This post needs putting in context, for that you'll need to check out Glen's post on the question of 'what's becoming of our denominations?'. I would continue to leave my comments there but for two reasons: 1. i think this takes the discussion down a slightly different thread to that which Glen intended and 2. i'm not interested in smearing my ignorance all over his blog.
What follows reflects part of my thoughts on the discussion and also shows me up for the bad Baptist i am:
Having been raised as part of a generation, and in a context, where what counts most is 'the individual in the right now', (and that having had a greater impact on my identity than the concept of 'Baptist') i feel massively disconnected from the past. This leads to a hunger to reconnect and find something of real meaning and significance. However, to attempt to do that under the guise of a specific tradition, brand or label of Christianity just seems a bit unsatisfying and disingenuous. My disconnection puts me in a sort of catch-22, it means that while i do want to rediscover stuff, none of it feels like 'my story'; not the baptist story or any other denominational story. It's not that i don't realise the massive value in those stories, i just don't feel that i own them in any way.
I do feel enormously bound to Christ, but the terms of discussion used in Glen's post, and in the comments, make me feel like that's not enough, like i need a specific denominational framework to hang it all on. My story, probably, is that of a 'humanist for Jesus', or a 'secularist for Jesus', again though, this has no depth whatsoever (since i just invented it), and so i swim around dissatisfied and whiny, adrift from the past, certainly from anything pre-1950, wondering if i'm alone in this, or is it a symptom of my post-modernal state?
Have i missed a point somewhere? Does this match or completely juxtapose your experience? Anyone fancy throwing me a line?
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3 comments:
Hi Andy,
some good questions.
Off the top of my head... part of my story and something I read last year.
My story - although I started out notionally Methodist, my main formative contact with church was via an ex-Congregational URC. I reckoned I didn't believe in denominations but would worship at a church localto where I lived and felt reasonably comfortable. It was about ten years later when back in a Methodist church and discovering that being a church member didn't give me the rights/repsonsiblities I had had in a small c congreagtional church that I realised that this mattered to me. By that time I had pretty well embraced a beleiver baptism perspective, so I moved to an open membership Bappy church - and the rest, as they say, is history. Sometimes we acquire by some sort of osmosis more than we realise.
The stuff I read last year, by a guy called Philip Richter, I think, was looking at people who'd switched denominations and discovered they were surprised by things that the new one did or did not do, because they thought 'everyone does...'
Because Baptists are a union(if we want to be pedantic)I suspect we have a wide range (though possibly no more than anyone else) of 'normative' - my lot have very clear views of what Baptists do and don't do - or they did until I came along!
I think what I'm saying is that even if we don't think we have any denominational or theological allegiances, we can be surprised what turns out to matter if it isn't there.
I'm not sure this answers your questions much, but thanks for making me think.
PS everyone knows that JC was dunked by a Baptist.... nuff said! (And the old jokes are the worst jokes)
Thanks catriona, perhaps i should have been a little clearer in the post, or said a little more. I do meaningfully agree with fairly exclusively Baptist practices - adult baptism, authority lying with the gathered community, rejection of creedal statements etc - it's just that i can't connect with why my adherence to those ideas should mean a deeper allegence (sp?) to the denomination across history.
Does it need to connect across history or might you get enriched by simply knowing the history and rediscovering what is there which then in turn, may bind you to committed theology of what comes next. Depth of what has been may translate into excitement for a community and a working out of where to next push the boundaries and seek to be the presence of Christ.
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