For those of you not familiar, the Call to Action is a document/plan prepared for/by the UMC to counteract trends of declining membership in the United States.  The Call to Action involves several aspects, but among them are a focus on “vital congregations” and assessing the vitality of churches based on seven metrics that measure membership, attendance, baptisms, and giving.  Measuring and monitoring such numbers (referred to occasionally as “dashboard indicators”) and holding pastors and churches accountable for them has been one of the most controversial aspects of a report with a number of controversial aspects.

I would like to suggest three things about metrics and church accountability: The current metrics are not theologically sound.  Another set of metrics might be.  This other set also has the potential to better unleash ministry and assist the church in mission.

First, it is important to point out that we are in many ways not ultimately responsible for the fruit our ministry bears.  We do not make converts to Christ; the Holy Spirit does through the administration of God’s prevenient grace.  We may be the means, but the Holy Spirit is the main actor.  The work of the church is ultimately God’s work, which God invites us to participate in, but whose success is ultimately dependent upon God, not us.  Therefore, I think it is a bad idea to measure membership and baptisms.  Sure, we should be a church that is reaching out to others, but it’s judging us on something that is ultimately the work of the Spirit.

That does not mean, however, that there should be no accountability in the church.  As a Wesleyan, I believe that we are responsible for responding to God’s grace through faithfulness and service.  Furthermore, I believe that we have a responsibility for encouraging and equipping each other in our faithful obedience to God’s call to service.  Finally, I believe that some metrics can assist in that process of mutual accountability.

Such metrics would measure not raw numbers of members and money but instead try to assess the ways in which the ministry of the church has contributed to the transformation of the world.  In the language of non-profits, they measure outcomes (how things are qualitatively different because of your work) and not outputs (how much of something you’ve produced).

Such metrics would ask all church members questions like the following: Have you (and how have you) grown in the knowledge and love of God in the last year?  Have you (and how have you) sought to more faithfully live out your Christian calling in the last year?  Do you feel like you have more or less of the knowledge and skills necessary for effective ministry than you did a year ago?  It would ask pastors similar questions, but also questions like this: Have you developed in your understanding of your vocation?  Church leaders, pastors, and district superintendents would be asked: How is the world different because of the ministry of this church?  Where has the Kingdom of God come into being because of the work of this church?

Such questions would have the advantage of holding all church members (and not just pastors and bishops) accountable for faithfully engaging in ministry.  One of the problems of the current Call to Action plan of assessment is that it makes elites responsible for the success of the church.  But effective ministry is the responsibility of all Christians, an insight which Wesleyans should recognize as much as any others.  By encouraging us all to reflect on whether we are being faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, such assessments would drive home our mutual responsibility to respond to the grace of God.  We may not be ultimately responsible for the results of our ministry, but we are, all of us, responsible for engaging in ministry as best we can.  Proper evaluation, like all efforts at equipping the saints for ministry, should reinforce that point.

Dana and I had been invited to make this presentation because we had written an article called “World Growth of The United Methodist Church in Comparative Perspective: A Brief Statistical Analysis”.  In that article, we compared growth rates for national branches of the UMC and growth rates for national branches of independent Methodist denominations, African-American Methodist denominations (AME, AMEZ, and CME), Anglicans, Nazarenes, and Christianity as a whole.  Thomas Kemper, General Secretary of the GBGM found our article provocative and wanted us to present our findings to the Board.

I won’t recount the findings of the article.  If you’re interested, you can read it online here.  Basically, the UMC is growing slower than these comparison groups in most countries around the world.  Instead of recounting the article in depth, I’d like to say something about the three discussion questions we presented to the Board.  Thomas wanted our piece to spark conversation among the board members, and Dana and I figured the best way to do that was to challenge our listeners with some questions.  I’d like to share them here, hoping they may challenge you, too.

The first question we asked the Board was, “How important is church growth to The United Methodist Church?”  Our article pointed out that the UMC was growing slower than these other groups and implied that was a problem, but that’s not necessarily the case.  I think especially as Americans and as capitalists, we think that the highest possible growth is always the best possible thing.  Indeed, as Christians we do want to make sure the gospel is available to all.  Yet there are good reasons for not buying into a mindset in which numerical growth in members is the sole important measurement of whether a church is headed in the right direction or not.  At the same time, knowing to what extent growth is important allows us to not be distracted by less important aspects of our mission.  How do we balance a desire to spread the gospel to all people with other important commitments to which God calls us?

