Our church membership class, pt. 2

This’ll be my week of spring break – “do or die” time, as far as my dissertating is concerned. I’ve already had so many “do or die” weeks, I can’t count them, but this one really is the “do or die” week.

Don’t expect great things on the blogging front.

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We looked at the Missionary Church’s constitution in today’s membership class. We spent much of the time discussing whether it was constitutionally all right for members to drink alcohol. I thought Article of Practice 7 was pretty clear:

The Scriptures clearly command that believers are not to be conformed to the worldview and lifestyle of the world of which they are a part, but, on the contrary, are to function as salt to prevent the spread of moral corruption and as light to dispel spiritual darkness. It is therefore imperative that they set high standards for their personal and collective life including the following: …

[That] their bodies be treated as temples of the Holy Spirit thus making it inconsistent with both Christian testimony and sound principles of health to injure their influence or bodies by the use of tobacco, intoxicating beverages, narcotics and other harmful products.

[Pages 10–11]

But no. Apparently, various pastors in the denomination have decided that there’s some interpretive wiggle-room. They claim that as long as members stop short of drunkenness, they may drink away.

To which I reply: Article of Practice 7 condemns injury through the mere use of intoxicating beverages, whether or not intoxication is achieved. So the drinking had better not kill any brain cells.

I didn’t spell all of this out during the class itself, but I did go so far as to say that the constitution tells believers not to eat fried chicken (another “harmful product”).

The reaction to this was a collective Huh. Then the pastor said that our congregation was going to interpret the constitution so as to allow anything that the Bible permits. So drinking is allowed, but drunkenness is not.

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Tonight, Karin & I used Hulu to watch the very last episode of Detectorists. What a lovely show. I’ll leave it to you to find out whether the metal detectorists find their gold.

There’s nothing more satisfying to watch than when these detectorists put up their detectors after a long day of detecting and head off to the pub for a friendly pint of beer.

Our church membership class

Karin & I have begun a three-week Sunday School class to become official members of our church.

The first session dealt with the church’s history, which was recounted by one of our oldest congregants.

Some tidbits:

(1) Long ago, it was disputed whether to call our congregation a “Community Church” or a “Missionary Church.” The latter name was chosen because it referred to our denomination, and, at the time, the congregants were keen to distinguish themselves from Baptists, Mennonites, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.

(The other people in our membership class agreed that nowadays, churchgoers don’t care about those distinctions.)

(2) Also, the church used to be called “Faith Chapel.” But “chapel” made the church seem too small, and “faith” was dropped because one of the main donors, whose name was Faith, didn’t want people to think the church was named for her.

(3) The church used to have a parsonage. But then an especially long-tenured pastor decided to live elsewhere – his family had grown too large for that house, someone recalled – and so the parsonage was rented out and, later, sold.

This week, our “homework” is to watch this video about our denomination: