Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 January 2008 08:28:23
Does denomination still matter to us? Well, lots of people, who I've read or heard speak, would say no because these days we mix and match so much, often taking a consumerist approach to finding the Lords will in our church choice. It's also regularly argued we are now post-denominational and that most people who practice these days are just Christian. Others say it is our theological position which is now becoming more important than our denominational name in terms of how we might want to describe ourselves.
So how do people see themselves? Well, one way I've found to look at this is reading the way people describe their religious views on facebook.
I've taken a random wander through my Baptist type friends who go to a range of Baptist churches and found the following:
A significant proportion describe themselves as Christian-Baptist
A significant proportion describe themselves as Christian
and a less significant proportion of people give different answers. Amongst the other type answers we had: "Evangelical Christian (but I am nice honest!)", "Jesus is the way!", "lots", "Praise Jebus" (and no that's not a spelling error) and "radical Christian realist with traditional Baptist underpinning".
Not sure what conclusions to draw from this, because it seems to underline that there are a range of ways in which people see themselves. The one thing that was interesting, though, was that all the people who gave other answers, including myself, go to the same church. As I've said in the past I think our church, whilst on one level very much a "standard middle of the road Baptist" is a wonderful mix of slightly disfunctional and diverse people with a range of views which are generally respected even if they are not agreed upon. I think the range of ways we describe our religious views on Facebook sums our church up totally and indeed illustrates exactly what I love about the place and the household God has bought together there.