Since having the church website up and running I have, together with many others, been trying to make sure that not only is the site up to date, easy to use and informative, but also that we have every page completed. An email this week made me realise that some of the pages were still blank as one mother was trying to get the information about the location of our last youth celebration.
One of the blank pages was about what we believe. It would be easy to cut and paste a doctrinal statement from an organisation like the Evangelical Alliance or to put up the essential aspects of what it means to be a Baptist, but these all have shades of meaning an nuance that make them harder to understand. I could have copied out one of the creeds, but which one? Anyway, the creeds tended to be written as much for who they excluded as they were for who was included in the church. I could have put up the watchwords of our particular branch of the Christian family (Baptist, evangelical, charismatic) but again these are not phrases that mean much to those who don't know our jargon.
So I sat and tried to work out what are the essentials of our faith. I'm sure that if you look at what I have written you will see many gaps (no mention of baptism!) and somethings that seem superfluous or even contentious (different views of creation, anyone). I think part of the struggle is that a relationship with Jesus Christ is about so much more than being able to tick the relevant boxes of what I do or don't give intellectual assent to and yet there is something of that in there. God's love, my sin, God's forgiveness and my need to receive it, the place of the Bible and the role of the Holy Spirit all seemed essential, but so does a recognition of the relationship as something that grows and develops over time.
Please do have a look at what I have written at http://www.mpbc.org.uk/whatwebelieve.htm and feed your comments back either on this blog or by emailing me. Even while writing this post I have had to go back and revisit what I have written, tweaking a few details and trying to clarify some points. I'd rather avoid heresy, if you spot any, but I guess no one has ever produced one without anything controversial, such is the diversity of this glorious and mixed up body we call church.
