Church Membership - What's It All About?

People are sometimes surprised and not a little baffled when I try to explain how our church - a Baptist church - works. There is no hierarchy, or central governing body to dictate how we must function, and some wonder how on earth we decide what to do!

The way it works is like this: every Baptist church is competent under God to organise itself and arrange its own affairs. This is an important part of our identity, we believe that the local church is the gathering together of believers in a local area who have committed themselves to following Jesus (as evidenced in their baptism) and to one another: living, worshipping and witnessing together for him. No-one can tell us what to do except God himself, by the Holy Spirit!

However, this way of working carries with it real responsibility. In order to conduct our affairs in the way God directs, we need to come together, to pray and discern God’s will. That's why we need the church meeting. This is not some great mystery, for God delights to make himself and his plans known to us as we seek him. Yet it is quite different from us merely applying our human answers to the matters that come before us. The church meeting is not an exercise in democracy, but an exercise of theocracy – the rule of God. So it is vital that everyone takes part, not so that we are truly democratic, but so that together (just like the first Christians) we may pray and discover God's leading for us.

I wonder how Paul felt when he went to the church meeting described in Acts 15. I'm sure that he must have felt quite discouraged as one after another, people stood to challenge the work he was doing in preaching the gospel to those who were not Jews (which was a very radical thing, remember). There was certainly a variety of opinion expressed, yet the interesting thing is that another factor was clearly at work. Despite apparently irreconcilable differences amongst the believers, by the end of the meeting it was quite possible to reach a way forward, and a final decision was made. Note those words in verse 28: `it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us'. The goal of every church meeting, the outcome of every decision should be that it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and therefore it seems good to us too.

Our Church Annual General Meeting is at 7.45pm on Thursday 19th April and all church members are expected to attend! There may be valid reasons why coming would be difficult, but it is our great privilege and responsibility to do all we can to be there!

However, I know that quite a number of our folk are not members, and some of you are already playing a very full part in the life of our church. Have you ever considered becoming a member? Of course there is more to it than simply being able to come to church meetings, but we should not underestimate the importance of this. I have copies of the leaflet Church Membership - What's It All About? or if you would like to talk over the possibility of church membership (or baptism, or anything else for that matter!) please ask. I'll be more than happy to help.

The Grid's Red Nose Day Extravaganza!

On Friday 16 March at 7.30pm The Grid Youth Club presented their Red Nose Day Extravaganza in a fun fuelled evening of furious fundraising in support of Red Nose Day.

The evening began and ended with the Red Nose song “Make Someone Happy” and youngsters took part in comedy routines and sketches to remind people of the projects Comic Relief supports. Some of the young people dressed in imaginative red costumes to take part in the Very Red Fashion Show, while others took on local teachers in the Big Red Nose Quiz (the teachers lost by one point!). “The Grid Does Fame Academy” saw volunteer parents of the young people compete in a singing competition in front of a panel of judges made up of their own children. The competition was unique in that no-one was spared by the judges’ comments and ended up with no winner – everyone was voted off!


The young people’s efforts have raised in the region of £500. As well as charging for admission and red-nose themed refreshments, some of the members were sponsored for speaking French all day. All the money raised from the event will be going to Comic Relief.

The Late Late Pancake Day

Anyone with photographs of this event willing to submit them for the web, please contact us.

I Hope You Dance

I recently heard about St John’s C of E Church in Hillingdon, London. They offer a variety of worship opportunities non-stop from 8am to 1pm each Sunday, with the invitation to ‘come when you can and go when you like’. There are ten worship experiences ranging from ‘traditional’ to ‘informal’, via ‘relaxed and varied’. Rev Tim Sledge (Mission Enabler for the Peterborough Diocese) suggests that this is ‘renewal through diversity and is widening the doors through worship for an encounter with the loving and living God’. He says, ‘not all churches will be able to manage such diversity of ten different opportunities, but there could be openings . . . for creating and developing our variety.’

You’ll be glad to know (I expect) that I’m not planning another nine worship services every Sunday, but what I like about St John’s is the way they have grasped that diversity is good. Variety is more than just the spice of life, it is the mark of a Spirit-filled worshipping congregation. However, while we claim to worship the God of infinite creativity, our worship can become predictable, formulaic, even bland.

This is why I’d like to invite you to get more involved in our worship. A group will be meeting every other week on a Monday evening to explore creativity in worship – music, drama, dance, storytelling, the visual arts and anything else we can think of. Maybe you should come along! All of us have something to offer, made as we are in the image of the Creator God. If you are interested, then please have a word with Rachel Palmer or Chris Harries – they will be delighted to tell you more.

We live in a consumer culture that traps us into thinking we come to consume worship rather than participate. The alternative is to reflect the values of God’s Kingdom, encouraging inclusion and involvement wherever possible in our worshipping community. After all, liturgy - the word used to describe the content of our worship services – literally means ‘the work of the people’. In his book Creativity - Where The Divine And Human Meet Matthew Fox points out that creativity is in our nature because we are made in the image of God. He says that creativity for God is a ‘cosmic habit’ in which we are all invited to participate, and we need to ‘dance with the rhythms of creativity rather than sit on sidelines’. In the words of a terrific song by Lee Ann Womack, ‘when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance’.