persuade them, then beyond the question begging "lead them to the Holy Spirit", there is no sure-fire specific answer that works 100% of the time.
It's obviously a question that has concerned us, that being a major goal of our Mission.
Wait...what? We're a sober living home, right?
Well, the Liahona Home is the name of our sober living home that we run. But the name of the non-profit is the Liahona Mission, which has two service code identifiers on it's corporate paperwork. 118 and 021. We have to put those on our Annual Report to the Attorney General when we file with the Illinois Charitable Trust Bureau each year.
What are the two numbers?
Under 118 falls the goal of the Liahona Home. Which is to provide a safe and secure place for up to four people to continue a process of recovery from alcohol and/or drugs, and be able to save up money to achieve independent living.
By charging such a modest monthly program fee ($150) that includes everything (bed, utilities, internet, laundry, etc.) we aid them in being able to save up for that first apartment, trailer, house.
Otherwise, the gap between a rehabilitative shelter and coming up with first, last and deposit can prove to difficult, and send a person crashing back down.
There's other things associated with that program, including regularly attending AA/NA meetings, resume building, job seeking, general advice and - as always! - "free rides to church"! Church is not a requirement, either ours or others, but it is encouraged.
But all that and more is the goal of the Liahona Home which again, falls under 118, which is titled "Services for Alcohol or Drug Abuse". The goal of the Liahona Mission on the other hand is a bit broader, and involves 021, titled "Missionary Activities".
The Liahona Mission is here to lead people to Jesus Christ. Providing a safe and secure residence and program for those in need is just one way we have of doing that mission.
While the running of a sober living home is a larger job than some would think, and while to fail to attend to that job daily can see a group living environment house explode in short order, there are still hours left in the day for other things.
Some of the other things are also involved with the home. Giving rides to interviews, or medical appointments or to pick up medicine or to get to work when a bus is missed or when the shift ends to late for a bus. Or giving rides to various AA meetings.
But then there is the general outreach work and missionary efforts to bring people to the church apart from those who live in the Liahona Home. This is everything from service work to the Mary Bryant Home for the Blind, reading to people at nursing homes, aiding in soup kitchens, giving advice, giving rides, moving people in-town or even from town to town, and really, anything else that comes up that looks like a good opportunity to share the message with others and lead them to the church.
And which outreach work and missionary efforts aid in doing that most efficiently is the million dollar question. There is no sure-fire specific answer, only general guidelines. We've had cases where inordinate time, effort, and money were spent in aid of a family that were as sure a prospects as ever could be, only to have them utterly reject coming to know Jesus or attend a church. Other cases of the most minimal amount of time and talking expended have resulted in baptisms.
Working closely with missionaries has taught us that our experiences in this mirror theirs. From this we deduce that it's not about how much you do for another, at least that is not a sufficient causal factor. It depends more on where their heart is and where your heart is. You can control where your heart is, you cannot control where theirs is. And yet where their hearts are do seem to be necessary factors.
Besides having your heart in the right place, it's a matter of knowing math. We can't know the outcome of one individual ministered to, but we can try to assess what percentages of a given number of people might be led to be baptized. Missionaries are told that it can take knocking on 100 doors to get an answer, and 100 answering to get one appointment! And perhaps even 100 appointments for a baptism! For some that tells them that door knocking is a waste of time (wrong answer!) and others figure, "We'd best get to knocking then!" (right answer!).
Math tells us then that the more effort and outreach to the more people, the more likelihood of getting the 1 in X that may have their heart in the right place. How much is X? That's hard to say, yet. Since starting to work full time at this, we've had four baptisms. Let's break that down.
Online, we reached at least 50,000 people from which 3 were baptized. That number is derived from counting the total numbers of people in the various groups we run, plus the "page view" data for who has looked at various pages we host. The number could be as much as 100,000, if other things were factored in, but it could be as little as a few thousand, if we had a means of differentiating between "glance" and "actual reading and studying". We're tentatively operating on the assumption of 1 baptism out of 16,000 reached for online efforts, as a very rough working estimate.
Off line, we may have helped/reached 12 non-member residents of the Liahona Home, half a dozen non-members in moving, at least two dozen in giving rides/general advice, at least another three dozen who witnessed us aiding others (friends and relatives of house guests, non-members of partial member families) and hard to say how many witnessed any good works of ours total. We know that some do, and based on that they inquire about learning more. We know that in some cases, we make more of an impression on the loved ones and friends of those we help than the actual ones we help.
We know for a fact that in at least one case, an attempt to re-activate an inactive church goer failed to re-activate that person, but did encourage the non-church going relative of the inactive to start seeking and eventually get baptized. In another case, aiding a church goer led to a random stranger witnessing that, who then told a caretaker, who then mentioned it to someone who she took care of, and that person then attended a Sunday church service, and at least has started seeking.
But how many witness our good works and don't inquire, we do not know. How many witness our works, do not inquire now, but will later, we do not know. Purely to just have a number to think about, we're guesstimating that 500 people (off line) will need to be helped, or witness a loved one being helped, before it leads to a baptism. That could be low, it could easily be 1,000 needing to be aided or to learn of others being aided.
Also, it's not always so simple as numbers. Having those rough estimates does not mean that if we let 16,000 more people online know about Jesus that we then get 1 more baptism. It means that we might then have a potential who would be willing to be baptized, but it takes a good person to "close", so to speak. In the case of online baptisms, a sister in a church over in the Philippines is the one who chiefly, by email and phone, aided those three into getting the lessons and getting baptized.
Likewise, offline, it's never enough to simply show the truth to a given number of potential converts, there always must be one person to aid in the "close", and in the case of a recent offline baptism, it was a member missionary Sister who was of enormous help in encouraging the baptism, and an exemplary full time Sister Missionary.
We have discovered some things that might help:
1. We must diligently make sure that lots of efforts are being undertook. And broadly, to cast a wide net. Anything to increase online and offline "reach" must be pursued. If that sounds like we're advocating a scatter shot approach, yes, that's what we're advocating!
2. Such efforts must be sincere and from the heart, which is why we do not require any volunteer work from the residents of the Liahona Home, though are pleased when it happens. If someone doesn't care to help, they should not. Help not done from the heart is ALWAYS valueless.
3. The efforts should have as much aid as possible from church members, because it's also been noticed that a potential seeker responds to seeing a variety of people all sharing about their testimony.
4. It's not enough to be "helped", no one likes being a project, they want friendship. See point two! It must be done cheerfully, and for that person's sake, even if it does not lead to baptism. That's crucial. One must be content to simply plant seeds, or be doing "good for goodness sake" or just helping people for their own sake.
5. Potential converts notice whether a person is happy in their faith or not. One of the main things we hear is how happy the faith seems to make people, to which we always advise, "That's available for you, too!".
That's where we're at now. That's our "How do you persuade a person to be baptized." As we get better at it, we will certainly share more!
