Communal discernment and the church meeting
As Baptists, we believe in communal discernment of the will of God, and we engage in such communal discernment through the church meeting. However, this raises a question: is the practice of church meeting just a convenient occasion for communal discernment, or is it of the essence of such work? Is there something special about communal discernment that takes place in the context of church meeting, or is that practice of gathering merely a way of facilitating a process that can happen equally as well in other contexts?
Read MoreChurch as (non-nuclear) family
When the Bible talks of the church as ‘family’, what picture are we meant to see? Not, I am sure, our own instinctive picture of a nuclear family, parents and children alone, a tiny two-generational group separating from wider society. To speak of the church as a family, and of Christians as sisters and brothers is not to make demands about intimacy within a certain congregation, but to make demands about concern and availability across the whole world.
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