Our second question for the Board was, “How do we balance diverse local expressions and global unity in the UMC?”  Anyone who has read the past couple of months of this blog will not be surprised by this question.  One of the points we made was that certain models of being the church may not be applicable for all national or cultural settings in which the UMC is present.  To assume they are can lead to cultural imperialism and hinder growth in those locations where they are inappropriate.  So, some adaptability is necessary.  Yet at the same time, if The United Methodist Church is to be united, not just in the United States, but globally, there must be some forms of global unity.

Third, we challenged the Board to answer, “What are the UMC’s gifts and graces relative to the world church?”  Talking about slower growth rates or declines in membership can quickly become an exercise in negative thinking in which people can end up feeling helpless and depressed.  That was certainly not Dana’s and my intention.  We asked this question out of a conviction that all parts of the body of Christ have contributions to make to the whole.  The UMC, at whatever rate it is growing, has gifts and graces to contribute.  Knowing what these are will help us to perform the ministry God has given us with effectiveness and satisfaction.

Those are the three questions then.  From the feedback we received, even though the questions weren’t part of the original research, they were just as useful to our audience as any other part of the presentation.  I pray that they may be of use to you, too.

There are a number of possible answers here, all worth pursuing.  Certainly, the church already has in place a number of systems that encourage people to work with and therefore get to know pastors or members from churches other than one’s own.  These range from Annual and other Conferences to ministry projects to denominational interest groups and beyond.  The internet is already an important way of promoting connections and will certainly increase in the future.

I’d like to suggest an additional possibility, though.  One of the ways connectionalism was fostered in the early Methodist church, both in England and America, was through pastoral itinerancy.  Itinerancy means moving around.  In the early days of Methodism, preachers would rotate from place to place on a yearly or even weekly basis.  This rotation allowed them to get to know people in various locales, carry news between locations, and building connections across geographic space.  The circuit riders would change their scheduled rotations frequently, ensuring that a single preacher could end up with a broad geographic range of connections, as is evidenced by the surviving correspondences of the early preachers.  Furthermore, they would meet with each other yearly if not quarterly, building connections with one another.  Thus, in early Methodism, itinerancy was at the functional heart of itinerancy.

The UMC still theoretically has itinerancy for its ministers.  Ministers can expect to be moved between churches, though the average frequency of such moves has fallen from every year to every seventh year.  Furthermore, the number of ministers who are appointed to have charge of more than one church has decreased dramatically to only a minority of pastors.  Therefore, ministers are not itinerant in the same ways they once were.  I’m not saying that’s bad or we should go back to the old way; I’m just saying that ministerial itinerancy can’t play the same role in fostering connectionalism it once did.

If ministers are unable to foster connectionalism through itinerancy, then how are we to foster connectionalism?  One possibility is for laity to take up a form of itinerancy.  Ministers may be unable to move frequently between churches, but lay members are not tied down to a local church in the same way.  Sure, many lay members have weekly responsibilities at church: teaching Sunday school, serving as greeter, etc.  But these aren’t their paid employment, and laity usually have more flexibility than a pastor has.

Hence, I would like to challenge United Methodist laity to consider choosing to intentionally worship at another United Methodist church on occasion, say once every month or two.  The purpose in going to another UMC congregation is to learn about them, form relationships, extend the sense of connectionalism between congregations, and create the opportunity for collaborative ministry.  It’s important that such visits be distinguished from church shopping.  The idea is not for the lay itinerant to look for another church, but rather to visit other churches for the sake of developing connections between them and their home congregation.  I think it’s important that lay members be rooted in a congregation so that they have something to connect other churches to, so I don’t recommend itinerating every week.  Nevertheless, I think occasional, intentional visits to other UMC churches would do a good deal to help us feel connected as a denomination.

It requires some courage to do this.  Breaking established patterns and getting to know new people and communities always does.  Nevertheless, I believe that such a form of lay itinerancy could be a real and really important form of ministry.  Ministry always involves risks and takes courage.  What courageous lay people will respond to this call to ministry?

I would like to propose one more possible source of unity for The United Methodist Church, one with long historical roots, one which can encompass the other sources of unity I’ve mentioned, and one which I think holds the most hope for the future: connectionalism.

