Meetings and personal discussions are great things. It is good to meet with people and get things out in the open. Questions should always be directed to the person who made a conflicting or confusing statement. I love meeting with people.
Seeking understanding from someone else is normally very unproductive and leads to a greater degree of confusion in most cases.
Somehow there may be someone who thinks I wrote the church covenant. This is simply not the case. I did not write the current covenant; the author is anonymous.
You can find the framework of our Baptist covenant as far back as the 1600s. The BBC covenant that I posted on the blog is the covenant that was in existence when I became the pastor.
My point in initiating this dialog is to make the membership aware of the fact that we have a covenant in our constitution and our constitution says that our membership follows the covenant. I thought as a member of the church you would want to know this. It certainly would have been easier on me to simply continue to turn a blind eye and pretend we didn't have one. But I can't do that. That simply isn't in my make-up.
The covenant is a church covenant; not a pastor covenant. The church needs to write the covenant. It is the church, the membership, covenanting one with another.
The church, as a self-governing, autonomous body has the freedom change its covenant as often as it sees fit, provided the majority agree that there needs to be change.
The first thing the church needs to decide is:
1. Do we need a covenant? I believe the answer is yes.
2. If we do does it need to be revised? I believe the answer is yes.
But the decision isn't mine is it OURS!
