Baptists in the Community- Voluntary cooperation of churches
I hear a lot that my generation is “post-denomination” and they feel that denominations are rather useless. I have to disagree on several levels. On the most basic front, however, Baptists have a distinctive that our denominations are built from the bottom up- individual churches voluntarily cooperate together in an effort to do more with the resources they have.
One example of this is our Baptist institutions which include universities, hospitals, and Baptist Child & Family Services. From their site:
Programs managed or offered through BCFS include residential services for emotionally disturbed children, assisted living services and vocational training and employment for special needs adults, mental health services for children and families, foster care, pre-natal and post-partum health services, and international humanitarian aid for children living in impoverished conditions in developing countries
Here are two examples of what the Baptist Child & Family Services have been at work doing recently:
San Antonio, Texas- the Guadalupe Street Coffee House:
The coffee house is a ministry on San Antonio’s West Side designed to specifically address the root causes of poverty through holistic empowerment of the community’s residents. It is a cooperative program developed by BCFS in partnership with Trinity Baptist Church, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, the San Antonio Baptist Association and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Read More About the Guadalupe Street Coffee House.
Because of the efforts of these partners, the Guadalupe Street Coffee House won a Redevelopment Award.
In Laredo, Texas- Healthy Start Laredo works with colonias in Webb County to provide residents with medical and case management services in an effort to decrease disparities in access to health care in the area of maternal childcare. BGCT News had an article about the program yesterday.
These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the fruit that our cooperation in a denominational system produces. Before we throughout the denominational baby with the bathwater, we need to seriously think about what we lose when we try to operate our churches completely independently.
December 10, 2007 at 9:48 pm
I don’t know if it’s that they think denominations are “useless,” per se, but that they perceive them as divisive, and are often turned off by denominational politics. Both objections, to me, are understandable, but they’re also short-sighted. As you’ve pointed out, a denomination is valuable in pooling resources. And also, let’s be honest, “non-denominational” churches aren’t exactly super-ecumenical.