What is connectionalism?  It’s a peculiarly Methodist understanding of what it means to be the church.  According to connectionalism, the church is defined not by formal structures or doctrine or lines of authority.  It’s defined by connections between people: connections between pastor and pastor, between pastor and laity, and between laity and laity.  When The United Methodist Church claims to be a connectional church, that means that we hold such interpersonal connections in so high a regard that we understand them as the essence of the church.

At the beginning of Methodism, connectionalism meant connection to John Wesley.  After Wesley, though, there was no one person who defined connectionalism.  Even Francis Asbury, who had a central role in shaping Methodism in America, saw the connection of Methodism as being between the preachers and each other, not between the preachers and him.  Thus, connectionalism has become not a hub and spokes model of relationship, but a network.

For those of you who read last week’s post, this talk of network should sound familiar.  I claimed that the aggregate model of unity is a network model of unity.  Therefore, connectionalism can be thought of as an instance of the aggregate model of unity.  Connectionalism takes a whole bunch of smaller social groups, be they congregations, Annual Conferences, Jurisdictions, caucuses, ministry networks, or other groups, and ties them all together into a denomination through a network of relationships.

The test for connectionalism is always two-fold.  First, are these relationships strong enough to hold when tensions come?  Can we maintain our relationships with one another, even when we disagree or feel hurt or wronged?  Second, are we willing to extend our sense of connection beyond just those with whom we have a personal relationship into second-, third- or even more degrees of connection?  Are we willing to recognize ourselves as in connection with not just those to whom we are directly connected, but also those people to whom our connections are connected (and their connections, too, and so on)?

The first of these challenges is a perpetual one.  Since sanctification seems to be a gift given to few, we can expect that church people will remain people, which means that they’ll occasionally disagree or hurt each other or fear each other, and such instances will test their relationships.  The second challenge becomes increasingly difficult, however, as the church grows in membership, expands into new geographical areas, and lives in an individualistic culture.  When there are too many people to know personally, even at one or two degrees of remove, and when distance (not to mention many of the other challenges of modern life) make it difficult to establish and maintain relationships, our sense of connection to others in the denomination suffers.  When we are content to be individuals independent of community, we care less that our connections are not what they could be.

There’s not much we can do about the first beyond praying that God will continue to give us sanctifying grace and then trying to cooperate with what is given.  There may, however, be ways in which we can try to overcome the third and second challenges.  Can new theologies re-emphasize community and connection?  Can new technologies facilitate those connections?  If United Methodists want to remain united, these are questions worth asking ourselves.

The diagram of this model I’ve presented before is below:

Here, the overlapping smaller circles are social groups (or other relevant, relational groups), and the heavy black circle is the organizational boundary of the overall group.

There’s another diagram which could be drawn, though.  It would look something like this:

This diagram looks not like a bunch of circles but rather a network, a series of connected points.  Each point is a different social group or relevant, relational group that makes up part of the overall group.  Hence, the aggregate model of unity is also a networked model of unity.  Not every point in the network is connected to every other point, but to be part of the network, each point must be connected to some other point, and preferably to several other points.

What are these connections?  They’re the same thing as the overlaps in the circle diagram: people who are part of more than one group.  These individuals, whom we might call go-betweens, cross-cultural agents, or simply bridge-builders, are what hold the various points of the network together.  They are what provide the unity in this model.

To be a true bridge-builder, though, a person must do more than just have membership in two different groups.  They must work to connect these groups to each other in some way, whether that be by elaborating shared values, projects, language, goals, or just some sense of affinity.  Establishing such connections requires a variety of skills and characteristics on behalf of the bridge-builder: trust from both groups, an aptitude for understanding each group, the ability to translate between groups, and a knack for building relationships.

Bridge-builders then are crucial to having unity within larger societal groups, be they The United Methodist Church, the United States of America, or some other group.  Unfortunately, they also seem to be in short supply nowadays.  We hear more and more about the polarization of the church and American political society.  In the church, liberal and evangelical groups have distinct and usually non-overlapping memberships.  In politics, the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican no longer overlap, as they used to do.

Without any overlap, without any bridge-builders, there is no sense of unity.  We become a polarized people.  We are left to fight about the money and power involved in the formal structures that hold us together, be that denominational structures or governmental structures, without any sense that this money and power could be used in ways which can benefit all.

