How to baptize you?

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The churches are against prejudice and exclusion. But here, too, there are strange ideas, as Jean-Félix Belinga Belinga describes.

“You hear stuff”

I am from my birth, Cameroonian, so Africans. For many people in this country, however, the African origin of a people is fraught with strange properties. Although I assume that I’ll feel at the end of each Taufgesprächs, Traugesprächs or funeral, call the concerned family is very close. But sometimes an unexpected Detail in the course of the conversation involved. Once it went to a baptism. Not the Taufgespräch with the German mother and Cameroonian father, worthy of the mind-based. With their parish priest in Nuremberg, where the baptism was to take place, I had to discuss a lot of things. It is a call, did not take long was launched, but to me, strongly thoughtful. For the Nuremberg colleagues crucial question came quickly, as if she would burn him on the tongue:

“You are not baptized at the baptismal font?”

“Yes, of course,” I said and indicated smirking equal, that no other Form was known. The colleague, however, remained serious:

“How do you do that?”

The “How” crashed threat from the handset and let me have a Moment of silence. It took me a while until I could reply:

“Uh, normal.” But then I continued: “Why do you ask?”

“Yeah, you hear stuff, you know?”

“For Example?”

“In Africa, do not immerse the child upside down into the water. Hm, things like that. That’s why I have to ask.“

“But I have a baptism here as an employee in a German Church and not in an African! You can be sure that I will not apply you called the method. But they have observed you been?“

Of course, the colleague of such a baptism had been able to observe anywhere. But the concern is that in his Church there is a small Franconian Baby might be immersed on a cold winter morning in February, upside down in cold water, was clearly felt.

 

As Africa would be a small village

Such moments of strain and employ me for a long time after that. A black African is in the world, with its wild existence prepared. Irrational thinking and often unreasonable actions involved, as he should know what he’s doing to a Baby on a February morning, when he dips it into the cold water upside down!

I could understand the Concerns of colleagues. The question is whether one can expect would be present at the baptism, that you experience directly, like a Baby in the cold Church Packed to the feet, and on that winter morning in a cold water bath. He had perhaps made even because of me thought: maybe I could determine at the time of baptism, frustrated that the baptismal font would be too small and the amount of water is extremely modest.

But regardless of what had motivated the colleagues, I wondered after that conversation, how could he think that I would apply in a German Church as a pastor so strange Taufpraxis. How could my African origin, only this and no other Association with him? And that he considered this infinite greatness of “Africa” as a small manageable unit that made me wonder. More than 1.2 billion people live in Africa. 47% of them are Christians in many different denominations, and denominations. It is strange, to put them all in a single Taufpraxis. The formulation: “In Africa, do not immerse the child upside down into the water” the image of Africa as a small village, where the people have a common Directive, the follow all the.

 

Diversity enriches the Faith

It will also be in the future is never clear, how do people gain such insights. It is a people knowledge, a benennbarer of origin is missing. Already in the 18th century. and 19. Century had a lot of Europeans have similar ideas. They soon began to think that the spread of Christianity in Africa was comparable to “pearls to throw before swine.” Today, however, you can praise confidently and loudly the colourful diversity and vibrant expression of the strength of African churches. “You enrich, in all its large range, the life of faith in Germany – even without children in the baptismal font to disappear.”

Author info:

Jean-Félix Belinga Belinga, born in 1956 in Südkamerun and raised

  • Author, Journalist and pastor
  • Married and the father of three children
  • Study of Protestant theology in Erlangen (Bayern)
  • Currently: lecturer for intercultural Learning in the centre for Ecumenism of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, the Evangelical Church of Kurhessen-Waldeck.