This is Kerrick Thomas – I’m the Executive Pastor at The Journey.  Nelson asked me to share my answers to the following question:

Q: What do you guys do for a baby dedication? What do you read? Do you give anything away?

A: For our Baby Dedications we try to make it very simple and straight-forward.  After our worship team does the first song – we invite the parents and babies to come up front.  We talk about how special a day it is and how God is blessing our church.

Then we go down the line introducing each parent and each child. Trying to focus on the babies.  If you are videoing it or doing imag – be sure to keep the cameras on the babies and not on you or the parents.

After the introductions we talk about the meaning of the Baby Dedication.  How it’s not really about the babies – but about the parents and the church.  How the baby is too young to make a decision to follow Jesus today – but as parents we can commit to raise our child in a godly way in the hopes that they will grow to make the decision for themselves and as a church we will make a commitment to support and pray for the families.

Then the pastor will read a commitment for the parents (and the parents say “we do”) and then a commitment for the church (and the church says “we do”).  And then the pastor reads the certificate that each child receives and prays a prayer of blessing.  It usually takes 5 or so minutes total.

Each child receives a certificate, a baby bible, and we email them with a picture of their family from that day.

Here are a couple of the documents we use for Baby Dedications (right-click and choose “save as” to download to your computer):

• Child Dedication Commitments
• Pastor’s Notes for the Dedication

Hope this helps!

Blessings…

Kerrick