For someone to baptized here in Japan, it’s a pretty big deal. So here are a few things that you can do to celebrate the baptism of your believer.

One of the things that really highlights this special day in your believer’s life is to present them with a beautiful baptismal certificate. Instead of just handing them a basic printed baptismal certificate that they may lose track of after a while, there are some simple things you can do to make it extra special, and something they will treasure for years to come.

First, instead of printing the certificate on regular printer paper, get some beautiful embossed paper that really makes the certificate stand out. Amazon is a great place to find them, and here are a few that might fit your style. I would recommend getting the A4 size paper. (Click on the paper to go to the product on Amazon.) Marui and Sasagawa seem to have the best designs. If you would rather go with a “gold leaf” stamped border instead of the embossed look, they have those available as well. Look for 金箔 in the description.

While they may offer templates, I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to make your own template in Word, print it out on regular paper first and hold it and the embossed paper together in front of a light to see if it fits within the borders of the embossed paper.

Here’s a sample template that we use at our church.

You can download a Microsoft Word file of this template here that you can use for you own church. The fonts we used were MS Mincho for Japanese, and “LHF Becker Monogram English” for English, which you can download here from dafont.com. We chose this font to give it some “official document flair” but not overdo it so much that it can’t be read by Japanese.

Once you get your certificate printed and ready to go, the final step is to present the certificate in a beautiful felt covered certificate folder. Amazon (gotta love ’em) has some really nice ones that we’ve used for years. Here’s the Amazon link for where to get them. (Be sure you get the A4 size.) We typically get get the blue ones for men/boys, and the red one for women/girls. And we try to have a few on hand all the time.

While each certificate will cost around ¥1200, it makes a huge difference in showing that extra bit of care for your church family. We’ve had so many comments on how special it meant to receive something like that. Hope that helps! Let me know in the comments what other ideas you use to make your baptisms extra special for you church family.