Reinventing My Denomination

Keith Drury, over at the Wesleyan Church, spoke on his blog about the "reinventing" going on in my own denomination. His post was titled "Re-inventing the Denomination," and he got it nearly all right. He expressed some admiration that such a radical change for decentralizing the denomination came not from the grassroots, but from the denominational leadership.

I hadn't really thought about that. That's why it's always interesting getting an outsider's perspective.

A year ago--Dec 16, to be exact--I wrote about "The Denomination of 'No,'" referring to the defeat of the referendum to join our denomination with the Missionary Church. That one capped a whole year's worth of sporadic writing on Whatever about the issue. Just a few days before that, I had written "Let the Purging Begin." None of that dire purging has happened. In fact, after killing the idea of joining the Missionary Church, the church put back into leadership primarily people who had favored joining the MCs. Go figure.

Many of us still feel that joining the MCs offered the best future for our churches. But you don't always get what you want, and you deal with it. We're dealing with it as a denomination. The fact that we explored something as radical as giving ourselves up created an openness to change, which we're now capitalizing upon. Most of our annual conferences (districts) are disbanding in favor of a cluster system, and we're seeing practically no reisistance. That astounds me. Clusters are forming, and while some of them will no doubt be dysfunctional, I'm sensing some real excitement among a number of ministers about this approach.

Anyway, Keith Drury's observations were interesting. But even more interesting were the comments people made concerning his post. It sounded like a bunch of United Brethren people talking. They were raising all the same issues we raised among ourselves. Maybe we should consider joining the Wesleyan Church.

Posted on December 19, 2005 07:43 PM|

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