Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
2nd September 2018
Acts 15.1-35
1 Corinthians 12.12-27
I have a question for those of us who have attended church
meetings over the years,
both here
at Bloomsbury and elsewhere.
What, I wonder, would be your third most memorable church meeting?
I ask this
because, out of all those meetings,
are there even
as many as three that stick in your
mind as memorable?
I have to admit I have struggled to answer this question
myself.
There was the one that commended me for ministerial
training,
in
Sheffield in about 1995;
and the one here at Bloomsbury a few years ago
where we
decided to register for Same Sex Marriage;
but beyond that, they are all something of a blur
of reports
received, elections conducted, and minor decisions taken.
They’re OK, and at the time they felt important enough to
justify going to the next one,
but not
many of them have been particularly memorable if I’m honest.
So, as I come to preach this morning on the topic of Congregational Church Government,
I want us
to take some time to consider together
what we
think we’re doing when we gather together in Church Meetings
to
discern the mind of Christ for our congregation?
Church meetings are, after all, one of the key distinctives
of what it
means to be a Baptist church.
The Baptist Union of Great Britain is built
on a
document called the Declaration of Principle,
which lists the three convictions that you need to hold to
if you’re going to be a Baptist.
Taking them in reverse order,
the third
one is a commitment to mission and to sharing the good news of Jesus.
The second one is the conviction that baptism is for
believers upon profession of faith.
And the
first one is as follows:
The Basis of the Baptist Union
is:
1. That our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, is the sole and absolute authority in
all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy
Scriptures, and that each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
to interpret and administer His laws.
And that’s it. If you can sign up to those three, you can
call yourself a Baptist.
Mission,
Baptism, and discerning the mind of Christ at a local level:
‘each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy
Spirit,
to
interpret and administer His laws.’
Those of you who were hear a couple of weeks ago
would have
heard me preaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit,
and when we came to the gift of Discernment,
I commented
that in a Baptist context, this is a gift that is primarily used
communally
and for the common good
in
our practice of church meetings.
Theologically speaking, it is when we gather as the body of
Christ
that we
discern the mind of Christ.
I can’t do this on my own, and nor can you
- we need
each other in this,
challenging
and correcting, listening and affirming.
Discernment, Baptist-style, is a communal activity,
and the
church meeting has developed as the primary place where this happens.
Historically speaking, the practice of church meetings
was also a
crucial part of the way Baptists understood authority.
In both the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England,
God’s
authority over the church was mediated
through a
hierarchy of ordained priests.
Think of it a bit like a triangle, with God at the top,
and then a
widening base of various layers of leadership
filtering
God’s authority down to a congregational level.
Different to this, the Baptist vision of the church
was built
on a theological conviction known as the priesthood of all believers,
which held that there was no need for any human intermediary
between the
simple believer and God
- because we
can each of us pray direct to God in the name of Jesus.
This meant that the early Baptists realised
that they
could do away with the hierarchy of authority.
When you do this, you end up with an inverted triangle,
with God
still at the top,
but with the primary place for the discernment of his will
being found
in the local congregation,
rather than
in a hierarchical structure.
There is still a place here for the exercising of the gifts
of ministry and leadership,
but they
are always offered in the service of the local church,
not over
and above it.
This is why I’m a minister not a priest:
because ‘Minister’
means ‘servant’,
and I’m a
servant of my congregation,
offering
my gifts for the benefit of us all.
It’s important for us to note here
that there
is still a place for the wider church beyond the local congregation,
and
we shall discover more about this in November
when
we come to look at Independence and Interdependence.
But for today, we’re going to concentrate
on the way
God’s authority is discerned within a local congregation.
Another way of thinking about this is to ask the question:
What is the will of God and how do we grasp it?
·
How do we know whether it is right to have
person A or person B as our minister?
·
How do we discern who our deacons should be?
·
How do we know what we should do with the money
we collectively offer to God?
·
How do we know what God wants us to do
about key issues facing our
congregation at this time?
x
These are the kinds of questions
that might
be addressed in a typical church meeting.
They’re important questions,
and they’re
questions that are vital for the good functioning
of our
congregational life together.
But, and here I’m going to be really honest,
they aren’t
often very exciting questions.
Sometimes they are, but on the whole they’re not.
In fact, in my general experience,
most of the
time in most of the church meetings I’ve attended
has been
taken up with matters of finance,
buildings
and fabric, and administration.
I remain profoundly grateful for those who handle such
matters on our behalf
- and
without a competent secretary, treasurer, diaconate,
and
the various supporting teams,
we would
probably go bust, have a catastrophe with our building,
or
get into enormous trouble
because
some form was filled out incorrectly.
But my question for us this morning
is whether
these should be the primary, or indeed only,
things we
do in our church meetings?
Certainly, since the early twentieth century,
most
Baptist churches have devoted most of their church meeting time and energy
to
issues of governance.
The ever
rising tide of bureaucracy and accountability in wider society
has
demanded that we take these things seriously and do them well,
and
quite properly we have responded in kind.
