we had kind of a unique situation with the grandparents. my mother though not practicing for decades was raised in the catholic church and holds on to their beliefs. so she has this big issue with infants needed to be baptised (original sin, limbo...). my in-laws (and dh though he's non practicing) are seventh day adventists who believe in adult only baptisms (their church believes that baptism is an acceptance/aknowledgement of faith, repentance of sin and a committment to lead a christian life-something a child does not have the maturity or knowledge base to agree to-since they do not believe you go directly to heaven/hell/limbo after death, even non baptised adults have no spiritual ramifications of foregoing baptism if they've accepted christ). i had the additional 'issue' of being baptised catholic but never being realy raised in the church-but always carrying the 'you were baptised catholic so you're catholic' denotation with me (if you're baptised catholic and go on to other christian churches it can-at least was for me- be a odd situation).
so one grandmother is worried the kids will suffer spiritual problems sans infant baptism, the others are of the mindset that it's inappropriate to make that decision on behalf of another person.
we knew we wanted to raise are children as christians, knew they would go to christian schools, but also knew they might go to sda schools. i also had that nagging catholic issue personaly about infant baptisms.
we opted to do a dedication service at a local lutheran church wherein we committed to instruct our children about christ. we did not select specific godparents (worked it out with the pastor ahead of time)-but made a speech about how we chose to raise our children with a full compliment of family and friends who we hoped would share their personal beliefs (and non beliefs) such that our children could learn, grow and make their own choices in the manner of worship and acceptance when they were ready to.
for us it served our needs, as well as those of the grandparents.
if we had been non christians it would have been no ceremony at all. neither dh nor i could have made a public statement to do something that we had no intention of doing (education or raising a child in a faith we did not believe in).
just as an aside-re. catholics being able to baptise anyone-in highschool a friend who was raised but was not a particularly devout catholic found out another friend had never been baptised (but did accept christ), so he offered to baptise her at lunch ('just in case something happens before you get around to it'
). uses his best alter boy latin, sprinkles water on her...the 'baptisee' is o.k. with it but keeps asking 'are you sure this is o.k.-i thought only priests could do this, are you sure this won't cause any problems?'. she is assured it's o.k. 'don't worry-what could happen?'.
that night the pope keels over and dies.
next day at school, the baptiser is ashen-and the baptisee is trying to research out weather she will carry some kind of spritual scarlet letter for participating in what she perceives as obviously an unsanctioned and clearly 'not good' baptism
over 20 years later and she still contends that it was a 'sign from god' that the catholic church was 'not for her'.
on my own thread I'm sure
