What a summer!
From a productive week serving church plants in Baltimore to youth and children’s outings, Music Day Camp to preschool camp and everything in between, we have been extremely busy! To cap it off, our church just hired a new Children’s Ministry Director. It has truly been a whirlwind since May.
One of the big events that took place this summer wasn’t here in Fairburn, but it does have both direct and indirect effects on us as a church. That event was the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans this past June. I want to thank the church for sending Christi and me to represent our congregation.
Given the events of the church calendar, I have not taken the time to give much update to you on what took place and what it means. Over the next few months, I will be bringing to you a series of writings that will, hopefully, explore the complexities of what was presented and what took place this year. Some of it may be boring, but I will try to keep it as entertaining as it is informational.
By way of introduction, here was what the next 18 (yes, 18…at least) weeks will seek to cover. To start, we will examine some of our convention structure and governing documents. My goal here is to help you understand the baseline of cooperation in the Convention as I know many in our church (especially newer members) do not really know much about what the Convention is.
We will then dive into what I am calling our “presenting problems”. These are shifts that have taken place in our convention of churches in the last year or so. This will cover some churches which were disfellowshipped (kicked out) and amendments to our governing documents. I will not offer much opinion in these sections but will try to keep it as close to facts about the events and amendments. Yes, I have opinions…they come later.
From the presenting problems we will look at some biblical considerations concerning these shifts. This will be the largest section of writing and will take about six weeks to cover four primary topics: ecclesiology (how we structure the church), church leadership, the role of women, and what it means to be a teacher. There will be minimal opinion offered here as we seek theological and biblical answers to the big questions in our convention.
Our last major section will take the biblical considerations and look at our current context as a local church. To conclude all of this we will spend three final weeks asking questions about undergirding agendas in the convention leadership, what does mission cooperation look like, and, finally, what do we as church do for this.
Please understand that I do not claim to be the authority on these issues. I am an observer of the events in the last few years…events that have raised some convictional questions. My hope and goal is for us to explore together what the Bible would say to our situation as we seek to reach Fairburn and make disciples among the nations. I hope you join me for the venture.