![\"Baptism](\"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/New-Blog-Book-Review-Graphic-58.png\")
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As someone raised in a baptist kind of faith, and constantly inviting people to consider who Jesus is, I was delighted to see that 10Publishing has decided to publish Mez’s little book on Baptism.<\/p>\n
Whether you read this book as someone who is leaning towards being baptised, or someone who is caught up in a revival wherein there are hundreds of people thinking about baptism, or you are just (like me!) a normal leader in a local church encouraging new Christians to get baptised, I think that this might be a brilliant little book. Each of the four chapters includes a week’s worth of personal bible study notes – to emphasise and underline what the chapter is teaching.<\/p>\n
Mez moves through two big questions – ‘Why Should We Bother Anyway?’, and ‘Am I Really Ready for Baptism?’ in a way that shows us that he’s wrestled with the questions in community. This is not a dry book of theology\u00a0telling<\/em> people thinking about Baptism what to think – this is a pastorally-rooted, biblically-based and eminently readable introduction to this vital topic. Some of my friends might struggle with the Baptistic emphasis of Mez’s own theology – but I think this would work reasonably well in an Anglican context for services of confirmation and believers baptism. Certainly, in the kinds of Churches I’ve been involved in, in a rage of places, this book would have been immensely useful to explain why Baptism matters and what is going on.<\/p>\n The book flows, after these first two parts, to two key practical aspects of Baptism – ‘Preparing for your big day’, and ‘Running the Race’. Baptism is a one-off event, an event in the life of the individual, and the invitation of that individual into the life of the Church. Mez has gathered some great practical tips – particularly around sketching out your testimony, but also on who to give your phone to – for the Baptism day. This book is also very real and honest – noting that ‘Running the Race’ is not always easy: the euphoria of declaring your faith and being obedient to Jesus in a public setting so often fades as the warfare reality of following Jesus arrives. The book closes with a helpful appendix on coping with temptation.<\/p>\n Overall, then, this slim, readable and attractively and simply produced book does exactly what it says on the tin. I’d warmly recommend it to leaders in churches thinking about baptism resources – even if you already have something, this neatly packages both preparation and the start of ongoing discipleship into one convenient little package. Thanks to 10ofThose for providing a review copy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As someone raised in a baptist kind of faith, and constantly inviting people to consider who Jesus is, I was delighted to see that 10Publishing has decided to publish Mez’s little book on Baptism. Whether you read this book as … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[389,2,453,312,56,55],"tags":[706,394,129],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1501,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions\/1501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thomascreedy.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}