The New Testament plainly teaches that faith and baptism belong together. So baptism is an act of confession. A temporary space between faith and baptism may be healthy in some cases, as for very young persons. But when professing adults with credible conversion experiences postpone baptism indefinitely, they are really declaring their unwillingness to submit to the lordship of Christ. Faith without the good work of baptism is incomplete.
Baptism is also an act of initiation.
The word comes from a Latin word meaning beginning and means reception and entrance into a committed membership. The early church selected water as its preferred form of symbolizing the passage of a person into church membership. It signaled the believer s entry into the fellowship of a local church and also signaled that incorporation into the body of Christ had already occurred. There is no flight of the alone to the Alone, we are saved in company, as units in the body of Christ, or not at all. Obedience to Christ demands that we join God s visible community.