Looking for Leadership and stuff

Well since last week - I think, and my talk of escapism, I've gone and watched with 20 other men "Johnny English" and just laughed my way through it. What was best was that the opportunity to switch off and enter a different world - albeit for an hour or so, was so refreshing. I did the same last night watching "Spooks", though to be honest I'm beginning to struggle with an unrealistic storyline!

Last week I touched upon the fact that ministry is changing. The economic climate is producing some quite challenging new ways of surviving. This is in no way something that is unique to me, but is being experienced right across the country. Churches are having to change too. And if churches and ministers are changing, so too must the superstructures that support both these players. That will mean - in my view, Baptist Associations, and most of all "The Baptist Union" - aka Didcot, aka HQ! The question - which we were debating in car journeys last year and early this year, of "Whether the BU can stay as it is" - is probably now yesterdays question. Time has moved on, finances have changed, because it has done for churches and ministers already! No, the new question is not whether change at the BU are required, but surely now it's an urgent question of "what must it change into?" And, it's at times like this, that real visionary national baptist leadership is required. These are no longer days for shaking hands and appearing in pictures and saying things that everyone expects you to say, but time to roll up the sleeves and set out the vision and direction for the future of the Baptist Union of GB. Not to do so in my view will produce death (we are already stagnating!, and are already well into decline).

And I would take a bigger view than just a baptist one. The tribal church structures in the UK are already quaking. There are now numerous crossover lines between Anglicans and Methodists, Baptists and URC's and Pentecostalists. Of course some want to hold on to tribe distinctiveness, and I understand that, but I sense that there are ways through these issues. The way I see it is that the long standing agreement of Methodists with the URC's is well and truly dead, and the new agreement with the Anglicans is one that should be grasped. The emptying out of many Church of England Priests to go to Rome, now leaves the CofE struggling. Combining with the Methodists is the only way. As to us, well the URC's argue that their plan was always to unite with someone else. I think that there are now numerous crossover lines with Baptists. But don't stop there, the breadth of the Baptist flavours within charismatic wings, surely allows for a formalisation of uniting of some Pentecostalists with Baptist Union Churches.
Of course, I leave many out of my quick sketch - The Roman Catholics for example. Well surely it will not be long before the revolution against single Priests will occur, and the married priesthood become a reality. if it doesn't, expext further transition there. And as to the so called independents or house churches, as we used to call them - well, I have no easy answer there.

But to get back to the thrust of what I'm arguing for in Baptist Union circles - now is a time when we must see visionary leadership at the top within our Union of Churches. At the moment, I'm not seeing it!