Steamy Services : California-Style Baptisms Are Done in--What Else?--Hot Tubs

It was a Southern California-style baptism, complete with a minister in a bright red swimsuit and a former Midwesterner who couldn’t believe he was being dunked--in February--in the steaming waters of the Puddingstone Hot Tubs Resort.

The mood was festive Sunday as 25 members of Covina’s New Song Church--whose motto is “The Flock That Likes to Rock”--took the plunge one by one at the place its owner bills as Los Angeles County’s only public, outdoor, rent-by-the-hour hot-tub establishment.

Applause and a chorus of whoops from scores of well-wishers greeted 17-year-old Ryan Winters as he emerged, sputtering and grinning, from his immersion. One spectator, clad in skintight, neon-bright bicycling clothes, raised his hand high as if in blessing.

“I always thought that getting baptized meant they poured water over your head. But here you get dunked in a spa,” said Winters, a Walnut High School senior who pronounced the 90-degree water temperature perfect.

Casey Giacomazzi said her plunge into the waters of the San Dimas resort was nothing like the baptism she received as a 10-year-old in the early 1970s at the First Baptist Church of Salinas. “(This) was perfect. Nothing between you and God, no structures, just sky,” said Giacomazzi, whose baptismal clothes consisted of pink shorts and a T-shirt with a depiction of Jesus on it.

Making his pre-baptismal statement, Doug Weber told everyone he grew up in Indiana and “I can’t imagine getting baptized in February.”

Pastor Dieter Zander, 30, presided over the ritual on a hillock in Bonelli County Regional Park, with a vantage point that provides a vista including the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains and many surrounding cities. He had only one complaint: “I’m getting a sunburn.”

Small planes flew overhead as they landed and took off from Brackett Field in nearby La Verne. In the distance, on the park’s lake, motorboats pulled water-skiers.

“It’s a very contemporary way to be baptized,” said Zander, whose 300-member church meets in a Covina school that, of course, has no baptistery.

The church, part of the Conservative Baptist Assn., holds its hot-tub baptisms at Puddingstone about six times a year.

Normally, the privately owned park concession is the setting for more sybaritic pursuits, including hot-tub “Happy Hour” from 5 to 7 p.m., when tubs are half-price. Sunsets silhouette nearby hillsides of chaparral and pine, eucalyptus and pepper trees. At night, when coyotes howl on nearby hilltops, the vista is of a twinkling carpet of metropolitan lights.

Local pizza and flower delivery drivers even know the locations of the resort’s 12 individual and numbered tubs, which come complete with fern plants, candles and radios, and, in some cases, stained-glass windows. Wedding parties have been known to jump into the giant hot tub.

Though not a churchgoing man, Lynn Swann, 58, who opened the resort with his family five years ago, takes a hot-tub dip religiously every morning. He said New Song’s style of baptism fits in perfectly with his own philosophy: “If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.”