If we want to be able to hold together and work together as a larger group, we desperately need people who can be bridge-builders, who can act as go-betweens between different groups.  We need them in the church, and we need them in the broader society.  Let us pray that there will be some who will answer this call.

This week, I want to say a little bit more about the role of relationships is promoting and sustaining unity.  While this role holds true for unity in general, it will set up what I want to talk about next week, which is the role of networks in the aggregate model of unity, a topic which depends on recognizing the relational nature of all unity.

The picture I showed last week for how the aggregate model of unity works looked like this:

As I talked about them last week, the smaller circles represented shared characteristics.  Yet it is perhaps more appropriate to think of them as social circles or social groups.  Such groups may be (and often are) defined by shared characteristics.  Yet merely having a characteristic in common with someone else is not always enough to foster some sense of togetherness or unity.  For instance, “innie” and “outie” bellybuttons can be shared characteristics, but do not usually form the basis for social unity (though I realize that somewhere out there, probably on the Internet, there may be an “Innie Bellybutton Club” that is based around just this thing).  While this is a somewhat flippant example, the point remains that unity is not merely a function of having some shared characteristic.

That’s because unity is a relational quality.  United describes the nature of people’s relationships with each other, and it is ultimately relationships was form the basis of unity, not shared characteristics.  People are thrown together by sharing some characteristic (whether it’s rooting for the same sports team, attending the same church or school, working at the same job, living in the same neighborhood, or something else), and that shared aspect of their lives may be enough for them to develop some sort of relationship (classmate, coworker, neighbor, etc.)  Nevertheless, one can have a relationship with someone without it being particularly characterized by unity.  How many people work at or live in places where they feel little attachment to those around them or, worse, find themselves at odds with those around them?

Hence, shared characteristics can serve as the basis of unity only in so far as they can create substantive similarities that lead people to really relate with one another in a positive way.  These relationships then add up to community.  Thus, shared characteristics can create communities, but they are (as all communities are) imagined or constructed, not given by the mere fact of sameness.  It’s the relationships that ultimately make the community, not the common characteristics.

Fortunately, finding communities or social groups united through relationships by some characteristic they consider salient isn’t hard to do.  Such groups are all over in the church and the world.  In The United Methodist church, there are congregations, conferences, and caucuses.  In the world, there are clubs and organizations, friend groups, fan clubs, neighborhoods, etc.  Not all may give each of these groups the same degree of salience, but usually there are some groups people feel an affinity toward.  Yet all of these groups, to the extent that they are salient, are so because those who are members of them have taken a shared characteristic and turned it into the basis for real, positive relationships, which are the context for unity.

That makes sense.  United almost always has the connotation of sameness is some way.  My next suggestion for source of denominational unity, however, calls that idea of united by sameness into question.  It’s a major departure, so I’m going to spend two or three posts exploring it.  It’s also an idea I think can have much wider application than The United Methodist Church, so there will be a lot fewer Methodist-specific references.

The idea of unity I would like to explore can still be thought of not as united by sameness, but unity through relationships and networks.  This model of unity actually presupposes that there is nothing that’s going to apply to everyone, instead looking for overlapping things that, when you add them all up, include everyone.  To make myself clearer, let’s look at a couple of diagrams.

The first diagram is a diagram of the unity by sameness model.  It’s pretty simple:

It’s just a circle.  The outline of those who are united and the outline of those who share a certain characteristic coincide.  The diagram for the unity through relationship or network is a bit more complicated, though.  It looks something like this:

Here the heavy black line is the group of people who are united in a certain organization.  The thinner black lines are groups of people who share certain characteristics.  None of these circles coincide with the heavy black circle.  None cover the entirety of that circle.  All of the thin circles overlap with some other circle, but there are pairs of circles which don’t overlap with each other.  Nevertheless, by adding all of the thin circles together, all of the area inside the heavy circle is covered.  Note, though, that the thin circles include not just area in the heavy black circle, but area outside of it as well.

I think this is a truer-to-life model of how unity works.  There is some functional way in which the heavy black circle is drawn (polity, in the case of The United Methodist Church), but most of the uniting factors that hold us together are like the thin circles – they’re things we have in common with a subset of the group as a whole as well as others outside of the group.  But there’s nothing that we have in common with the group as a whole (except the polity which defines the heavy black circle).  Only by adding up a series of uniting factors are we able to include the group as a whole.

