I just got home from a wonderful candlelight baptism service at Japanese Baptist Church. The baptismal candidate was Mr. Mitsuo Sakiyama, not a US citizen (hence the "alien baptism" bit*), and the baptizer was Rev. Yuki Sakiyama, a US citizen and son of the one dunked.
The Japanese population is aged enough, on average, that if every nonagenarian—Mr. Sakiyama is 90 years old!—were to be baptized it would have a statistically significant effect on the Christian percentage in the nation.
It was wonderful to listen to the music and to watch Yuki, pastor of the Japanese-language congregation at JBC, manfully keep his voice in gear through a baptismal segment in which he seemed often on the verge of breaking down for joy.
Since JBC doesn't have a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day service, they gave the Sakiyama family (Yuki's mother and younger brother also flew over to be at the baptism) the honor of lighting the Christ Candle on the church's Advent Wreath, the candle presented to Mr. Sakiyama in token of his baptismal pledge (an adaptation of a paedobaptist custom involving godparents); at the end of the service everyone held individual candles lit from the Christ candle, and sang "Silent Night/Kiyoshi kono yoru".
The Japanese choir did a wonderful Japanese arrangement of "What Child Is This?" with flute accompaniment, and a guest sang a stunning solo of "O Holy Night" in Korean.
The English choir did a segment, "Worship the Light", of tom Fettke's Festival of Lights cantata. (Unfortunately, this segment is supposed to incorporate congregational singing of half a dozen well-known carols, the words of which were displayed on the screen, but no one clued the congregation in, so I was pretty much alone in joining in on those sections.
Afterwards there was a scrumptious dinner of chicken cordon bleu (I think; I'm not sure of the terminology in that branch of cuisine), rice with beef curry, macaroni salad, tossed lettuce salad, crunchy sesame cole slaw, kimchi, tea, and a three-layer cake-and-mousse concoction that looked like a cheesecake but wasn't.
The baptismal segment was entirely in Japanese; most other parts of the service were bilingual. It was one of the best baptisms I can recall.
Haruo
* a play on a thread title in the SBC forum; an alien term to us in ABC...