After all, if we are going to have a building
out of
which we are going to do all the amazing things
we
do in our wider congregational life,
then we
have to make sure that we take good decisions
about
its upkeep, development, and use.
If we’re going to be able to afford the ministry
that we
believe we’re called to live out,
then we
need to take good decisions about our money.
Issues of finance, fabric, and administration
are not
divorced from issues of mission and ministry,
they are
foundational to them.
And because of our authority structure,
it remains
important that these decisions are owned by the church meeting.
So here’s my first challenge:
When we gather
together to deal with these issues,
let’s
take them seriously, do them well,
and honour
those who do so much of the hard work on our behalf.
And I need to say very clearly
that a key
part of this will be turning up and being part of the meeting.
We’ve had a couple of church meetings recently
where we’ve
barely scraped a quorum;
and if we are not quorate, we can’t do what we need to do.
So - if you’re a church member,
even a
church member who finds issues of finance, fabric and administration
somewhat
uninspiring
- we still
need you at the meetings,
because
you still have your part to play in the way we run our life together.
But, did you know that if you rewind back into the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries,
Baptist
church meetings were something very different.
Most of the time in these early Baptist meetings
was spent
not on governance but on discipleship.
The Church meeting was the place
where the
members discussed, often in quite lurid detail,
the goings
on of the private lives of one another.
And people were disciplined by the church meeting
if their
lives didn’t conform to the standards
that
the congregation had set for them,
with some
even being voted out of membership
-
the Baptist version of excommunication.
Our own church was no exception,
as the
following except from our church history shows:
Between 1849 and 1866 twenty-four
disciplinary cases came before the church. Usually bare details are given in
the Minutes. Eight involved bankruptcy, others were for adultery, stealing,
having a baby too soon after marriage, intemperance, and renouncing
Christianity.[1]
These days, of course, we live in a very different world,
and I
certainly wouldn’t want to suggest a return to these church meetings of old,
where such
matters were addressed in public.
But there is an important point here
- which is
that when your ministers and deacons
have
to deal with difficult and complex personal circumstances
on
behalf of the church,
which we do
from time to time,
we
are only doing so using authority delegated to us by the church meeting,
and
ultimately we are accountable to the church meeting for the way we do it.
But I am still left wondering
if there is
more to church meetings than we’ve covered so far.
We know that they’re going to have to include issues of
governance,
and address
finance, fabric and administration,
and we know that they are the source of the authority
for the
discipline side of discipleship
insofar as
that is the business of the church.
But is there more?
I think we’ve inherited a bit of a language problem
in the way
we talk about church meetings.
We sometimes speak of them as being the church ‘business’
meetings.
But this does not mean ‘business’ in the sense of finance
and industry,
as in
‘businesswoman’.
Rather it means the ‘business’ of the church,
the things
that keep us busy as a congregation,
the things
that matter to us.
Stuart Blythe suggests that
church
meetings should deal with ‘Matters that Matter’.[2]
And that whilst this clearly includes governance,
it should
not be restricted to it.
So what, in addition to finance, fabric, and admin,
might
feature on a church meeting agenda?
Glen Stassen, an American Baptist ethicist, makes a good
point.
He says:
Some churches seek to avoid
offending any members, and so steer clear of controversial issues and
confrontations… [but] this reduces the gospel to private matters or general
principles that do not clash with interests and ideologies. These churches fail
to confront members in ways that provide the guidance we need in our lives, and
they avoid addressing injustices and problems that threaten us. They offer
something far removed from the Jesus in the gospels who challenges the
religious and social complacency of his generation.[3]
In so many ways we have reduced our faith to the personal
and the individual.
We receive
the content of the sermon individually,
and
act on it or not privately,
we vote in
church meetings individually and occasionally secretly,
we are
baptised one at a time.
And yet we are baptised into the communal body of Christ,
as we are
together priests before God and to one another.
The church meeting, where we gather to discern the mind of
Christ,
calls us
away from our individualism
and back
into relationship with one another.
So I find myself wondering what would it look like
if church
meetings included opportunities to hear from each other
on
more controversial issues,
to be confronted
together about the injustices and problems that we all carry.
I don’t think Stassen has in mind here a return
to the kind
of ‘nosey parker’ approach of earlier centuries,
where individuals were singled out for their transgressions
and disciplined.
Rather, what I think is in view here is a more collective
approach to discipleship,
where
together we are unafraid to tackle big issues,
and to seek
the mind of Christ for our community on them.
And the thing is, and hear this very clearly,
we don’t
all have to agree!
We can have a discussion, hear from one another,
even challenge
each other,
and not
actually end up in complete agreement.
Did you notice that in the reading we had earlier from the
book of Acts,
they don’t
end up in complete agreement either.
The Council at Jerusalem, the first Church Meeting of the
early church,
forges a
compromise from conflict,
so that
they can move forward together,
but they know that they are going to live with disagreement
in how that
will be worked out in different contexts.
Similarly, in the reading we had from Paul’s letter to the church
in Corinth,
he is very
clear that the members of a church are all different from one another,
and that Christian
unity is not Christian uniformity.
