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Last week's poll: "Should we be planting more churches?" 7 votes: yes 4; no 3. One more vote: I vote yes
musings on mission and ministry ... and other miscellaneous mind-leaks
3 comments:
How do you have community council and make decisions as a body of you do not have membership? How do you employ anybody and fulfill all the organisational requirements?
Jody you are right of course ... sort of. But the points you make illustrate the fact that the need for membership as we now know it as Baptists is primarily a pragmatic legal thing. Perhaps as such it is unavoidable, though it is not impossible to imagine locating those legal responsibilities in some other more centralised body which wld then delegate the tasks of leadership back to a local church. I don't see that people have to be church members to take part in community council (church meeting) decision making. I think given the way things are currently set up we probably went as far as we could at Wakefield to minimise the institutional feel that is my primary bugbear with membership - see me reply to Catriona in comments on the previous week's poll.
Ecumenism...
Good question! Intuitively a no-brainer, yes, of course we should. Then I think, yes but... our distinctives are valuable too, and there are things I wouldn't wanted to loose in order to be ecumenical.
If we can separate unity from uniformity, and avoid lowest common denominator mush, then it's got to be a good thing.
For smaller congregations I'm not sure there's any other way. Through ecumenical working here in darkest Dibley we are doing some mission together and supporting each other in our little denominational huddles too.
I like the idea of a village elsewhere in Leics where all the churches have signs saying "The Church in Rothley" and only then their denominational affiliation.
Could waffle for ages on this one without ever getting very deep, so I'll.shut up
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