What is a Child Dedication?

What exactly is a child or baby dedication? Well, the one thing it isn’t is the one thing it looks like it is. Dedicating a child to the Lord is not a celebration at church where a happy couple brings a beautiful new baby before their congregation to say a few prayers and to make an announcement to everyone that they are turning their child over to the benevolent grace and mighty power of God.  That event is a symbolic ceremony. In fact, you won’t really find an example of such a ceremony in the bible as a rite or a sacrament – though there’s plenty of very good biblical reasons to affirm the ceremony’s usefulness and importance among Christian churches. Such an event is a lot like a wedding.  A wedding is not a marriage. A wedding is a symbolic ceremony in which two people publicly pledge lifelong commitment to one another.  A marriage, on the other hand, is actually living out the difficult, tedious, and joyful process of honoring those wedding vows. Thankfully, our language has separated the two concepts so that no one can rightfully confuse one for the other. Unfortunately, child dedication is too often like the word “church.”  We’re not in the habit of dividing out where a church meets for religious ceremony from what a church actually is. For instance, we say that we are going to church as if it is a physical building. Of course, church isn’t a building or a place or a weekly religious event.  Church is the community of believers who help each other live out a Christian life of worship and dedication to God. Church is every day and every where any number of believers greater than one who are helping each other embody Christ in their lives.  Just like a marriage, it can be difficult, tedious, and joyful.

Perhaps a better question to ask is, “What does it mean to dedicate a child to the Lord?”  It means to raise up a child in the way he should go so that when he is old he won’t depart from that way (Proverbs 22:6). Ironically, dedicating a child to God is also dedicating your life to raising a Godly person. A dedication is not the promise that you will do that, but instead it is the living out of that promise. It's having contact and Godly influence as a parent on that child every day and every where. A child dedication is parenting that child throughout their entire developmental life so that when you as a parent are long gone, that child will willfully dedicate his (or her) own life to God (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). This isn’t to turn them into religious zealots, but so that they will see God’s goodness everywhere, and their lives will be marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control because of their willful love of him.

If you are a church member witnessing a child dedication, the ceremony is also a charge to you to do your part in the faith community of supporting those parents in their raising up of that child, so that they can live out the promise they are making in that ceremony. It is a reminder to you that you have a vital role in helping those parents forge the next generation of your community.