How Much does your Church Participate?

City - not much there are only two other baptist churches here. One is independent of the independents and the other doesn't seem to want to do much together

Region - I serve a chairman for one of the committees and attend all meetings

State - As involved as I can, our state does a wonderful job of helping the pastors

Nation - prayer and missions giving

International - prayer and missions giving, we also support a missionary on our own working at a school overseas teaching English to the teachers that teach English

 

Our church is very active with the other Baptist churches in the community. We sing at each other's revivals, we have men's fellowship with them, etc.

On the regional front, we sometimes host the Georgia-Alabama Preachers Fellowship.

I love when all the sister churches gather together to worship the same Lord. It is a blessing!

 

The churches are very competitive around here. Church hopping is the norm. Labels are placed on churches that discourage fellowship and so there is very little official cooperation or fellowship.

How has our church responded to the pressures of competing congregations?

Within the past few years my GARBC church has sponsored a start-up Southern Baptist Congregation that was searching for a place to worship. They meet each Sunday away from our congregation in our nearby Community Center.

And our congregations meet every once in a while for evening services and baptisms, etc. They're a nice bunch.

We also strive to bring new believers into the fold and not to encourage other believers to leave their church.
...and for this reason we have a greater tendency to be non-traditionalists.

 

We have youth conferences, woman's conferences, Leadership conferences, college conferences, missions conferences. We have visiting churches quite often. And we have visiting pastors even more often. I know that the High School Football, Volleyball and Baseball teams have to travel pretty far for games though. Most everything is regional....but some things are global.

Is this what you were going for?

Laurenda

 

city -- The "Other" Baptist Church (IFB) is an "Us 4 No More" hdad 13 members for 20 years most from the same family, the other churches in our community have several yearly events that we participate at in some level, unless they also include the JW or Moron Church, in which case we sponsor a different event at our church where we can make sure that the other churches involved at least preach the Good News. Our pastor dropped out of the local "Pastor's Club" for that JW/Mormon reason.

region -- Our pastor holds several positions of leadership at our regional association, I am active as both Regional Music Director and Assistant Regional Youth Pastor, Our associate pastor is involved in much of the committee work in the regional association. We also participate with several other churches in the region for youth, music, and conference events. There are some more ecumenical movements in our region that bring larger "Christian" events and activities to be hosted at our church and other churches in the region. We Share VBS, Sunday school material and other items around the region

state -- Our pastor remains active in the state level of our association, many "core" members attend state meetings including training events and other leadership conferences. Our youth are active through out our state with missions, youth meetings and other events.

nation -- How about Interstate? Our church sponsors several ministries that are outside our state but in our "area." We also have sent our pastor in the past as a representative of our state convention to the larger SBC Convention.

international -- We sponsor at least one missionary family directly from our congregation as well as a significant portion of our church budget to missions. We have some very active adults traveling to the Mission field from our congregation as well as an international missions trip for our youth (growing hearts for missions is not as easy these days)! Last year street witnessing in England, this year a University witness and ministry in Nicaragua.

As you may have noticed from the wording in the activities above our church is an SBC church. The funny part is that we are a small church with a pastor who encourages the body to fellowship and give both time and finances to ministries. This has led to families leaving to go to other churches in our town and area, as well as to an extended level of fellowship with believers sending 2-5 of our men outside our church to fill empty pulpits in our area of Wyoming, some permanently and some weekly.

So that leads me to another thought ... "Was Paul a church hopper with good letter writing skills??"

Probably more that you wanted to know,

-- Jeremiah

 

I have been attending a Primitive Baptist Church that is out in the country. The Primitive people seem to not align themselves with ANY other Baptist groups. They pay dues to no other organization other than the Primitive Baptist Association (this goes along with my other thread about the denomination/association confusion).

Although they don't verbally knock other Baptist churches in the area, they certainly do not ever talk about doing activities with any of the other area churches. Ecumenical is NOT the word that comes to mind when I think of this group, although they have been very loving and kind to me--I was not raised Primitive either. Their somewhat separate stance was all the more evident when I asked about their upcoming communion service and I was told that it was for "members only" but any and everyone was welcome to attend. I have been to a few churches over the years that had closed communion but they were Lutheran Churches (Missouri Synod). This is the first Baptist church I've ever attended that had a closed communion unless you were a member.

So, to answer your question, they have basically nothing to do with any other church groups which is, in a way, sort of sad. They don't have a strong outreach at this church, although you won't find any nicer group of people.

 

In my region (40 miles) - there are seven IFB churches that have four meetings a year together:

New Years Ever Service
Sun Rise Service (Resurrection Morning)
Summer Picnic
Thanksgiving Eve Service

[ April 14, 2003, 10:31 PM: Message edited by: Dan Todd ]

 

Hi. We left a church due to the dissention over some members of churches that "bounced" back anf forth. The pastor's son made the comment,"Why shouldn't we welcome them back, they stole them from us to begin with." (speaking of those who left and after 2 years came back).

It's been my experience that these have just been trouble makers all aong. The two churches had good fellowship for many,many years. But due to petty jealousies, that fellowship was broken.

We attended the other church's meetings for awhile, noticing that our people became less attending, and theirs backed off from ours. This is the direct result of "backbiting" and gossip.

Just last week, a preacher that has good fellowship with our pastor, preached a revival at the other church. On the fourth night, revival broke out! It wasn't until 12:30 a.m. before the service let out. Many seemed to get things settled, apologized for things said.

We have our monthly youth meeting tonight, we'll see the fruit of that meeting. I don't mean to sound sceptical.

It has been really hard for us the past year due to being torn between the two congregations. It has come to the point of not answering our phone due to this.

What really bothers me the most, is how some feel like their members "belong" to them. We belong to the Lord, not some pastor. I've made this clear to our pastor now, he agrees. It's just that mentality that wrecks churches. It leaves them wide open to the criticizm that pastors are just feeding off their congregations, this has been my experience.

I'm a plumber, and I'll do whatever it takes to help some one out, but the previous pastor felt like I was "his" plumber. I believe fully you ought to do anything to help the man of God out, but that doesn't mean to the point of something being against local building and health codes in spite of that. I had told him what he wanted to do was against code, and not only that, the septic system he was going to put in would never work in a swamp. I refused to work on it, and he got real upset with me, failing to undestand my license as a plumber could be injepordy for getting involved, the chief inspecter just so happens to live directly behind him at that!

WHAT A MESS!

We have as much fellowship as the surrounding churches will allow us to. Many don't seem to like us due to the stand we take on certain items.
We're not any better than anyone else. It even says on our church sign,"Where everybody is a nobody, and Jesus is Everything!" We do have fellowship with a few, there are about 40 Baptist churches within a twenty five mile radius, about 10 are IFB.

Our doors are wide open to all who will come, especially to the lost sinner, in need of the Saviour. I suppose it's because we don't have all the "entertainment" so many are looking for today. But as the old song goes,"I'd rather have Jesus, than silver or gold.." We're not looking to be accepted by the community, we are just serving the Lord. Just a bunch of nobodies, telling everybody about Somebody that will save anybody willing to come to Him.

Brother Ricky