This model depends crucially upon relationships and networks, and it’s to that aspect of the model I will turn next week.

Having the attitude that “the world is our parish” denotes a certain understanding of the church and its relationship to the world that I think is characteristic of Methodism (and many other denominations as well).  It denotes an understanding that the purpose of the church is not just to care for its own members but also to reach out beyond itself to engage with the world, to minister to the world, to be in mission to the world.

Currently in American Christendom, there are two understandings of how the church reaches out to be in mission to the world.  One is a conversionary understanding in which the church’s job is to try to convert individuals out of the world and into the church.  The other is a social justice understanding in which the church’s job is to try to combat the unjust structures of the world.  All too often, there is a bifurcation of the two, and they are seen as mutually exclusive and competing understandings of how to minister to the world.  Such a view is often present within United Methodism itself and reflects yet another dimension of the conflict between conservative and religious voices in the denomination.

Yet such a breach between these two forms of ministry to the world has not always existed.  Indeed, it’s really only a product of the last 100-125 years.  Before that, Methodism had a long history of trying to reform both individuals and society.  John Wesley was certainly no slouch in preaching individual conversion, but also tackled systematic injustices like poverty and the slave trade.  He wasn’t Marx in his analysis, but he did have an awareness of and concern for systemic problems with human society.  Such a combination of a drive for individual and societal reform continued through Methodist history until the fundamentalist/modernist debates of the turn of the 20^th century began to drive these two options apart.

Nevertheless, I think it is possible to reclaim such a unity in the concept of ministry to the world which is our parish, and thus to reclaim some unity in our denomination.  To do so, however, depends upon a robust understanding of the holism of the church’s mission.  What is holism?  It’s thinking about think as wholes, not as a collection of divisible parts.  An emphasis on holism is also part of the what-comes-next era, so the intellectual and cultural resources are out there to support such an emphasis.

If we seek to undertake holistic ministry to the world our parish, we will seek to present a whole gospel to whole people in the whole creation.  This means that seeking religious and moral transformation is important.  To say it’s not and that economic and political injustice is all that matters is to practice a materialist reduction that goes against the spirit of religion, which emphasizes that matters of the spirit matter.  Yet we can’t stop at seeking individual religious and moral transformation, for that would also ignore the wholeness of people, who are also economic, political, sexual, and physical beings with associated needs and concerns in these areas.  Our ministry to the world must therefore address these areas as well.  Furthermore, because whole people are part of a whole world, our efforts in these areas must not be solely individual but also systemic in nature.  Finally, because the whole world is not just human, but natural as well, our ministry to the world must also include ministry to the created, natural world, the essential context of all human life.

My guess is that right now there are a lot of people doing street evangelism who wouldn’t want to see their work as flowing from the same impetus as people protesting the School of Americas, and vice versa.  Yet in order to stay together as a denomination, we must find ways in which we can think of these two aspects of the church’s mission in the world as part of the same understanding that the world is our parish.  Since mission in and to the world is one of central reasons for the church’s existence, we need something to unite the denomination in its mission, just as singing can unite us in our worship.  I hope that agreeing that the world is our parish can be an important part of that uniting bond.

It’s also more distinctively United Methodist than the other three areas I’ve looked at.  Of course, I’m not saying that only United Methodists sing.  Obviously, other denominations have fine traditions of singing, especially the Churches of Christ/Disciples of Christ/Christian Churches, with their well-developed tradition of unaccompanied part singing.  Nevertheless, while not uniquely Methodist, I would like to suggest that singing is distinctively Methodist.

Methodists have long been known as “a singing people”, and I believe that designation remains apt today.  Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, was also one of the most prolific hymn writers ever.  His brother John also composed and translated hymns.  In America, hymn-singing was an important part of the tradition of camp meetings, religious worship and revival services common in the nineteenth century.  The current United Methodist Hymnal (UMH) is the most successful hymnal ever published.  While certainly not all Methodists can sing or like singing, the denomination was and is a tuneful one as a whole.

