Why This Church? Congregational Church Government

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?

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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.