Baptism is a church’s act of affirming and portraying a believer’s union with Christ by immersing him or her in water, and a believer’s act of publicly committing him or herself to Christ and his people, thereby uniting a believer to the church and marking him or her off from the world.
Baptism is derived from the Greek word BAPTIZO, which means “To dip completely into; to immerse completely into something. This suggests a total submersion. The process of water baptism, therefore, is as follows;
• Immersion: To dip into water.
• Submersion: To completely go under the water.
• Emergence: To come out of the water.
Baptism is complete when someone is dipped into the water so that his/her whole body submerges completely. However, the person does not remain underwater; he emerges thereafter.