I gotta have my orange juice.

If children belong at the table, if we’re to rejoice at the feast of the kingdom with our sons and daughters, then they’ve got to be washed up. If our children belong at the table of the Father, if they participate in the body and blood of the Lord, if they share the holy things as living stones in the temple of the Spirit, then they should also receive the effective sign of baptism.

The role of children in the church divides Baptistic Christians from others. It’s not a minor issue. Whether we baptize babies or not, we’re making a statement about the boundaries of the city of God. And not just a statement: The way we baptize, whom we baptize, shapes the kind of city we are.

Without children, the church is a club for the religiously mature. Without children, the feasts of the church are more restrictive than the feast of old Israel, as if God’s hospitality had, unthinkably, contracted after the coming of the Son and Spirit. Without children, the church cannot be the new humanity that extends as far as the old humanity, from the cradle to the death–bed. Without children, the church is something less than the city of God. Without children, it may be a city under judgment, a city without children laughing in the streets and playing in the squares.

Peter Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, 39–40