How do the newborns fare?

[pdavelee]

I’ll remember Gladys (not her real name) for as long as I live. When we were still a very young church plant, she was among the first to respond to an altar call and receive Jesus as her Savior at one of our Sunday services. It was a moment of great joy and celebration at our church, and with open arms many congratulated and welcomed her.

What followed was one of the most painful lessons we learned as a church. Somehow every leader who had contact with Gladys assumed (wrongly) that someone else was following up with her. In the end, no one did. Spiritually speaking, she was like a newborn infant left on the floor of the hospital lobby to fend for herself.

Understandably, her new and fragile faith was greatly challenged, and she did not have any support system or discipleship in her life. She became discouraged and began to drift. When I recognized too late what had happened and approached her to see if we could make things right, she’d lost her appetite for the church scene and elected to move on. We have not seen her since, and I have repented over and over for our great failure to care for her when she was a newborn in Christ.

That painful lesson has taught me how important it is to give special care for those who are new to the faith. My church sees nearly a dozen infants born each year, and seeing all these young parents struggling with their newborns and the frightening experience of being first-time parents, is like God’s visual reminder to me that need to care for our spiritual newborns as well.