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FROM MY HEART TO YOURS….

Dear Friends,

As I write this, we have had two calls in the first two days of this week of Churches seeking information about the Association. One of them asked, “What is it that binds a Church or an Association together?” The question could not have come at a better moment. That very morning I was scanning the Congregational Symposium in California in 1998 and Dr. David Fisher’s lecture entitled “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” In it he states three principles which lie at the foundation of our Congregational way of doing things: 1) The Church is a believer’s Church; 2) The Church is a gathering of visible saints; and 3) Each local Church is sovereign.

“But the more fundamental principle is, in fact the first principle of Congregational ecclesiology: the Church local exists by the will of God, not by the will of the king, or bishops, or synods...The validity or the legitimacy of any local church is guaranteed not by kings, or bishops, or synods but by the presence of Christ” (p.85).

And what is that objective form which marks a Church as Christ’s body? The covenant.

Then why an Association? To proclaim these principles. To uphold them. To nurture them in each other. To extend the tie to those who have mutual concerns, projects, missions, needs, and who know that much can be gained by fellowship with sister Churches who, like yours, practices the autonomy of the local Church in the midst of the sovereignty of God.

I obviously have more to share with inquiring Churches than this, but this seemed to me to be as fundamental a view of what and who our member Churches are as I could come up with at the time.
 

Grace and Peace,
Dr. Thomas M. Richard, Executive Secretary