Yesterday I attended the first of six "Discovering our church" classes at the congregation I've decided to join here in Nashville.
During the informative session, led by the the connections pastor, we learned about the history of the congregation, how to reach the elders, upcoming small group opportunities, and many other items of interest to new and prospective members.
Despite all this informativeness, I was surprised by what wasn't included. About halfway through the hour, a woman in the third row raised her hand and asked what the church believed about music in worship (this is a non-instrumental church of Christ), the role of women in leadership, and affiliation with other churches. As the leader responded to these questions the subject quickly broadened into a discussion of the churches of Christ, how they are different from other denominations, and who makes the decisions about these issues.
Although the leader did an adequate job of pointing to Scripture as the final authority, and although one of the elders competently shared the church stance on the specific questions as well as the broader philosophy of elder leadership, I was amazed at their amazement that these questions came up (and, incidentally, dominated the rest of the class).
In this age of denominational conflict and theological questioning, people want to know more than classroom locations and meeting times--they want to know "what kind of church is this?" with honesty and a minimum of rhetoric. Restoration Movement churches have unique and refreshing answers to these questions (and a great resource in Standard's brochure of the same name) and it's too bad my new church missed its first opportunity to share those answers with an obviously-interested audience.
I emailed the pastor today and shared a link to the brochure as well as encouragement for her thoughtful facilitation of our first session. Yep, she's a woman--this local body and its group of elders have prayerfully concluded women can hold some leadership positions. This autonomy is a wonderful part of our heritage--I hope the church begins communicating it more effectively.
posted by Jen @ 1:25 PM
3 Comments:
I'll admit that I may be completely off-base since I have no idea which church you are joining, but many churches would have difficulty defining who they are, what they believe, and why they believe it. If a church has been heavily influenced by the emergent church movement or has struggled to leave legalism, it tends to have difficulty stating anything with much conviction. It can tell you where the classes meet or how to join a small group, but it has a hard time defining and defending many basic biblical doctrines. Unfortunately, such a church does not realize that hurting people are looking for both kindness and strength of conviction. If I am off-base in my comments, please ignore them. But if your new church has been described in my comments and you believe it could be helped by them, feel free to share them.
I appreciate your comments and agree that for some churches this can indeed be the core problem. I don't see it being the issue at this particular church--my opinion is they have good answers (or else I wouldn't be joining :) but they also have some naivete about the most important questions.
It's interesting--when I joined my church in CA (a nondenominational church with a very loose connection to the Baptists) they did cover these issues in a warm, thoughtful, yet unambiguous way. In fact, at that class the senior pastor shared the single best rationale for baptism by immersion that I've ever heard. As a result an on-the-fencer at my table was baptized the next weekend.
But I'm not saying the class should necessarily become an apologetic for all theological positions--just an explanation of "No, we're not Presbyterian, here's what we are and why" would go a long way.
Well, this turned into a second blog entry. You got this one for free.
I'm looking forward to hearing about the next 5 "Discovering Our Church" classes. Sounds like they covered at lot in the first meeting. I'm thinking that they will get deeper and deeper each week ~ so with 5 more classes they'll be able to get pretty deep. I'd bet they'll have other pastors facilitating as well. Now that they have the Who, What, When and Where... they'll have plenty of time to dive into WHY.
Maybe the pastor wasn't a particularly great facilitator and should have given a hint to future classes. To me, if she's the connections pastor, she did exactly what she intended to do ~ help people deal with interacting with the church family (and the church building etc...)
Sunday I taught a becoming a christian class for kids and their parents within a 2hr time period. yikes! There's no way to get things covered properly - even for kids. (lol especially for kids you have to include snacks, potty breaks, field trips to baptistry, object lessons and games etc...)
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