This was the scene at the flooded underpass inside the Hartcliffe Way roundabout on Sunday (March 6) - as a member of South Bristol’s newest ministry was baptised in the flooded rainwater.
The man, who has not been named, was filmed being baptised by Hartcliffe man BJ Walsh, who set up the Set Free ministry in the River of Life Christian Centre last November.
A video of the baptism has gone viral on social media, with Mr Walsh saying he has been contacted by people all over the world who have seen it.
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The two minute video showed an outdoor baptism in the flooded underpasses of the Hartcliffe Way roundabout take place on Sunday afternoon. Mr Walsh said the decision to do a baptism there was ‘meant to be’.
“It was God’s will,” he told Bristol Live. “Last week, on my 40th birthday, my wife put up a banner on those railings you can see in the background, but I didn’t see it until later and when I went up there, I saw the water down in the roundabout and said ‘that would be a great place to baptise someone’.
“Then, last week, I picked up my mate and we were driving around the roundabout and he looked down at the water and said ‘I want to be baptised there’. So it was God’s will, really - he puts all the pieces in place. It was freezing cold, that water, but you know what - if the puddle is deep enough, you can be baptised anywhere - the setting doesn’t matter,” he added.
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The video shows the man having a full immersion baptism, with BJ - on the right in the hat - praying for him before and after.
“Since I posted the video on Facebook, it’s had thousands of people seeing it, and I’ve had messages from all over the world. People as far away as San Francisco saying they have been encouraged by the video,” he said. "So that is to the glory of God."
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BJ Walsh is well known around Bristol and the wider West Country as a street preacher - he’s even got up on a step ladder in Morrison’s in Hartcliffe, on top of a car outside Cabot Circus and on a post box in Cheltenham to preach.
He grew up in Hartcliffe and is now on a mission back in the community where he’s from.
“I was on drugs from the age of 11 - it started off with cannabis and then ecstasy. “When I was 16 I tried cocaine - then I couldn’t stop doing this stuff,” he said. “I grew up in Hartcliffe and a lot of my friends were smoking crack and heroin at a very young age. I always said ‘I will never end up like them’, but my cocaine addiction got worse.
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“One night I was out drinking and sniffing cocaine and ended up in a crack den - the place I said I’ll never go. I always said I wouldn’t end up like them, but that’s exactly what happened. I ended up smoking a pipe, and then couldn’t put that down for many years,” he added.
It wasn’t until he was 34, on October 8, 2016, that he stopped taking drugs, and became a Christian.
“Deep, deep inside I never wanted to do anything - no drugs, no drink - but I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop,” he said. “It came to the point where it was making me depressed and suicidal, not wanting to live. I didn’t feel good when I took them anymore, I just lost the power of choice.
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“The day came when I nearly took my own life, and that was the day a friend put a message on Facebook. Now I know that God was putting his hand out and said ‘follow me’,” he added.
BJ said he attended a 12-step fellowship, and after a year of being clean from drugs, he was baptised.
He attended church and last November began his own ministry, called Set Free, which meets every Tuesday evening from 7pm to 8.30pm at the River of Life Christian Centre in Hartcliffe. It’s taking off - with a large group gathering to watch Sunday’s baptism.
“People have messaged me to say that we shouldn’t have done it there, because rats live there, but when we were kids we’d go swimming in the river at Saltford, and that wasn’t exactly great either. If we’d have gone swimming in the water there, then people would have been laughing, but it was a serious thing, a baptism,” he said.
A local councillor, Sarah Classick, said she had been calling on council officers to sort out the drainage at the roundabout for months. “I've repeatedly asked BCC to clear that underpass including reporting to officers and asking at members' forum,” said Cllr Classick (Lib Dem, Hengrove). “It can't be the most sanitary place to hold a baptism,” she added.
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