Of course, singing is not an entirely uncomplicated source of unity.  Even if everyone agrees that Methodists should be singing together, there remains the question of what to sing, and here there have been and are some significant disagreements.  There are, of course, the famous worship wars of the past couple of decades between those who like the old, traditional hymns and those who prefer contemporary worship songs.  There’s the question of the adequate inclusion of black gospel and spiritual songs in denominational hymnals, not to mention the issue of Spanish-language songs and songs from other ethnic groups.  It’s also often the case, as the supervisory committee for the UMH found, that the list of best-loved hymns and the list of most-hated hymns have some overlap.  People take issue with hymns for a variety of theological, musical, and personal-preference reasons.  In addition, there’s the question of revisions to the words of hymns.  So, while United Methodism may be united in agreement over the importance of singing our faith, there is disagreement over what exactly to sing.

The question then becomes whether we are able to overcome some of that disagreement on what to sing and still sing together for the sake of having our voices in harmony.  Can we still lift every voice and sing together, even when the owners of some of those voices dislike what’s being sung?  Are we willing to sing a few songs we don’t like (or don’t know) along with some that we do, so that everyone can sing together and everyone can find something they like?  Or will every song that’s not on our own personal list sound discordant to us?  These are important questions for us to consider as a denomination.

I would like to believe that despite the potential for disagreement over particular songs, singing does still have to potential to unite us as a denomination.  Not only is singing a shared value, but the act of singing embodies that unity toward which we should strive as a denomination.  Furthermore, singing together is a fundamental component of worship, which is one of the primary functions of the church.  Thus, if we can sing together, we’ve gone a long way towards being able to worship together in unity and thus toward being the church.  While none of us individually may have a thousand tongues, collectively we as a denomination have several million tongues to sing our great Redeemer’s praise.  Let us strive to use them in chorus.

On a first glance, polity is certainly part of what constitutes the unity of The United Methodist Church.  Historian Richard Heitzenrater (and others) argues that what it truly meant to be Methodist in the early days was to be in connection (or connexion, as the British would spell it) with John Wesley.  Similarly, to be United Methodist nowadays means to be a member, minister, or ministry of The United Methodist Church, a formal organization with its own set of laws and regulations governing how the church functions.  People can play with the boundaries of those laws or disobey those laws at times, but one isn’t United Methodist unless one buys into the organization to a certain extent.  If a church completely disregards the Book of Discipline, never sends delegates to an Annual Conference, doesn’t pay apportionments, and is in no way linked to the church hierarchy, it’s not United Methodist; it’s an independent, non-denominational church.

So polity is definitely part of what unites United Methodists.  In fact, polity is such an important uniting force that it also highlights the forces for disunity.  Methodists can argue with Presbyterians and feel that, as fellow Christians or even fellow Protestants, they have a stake in keeping those arguments going and not just walking out.  But, at the end of the day, there’s always the option that, if the argument gets too much to deal with, Methodists (or Presbyterians) can take their ball (or, rather, their pension fund) and go home.  Yes, that might be a defeat of Christian unity, but it’s not going to cause massive administrative problems in local churches.

United Methodists cannot, however, when arguing with each other, just take their pension fund and go home because it’s the same pension fund!  Because polity governs things like money and power but is also something that unites denominations in a fairly robust way, disagreements over other issues quickly get translated into disagreements over polity, and these disagreements matter because they affect things like who gets to be a minister, which ministries get money, and who can become a member of a church.  It affects the day-to-day operations of churches in real, tangible ways.  Sometimes polity is strong enough to survive these types of conflicts, and churches work through their differences; sometimes it’s not, and churches split.

This tendency for conflicts from other areas of the church to become conflicts about polity means, however, that polity cannot be the sole source of denominational unity.  If all we have in common is common pools of money and common structures of power, then all we will do is fight about money and power.  There’s already a good deal of that going on in the church (see the comment from a couple of posts ago about people fighting like weasels at General Conference), and we don’t need more of it.  Fighting about things like money and power means that the church is focused internally on itself and not focused externally and is focused on earthly things and not heavenly things.

When the church is not focused externally, then it can’t be in mission and ministry to the world, which is a good portion of the church’s reason for existence.  When the church is stuck thinking solely about earthly and not heavenly things, then it can’t be an effective worshiping community, which is most of the rest of the church’s reason for existence.  And if the church isn’t in mission and isn’t a worshiping community, then it has effectively stopped to be the church, no matter what the name on the incorporation papers say.

Therefore, to do ministry together and to worship communally, which are the reasons for the church’s existence, there must be something more holding the church together than just polity.  In the next two weeks, I’ll look at some ideas as to what else might provide that basis of unity.