Welcome to the Baptists Together blog!
This is a space for fellow-travellers to explore, understand and contribute to the fabric of Baptist faith and experience in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.
Over the next few months, five task forces will develop strategies to lead our movement of churches forward together. These are:
1. Empowering congregations for effective mission
2. Re-affirming Baptist identity, cooperative ministry and partnership
3. Changing the denomination's governance structures
4. Building and sustaining healthy pastors
5. Being more intentional in the strategic use of resources
This blog reflects the thinking of and contributions to Taskforce 2.
Directions 2012
In 2001 the Baptist Union of NSW began a process of discerning and empowering future directions for the period 2002-2007. For various reasons there were mixed results for this ambitious initiative. In November 2007, our President, Dr June Heinrich, and a group of leaders met to consider key issues confronting NSW & ACT Baptists, with an external facilitator. There was enormous support for change, and the strategies emerged from this meeting. Subsequently our Executive Committee released the Secretary of the Union, Mr Alan Soden, from day to day functions to focus on facilitating the Directions 2012 process for five months.
Here's June Heinrich's take on recent developments:
The ancient words of the Proverbs writer continue to powerfully resonate in 2008, reminding us as a family of churches of the importance of seeking God’s leading and uniting together to pursue the direction God has for us.
When I accepted the role of President of the Baptist Churches of NSW & ACT I was eager to use the opportunity to encourage our denominational ministries and family of churches to clarify and sharpen our vision for the future.
I was very encouraged by the Directions 2007 process, but my experience as the Chief Executive Officer at BCS has shown me that a visioning process such as this is only successful when it gains wide ownership, has clear and tangible strategies in place and there are appropriate accountability measures. With the lessons learnt from the Directions 2007 process, it was my privilege to host a gathering of leaders from across our family of churches in November last year to begin the Directions 2012 revisioning process.
It was clear to see God’s Spirit at work on the day as we all came away with the five key strategies you will read of in this update. This was just the beginning step in the process and it has been encouraging to see how the Executive Committee has already progressed these strategies. The challenge now is to ensure that Directions 2012 becomes a process that our wider family of churches embraces and shares in. We are a family of more than 340 churches. We have a number of lifetransforming shared ministries, such as Morling College, MSD, Global Interaction and Baptist World Aid Australia.
God has a great vision for us as a movement of churches. Let’s get involved and share in the vision of Directions 2012.
June Heinrich, President, Baptist Churches of NSW & ACT
More in the next post....
1 comment:
I am glad to see that we are working on our identity. I believe that we Baptists have something important to say to our world, but we need to speak with a united voice if we are to be heard.
Some years ago, I caused some consternation in the denomination by pointing out that we are not a particularly united group. There are different kinds of Baptists -- dispensational, calvinistic, arminian, charismatic, radical. We have to accept this fact if we are to move ahead.
The reaction to those articles demonstrated a sad fact, that we Baptists, by and large, neither tolerate diversity nor like to face unpalatable truths.
Some might consider diversity to be the same as heresy: "you diverge from my position, and you must be in error."
Apart from the possibility that I might be the one in error, this kind of thinking fails to recognise that there are genuine disagreements between Christians, both because we bring different personalities and approaches to our understanding of scripture, and because we sometimes express very similar ideas in quite different terms.
The diversity between us can be addressed in various ways, but the two simplest are either division or revival. When we choose to tolerate each other without any real interaction, we have chosen de facto, though not de jure, division.
Revival, the other main alternative, should not be understood in terms of its "accidents" -- crying, shouting, laughing or whatever -- but in terms of its essence, which is the formation of a true community centred on the person and work of Jesus.
For all our "distinctives" that is really what we are on about: creating mini-communities which come together into coalitions of communities.
We will not develop such communities unless we recognise and repent of the divisive spirit among us, a spirit which gives responsibility but withdraws authority to act, a spirit of suspicion against each other, a spirit of pride in our doctrinal differences.
We need to break out of the fake community of being nice to each other, to face the conflicts and chaos of bringing the damaged areas of our denominational life to the light and facing the pain of change.
It is only by going through the chaos to the point of brokenness that we can truly move forward. And that brokenness will be healing and progressive when it comes about from seeing how our old way of relating keeps Jesus nailed to the cross.
Unless we can keep this kind of transformation in focus, we will only rearrange deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic.
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