By George Bullard
You may have read my serious post responding to a real question from a real congregation where I provided 10 reasons for a non-denominational congregation to affiliate with a denomination. See it here.
Now read my not-so-serious post on 10 reasons to affiliate. Any similarity with real life in your denomination is purely accidental or hilarious or sad. Help us all have fun with this by leaving a comment with other not-so-serious reasons.
If any or many of these really are your denomination, I am sorry for poking fun at something that may be painful for you. Perhaps we need to start a 12-step group if you or your congregation is co-dependent on a denomination with any of these characteristics.
Why affiliate?
First, affiliate if your pastor is bivocational so she or he can be invited to the annual gathering of your denomination to lead in silent prayer. They will never be asked to preach or chair a major committee. Out of guilt and the need to do something to recognize those in bivocational ministry the programs planners decided to give your pastor a small part on the program.
Second, affiliate so the various educational, benevolence and other institutions of the denomination can approach your church about taking up an offering to help various institutions succeed, or survive if they have missed the mark in being successful.
Third, affiliate so the theological, ethical and moral debates within your denomination can impact and disrupt the internal life of your congregation, and hamper your ability to attract new people who are turned off by the liberalism or conservatism of the your denomination. The denomination with which you are affiliated will be accused of both depending on who is doing the accusing.
Fourth, affiliate so if a pastor, staff person or layperson from your congregation ever runs for elective denominational office, your congregation can be accused of unfaithfulness to the denomination, and the person running for office unworthy, because of how small an amount of money you contribute to the denomination.
Fifth, affiliate so when your congregation has a pastoral vacancy you can be inundated with dozens of résumés from people who want to be your pastor because you pay a better salary than the church they currently serve. The people in their current church are sick and tired of them — and the feeling is mutual. Or they got run off from their last church and have not been able to get called or be placed in a new one.
Sixth, affiliate so people who were troublemakers in their former congregation can join your congregation and be troublemakers for you. They would not have considered you previously, but now that you are “one of them” you would be a good church to invade.
Seventh, affiliate so your local or middle judicatory staff leaders can visit you when they receive reports of apostasy in your congregation based on the radical doctrinal statements you have made in sermons or a blog post or article you wrote that was published in an online magazine. Or they heard about you from other pastors out of what you thought were confidential conversations.
Eighth, affiliate so you can be pressured to use the denominational literature in your Sunday school or Bible study classes and small groups because if you and other churches do not then the publishing house is going to have to be closed down. Are you loyal or are you not?
Ninth, affiliate so your pastor and church staff can participate in the denominational retirement program that needs an annual infusion of new money because of the significantly increasing number of retired ministers in your denomination who are draining the retirement funds since the stock market has not done well in recent years. Do this even though the retirement program you are currently in has better earnings and a higher funding rate for retirees. Again, where is your loyalty?
Tenth, affiliate since you have a nice building in a convenient location and you are able to host denominational events, not charge rent, pay for the utilities and clean-up, and recruit a large number of volunteers from your congregation to act as hosts, greeters, cooks, parking lot attendants and ushers.
Go back through and decide which ones of these are true of your denomination. Leave a comment for this blog post with your reaction. Share other “good” reasons we all need to hear. Both laugh and cry about the partial or absolute truth of some of these in your situation.