The Church of Christ that my Father has served these many years inhabits a facility that was built by the hands of the founding members in 1954. That is to say: the electric does not conform to any modern code, some of the materials are low quality, and a lot of the workmanship was a little short of professional quality. It has a baptistry of masonry composed of some type of cinder block.
I remember the time they learned the masonry was found to be hopelessly deteriorating: there was actually a candidate for baptism and Dad decided to perform the baptism prior to the 5 P.M. service so there would be time to fill the baptistry and even turn on the heating element and warm the water a bit. Everyone left after the morning service and went out for lunch and such. After lunch, Dad swung back by the building and turned on the water flow into the baptistry; he hung around for over half an hour until it was up to a level he thought suitable for a full immersion. Then he turned on the heating coil and left to relax for a few hours. We went back a little after 4 and there was a huge puddle on the carpet in the front of the sanctuary. That old baptistry had sprung a leak! It was bad enough that he had to turn the water back on for a while to get the level back up. He did the baptism with some haste and pulled the plug. He and another fellow took snow shovels and pushed the water through the carpet and out a side door prior to the 5 o'clock service.
A month or two later the business committee set about discussing this facility problem. They went about getting estimates for a liner for the baptistry and it was going to run a couple thousand dollars, so that got nixed. The usual sort of excuses prevailed: we only have one or two baptisms a year, that's a lot of expenditure, we can just fill it immediately before a baptism and drain it right after so it won't leak much. . . To my knowledge, my brother was the last person baptized in that baptistry, about five or six years ago. And my mother told me a few days ago that he doesn't regularly go to that church anymore: he's started going to some trendy church in a bigger town in the hopes of finding a woman.
