Free Republic

Hundreds of college students at one of the largest party schools in America, Florida State University (FSU), dedicated their lives to God on Thursday.Christian author Jennie Allen shared news of the event on her social media pages. Photos and videos show the large group of young people gathered at Wescott Fountain on the school’s campus in Tallahassee, the Stream reported Saturday.“God keeps doing it!! They confessed their sin. They came forward in droves tonight to trust Jesus. We baptized hundreds in a fountain usually used for partying and worse. And it’s all just the beginning,” Allen wrote in a post...

There was significant rise in the number of baptisms at this year’s Easter vigil in France, according to figures published before the Easter Triduum by the French National Service for Catechesis and Catechumenate. This year at the Easter vigil, 5,463 adults received the sacrament of baptism across France, a 21 per cent rise on the year before. In 16 dioceses, the number of converts doubled. The rise has been both steady and consistent. The figures revealed there were 3639 adult baptisms in 2021, meaning 2023 represented a 50 per cent increase on two years ago. Meanwhile, in the past twenty...

Representatives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Presbyterian Church-USA, the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the Reformed Church in America, and the United Church of Christ have signed an agreement formally pledging to recognize one another’s baptisms when water and the Trinitarian formula are used. In 1948, the Holy Office declared that “baptism conferred in the sects of the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, [and] Methodists” is “presumed as valid unless in a particular case it is proven to the contrary,” as long as “the necessary matter and form have been used.” In 1993,...

It has become fashionable in recent years to make doomsday predictions about the future of the LDS Church based on the recent decline in convert baptisms. Of course, this analysis is grossly oversimplified and demonstrates an entirely underdeveloped sense of history. Convert baptisms have risen and fallen in the past due to a variety of factors: wars interrupting missionary service in the '40s and '70s, 18-month missions in the '80s, et cetera. To predict the extinction of Mormonism or the failure of missionary work based on a relatively short trend of declining conversions is short-sighted. If you want to accurately...