These days, it’s common for people to get baptized at 10 or younger. This is true across many credo-baptist traditions, but perhaps especially so among Baptists. How does our current practice square with Baptists of the past? In this article, a third in a three-part series, we’ll examine that important question.
With the help of William Buell Sprague’s Annals of the American Baptist Pulpit, I can examine the accounts of 45 baptisms from 1700 to 1840. Hopefully, this will provide useful insights into how children relate to the church and, perhaps more to the point, when they should be put forward for baptism. [1] I’ll briefly discuss the data before providing four reflections.
As the chart below shows, the most common age for baptism was 19. The youngest subject was a 12-year-old; the oldest was 31. If these 45 examples are representative of Baptist practices from that time period, the rough “bell-curve-shape” indicates that people were ordinarily baptized in their late teens or early twenties.
As the chart below shows, this pattern roughly holds across time. The age only slightly lowers over nearly 150 years. In total, the average baptismal age came to 20.68.
These numbers provide four lessons from the
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