Over the last two Sunday nights, Grace Community Church enjoyed an extended, intimate, interview-style Q&A with John MacArthur. These informal sessions, led by associate pastor Austin Duncan, focused on the early days of John’s career at Grace Church and the importance of the local church in every believer’s life.

In many ways, their conversations mirror our current blog series on the local church. John even mentioned the series at one point and remarked on the extraordinary response we’ve seen from readers. So for those of you wondering: yes, John does see your comments.

And since John and Austin covered some of the same topics we’re dealing with in this series, we wanted to share some short clips from their conversations to help frame our ongoing discussion here on the blog. This first excerpt deals with the importance of baptism and the struggle to establish the biblical model in a church that didn’t have a set pattern for baptizing believers.

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Tomorrow we’ll take a closer look at why baptism is important, and why so many believers today have not been baptized.