So what would it look like
for our
collective discernment of the mind of Christ
to include not just next year’s church budget
or the next
phase of our building’s development,
but issues that matter beyond our gathered community?
After all, we are the body of Christ gathered on Sunday,
but we are
the body scattered on Monday.
I wonder how our Church Meetings on occasional Sunday
afternoons
might affect
our lives Monday to Saturday?
What would it look like if our gathering included
discernment together
on issues
of politics, or immigration, or racism,
or
homophobia, or anti-Semitism, or Islamophobia?
Not with a view to necessarily all agreeing at the end of
it,
but with an
intent to hear from one another,
and in
doing so to hear from Christ himself.
What would it look like if we came to church meetings in
humility,
holding our
convictions lightly,
willing to be challenged and to change,
rather than
to argue our corner or defend our position?
What if church meetings became the cradle
for justice
and inclusion in our community?
If you think I’d dreaming here,
let me take
you back to the origin of the practice of voting in church meetings.
In 1835, a man called Charles Stovel published a manual on
church order,
in which he
commended balloting as a good procedure.[4]
Until this point, as far as we know,
Baptist
churches didn’t use voting as part of their discernment
-
they just prayed and talked until it was clear,
and if it
wasn’t clear, they came back next week or next month and tried again.
These days, of course, voting is embedded in our constitution.
A simple
50% for most issues,
but a two
thirds majority for calling a minister or buying and selling property.
You could read this adoption of voting into church meetings
as a move
away from spiritual discernment in an earlier, purer form,
but you’d be wrong if you did.
The wonderful thing about voting,
is that in
a Baptist context, everyone gets a vote.
In 1832, just three years before the publication
of Stovel’s
Hints on the regulation of Christian
Churches,
the Reform Act had extended the franchise in England
to about
650,000 men.
Which works out at about 10% of the male population of the
country.
90% of men,
and all women, still couldn’t vote in national elections.
For Stovel to advocate a practice of voting where everyone
gets a vote
- male and
female, rich and poor, property-owning or not,
is a radically subversive, gospel-inspired remodelling
of the
structures that bind wider society together.
So yes, we sometimes vote, and when we do our votes matter.
But they
matter because each of us has a vote, each of us has a voice.
And I appreciate this could just sound like a plea to attend
church meetings
- but if
you’re a member of the church and you don’t attend,
then
you don’t have a vote, and you don’t have a voice,
and
we’re all poorer for that loss,
because it
may well be through you
that
we will hear the mind of Christ speaking to our community.
It pains me to think that we may have lost Stovel’s radical
vision
of the
church meeting as the place where barriers to inclusion are removed.
What, I wonder, would it look like today, in our context,
to
rediscover that urgency, that intensity,
whereby our way of gathering and discerning
as
Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
was itself a process of challenge
to the
structures of oppression still at large in our society.
Stephen Holmes suggests that the Church Meeting should be
profoundly subversive of almost every human
social order … This is the church, where every social division is levelled and
each person granted the dignity of one made in the image of God and remade
through the sacrifice of Christ and the work of the Spirit.[5]
So what would it look like if our meetings were places where
everyone was heard,
not just
the same old articulate few.
What if we committed ourselves to hearing, and hearing well,
to voices
from the margins of our community,
even if
they make us uncomfortable?
What if we found ways of hearing from those
who don’t
like speaking out loud in public debate?
Ruth Moriarty gives us a clear challenge:
If the Church Meeting fails to
hear from all of the voices within its membership then it fails to hear the
fullness of the Holy Spirit’s voice and so operates with a limited image of
God.[6]
She goes on to suggest that what we need is the Spirit of
Pentecost,
present
with us each time we meet,
giving us all the gift of new speech and careful hearing,
so that all
can hear the words of Christ.
And here’s the thing
- I don’t
have all the answers to this.
I haven’t heard from God how we should structure things in
the future,
I don’t
have a master plan for reconfiguring church meetings.
Because I’m your minister, not your priest.
I need you, and you need me,
as we share
together the priesthood of all believers.
But I’m going to keep asking the questions,
and I’m
going to keep listening.
Because we need to keep hearing from one another,
we need to
keep challenging one another,
as together we discern the mind of Christ for our community.
So, I’ll see you at the next church meeting,
and we can
continue the task of working this out together.
[1]
Bowers, Faith, A Bold Experiment, pp.
173-4
[2]
Blyth, Stuart, ‘“Your Will Be Always Done” Congregational Discernment as
Contextual Discipleship’, in Blyth and Goodliff, Gathering Disciples, p.78.
[3]
Blyth, Stuart, ‘“Your Will Be Always Done” Congregational Discernment as
Contextual Discipleship’, in Blyth and Goodliff, Gathering Disciples, p.77.
[4]
See Holmes, Stephen, Baptist Theology,
p.102.
[5] Holmes, ‘Knowing Together the Mind’, 185.
[6]
Moriarty, Ruth, ‘Discernment and the Church Meeting’ - forthcoming.
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