Another new constitution

It was time. Time to settle down and read the document I've been avoiding for a few days. Purposely I left the email in my inbox. I'm usually pretty quick to archive these kind of things and delay reading them until I absolutely have to. Nothing cures insomnia quite like a legal document!

Well I sat down this morning and trawled through the BU's proposed new constitution for churches. The need for a new constitution has to do with the need for churches to register individually with the Charity Commission as I understand it. Generally speaking we don't change our constitutions just for the fun of it!

What struck me as I read through the document before me was the emphasis on prayer and worship as the cornerstones of church meetings and the meetings of the charity trustees (deacons to you and me). The actual phrase suggested is: Worship including prayer and the reading of Scripture shall be a key feature of the Church meeting. Similar wording is suggested for the trustee meetings.

Now we all know the importance of worship and prayer and Bible reading, but do we do it, in the context of a meeting, to get it out of the way before we get down to business? In the last year or so I've tried to pay more attention to the need to pray about all the things over which we deliberate, even to the point of stopping a meeting to pray. The problem is that we get very busy and I forget as easily as the next person to do this.

But how interesting will it be if we adopt the suggested constitution. How will our meetings change and how will the processes by which we conduct our business have to be reshaped in order to work in line with this new constitution?

I think we have more to discuss that we might have first imagined!