Creed, pt 7 – The Church Growing Together – Bedford Road Baptist Church

You can check out all the messages from the series Creed here.

We apologize for the fuzziness in some of the audio. There’s an issue in our lines that we’re having trouble isolating.

Rather than discuss the doctrinal stuff involved in the church (known as ecclesiology), I thought I would share some links to a series I wrote last fall as we prepared for merging Heritage Baptist Church and Grace Baptist Church.

Part 1 – Introducing the Merger

Because we will be journeying together toward this merger, we will be posting some thoughts about the merger. Any time two congregations take a faith risk like this, there are a lot of concerns and we want to try to make sure we address these concerns.

Part 2 – Not Giving Up on “Old” Congregations

Here are some faulty assumptions about ‘established’ churches that do nothing but destroy the body of Christ.

Part 3 – Unifying Two Different Congregations

The intensely individualistic local church idea has to be rethought and possibly even rejected in order for it to happen. This product of modernism has bred distrust and disunity in the Church, and it is the biggest obstacle that has to be overcome.

Part 4 – We Are Not a Business

People are not our consumers; they are our fellow human beings. Salvation is not a commodity; it is a necessary gift, a divine blessing. Ministry is not our strategy to ‘get’ more people and preaching is not about ‘appealing’ to people

Part 5 – Redundancy

Redundancy is absolutely essential to survival as a church. When you only have one group of people who can accomplish a task, if something happens to those people, you are in a ‘dead stick’ situation. You’re going in and there is nothing you can do about it.

Part 6 – Expectations

We do expect God to do something awesome and we hope that this is what will happen. But we cannot expect this merger to fix all of our problems or answer all of our questions. Those expectations are too high and no matter how successful the merged congregation is, you are bound to disappointed.

Part 7 – First Meetings

Of course, the church is not the space they meet in, but I am posting it because compared to our current space, it looks positively HUGE.

Part 8 – Facing in a New Direction

For a church to grow together, they have to strike the balance between sitting together and working together. There are times for all of us to sit and learn, and other times when the seats should be emptied. There are times when we have to give our chairs to someone else; and other times when we need to take up a couple of chairs to rest.

Part 9 – Moving Forward

Just a quick update for everyone so you can know what is happening.

Part 10 – First Weekend Together

The big weekend is almost HERE! Our first Sunday worship service together with our sister congregation, Grace Baptist Church.

Part 11 – Schedule Changes

We have changed our schedule for the merger activities between Grace Baptist Church and Heritage Baptist Church.

Part 12 – First Weekend

There were nothing but positive thoughts from folks as things wound down and people headed out.

All in all, I don’t think it could have gone much better; and all the credit goes to our Lord Jesus!

Part 13 – Ministry without Borders

How do we build a ministry without these age borders? I have to think about it some more and try to engage the entire congregation a little better.

Part 14 – The Votes for Merger

The time is quickly arriving. It has been months since I first posted about the merger between Grace Baptist Church and Heritage Baptist Church, it had been four months in the making.

It is probably time for me to write parts 15-20, but I want to leave it for a moment and let things continue to play out.

Creed, pt 7 - The Church Growing Together

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