{"id":290,"date":"2006-10-04T10:39:07","date_gmt":"2006-10-04T09:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=290"},"modified":"2006-10-04T10:40:34","modified_gmt":"2006-10-04T09:40:34","slug":"labelling-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=290","title":{"rendered":"Labelling Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m following the comments against Richard&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=280\" onClick=\"popWin=open('http:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=280','myWin',''); popWin.focus(); return false\">Fresh Expressions post<\/a> with great interest.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve just had a look on the Fresh Expressions web site and peeked into their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freshexpressions.org.uk\/directory_section.asp?id=16\" onClick=\"popWin=open('http:\/\/www.freshexpressions.org.uk\/directory_section.asp?id=16','myWin',''); popWin.focus(); return false\">directory<\/a> of fresh expressions of church. In it I note what appears to be a 100% tendency to label one&#8217;s church. Now, in a way that is a stupid thing for me to say, because if they didn&#8217;t have labels they wouldn&#8217;t be in the directory.<\/p>\n<p>Whilst I don&#8217;t think that labelling yourself is wrong &#8211; after all it is quite a handy way for people to refer to you (and it helps if you want a web site) &#8211; it is interesting to give labelling some thought. The points that I&#8217;m tending to ponder are these:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do labels tend to straightjacket your practices? e.g. &#8216;Baptists&#8217; aren&#8217;t ever going to not Baptise are they?<\/li>\n<li>Do labels tend to limit your mission to a particular demographic? e.g. pensioners aren&#8217;t going to turn up to &#8216;Loud Rave Church&#8217; are they? Does this make us exclusive rather than inclusive in mission?<\/li>\n<li>Do labels enable you to exert controlling power? After all, if one person is the founder, inventor and owner of the label, aren&#8217;t others more likely to go along with what they say, so that they can retain some of the benefits of that label? Having an &#8216;owner&#8217; of the label can surely get in the way of God raising up other key figures within that group.<\/li>\n<li>Do labels tend to go hand in hand with formalised procedures?<\/li>\n<li>Weren&#8217;t labels first applied by those outside of the group? People who looked at the church, from the outside, and found a way of referring to it.<\/li>\n<li>Do labels push you towards becoming a legally recognised organisation? Whilst this may give benefits (e.g. Gift Aid tax reimbursement) does this then put you in a position of subservience to societal law?<\/li>\n<li>Do labels enable us to shortcut relationships? If we have a label is there then less need to know each other so well?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, whilst I don&#8217;t want to argue for not having labels, I think that we have to be aware that our natural tendency can cause negative things to arise from having a label. In my mind we constantly have to fight our temptation of implement rules and routines that will suffocate the movement of the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I note what appears to be a 100% tendency to label one&#8217;s church <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/?p=290\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-emerging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sundaypapers.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}