“Christian denominations are created by confessions; and these confessions are liminal, they create boundaries. Hopefully, this liminality is about secondary matters and not tertiary issues. The distinction between secondary and tertiary issues is of vital importance here.1 In Romans 14, for instance, Paul deals with tertiary matters of food and holy days. In more recent history, the issue of the millennium should have been regarded as a tertiary matter.
Baptism, though, is not a tertiary matter: it is a secondary issue. One’s stance on it determines which community one belongs to. As a Baptist, I believe in the baptism of believers, not infants. I have many dear Paedobaptist friends, who are solid Christians, with whom I can work on many endeavours and from whom I have learned much (and in the most important matters of the gospel we agree as one), but on the matter of ecclesial identity we obviously must go our different ways.
Currently, there is a debate within the FEBC over the role of women in the public ministry of the church. In the late 1990s, the FEBC affirmed its commitment to complementarianism, though the affirmation was not one that was binding on the churches within the denomination. In recent days, some churches within the FEBC made a proposal to make it binding. A motion was brought to our annual denominational meeting last November to make it so, but it did not obtain the necessary percentage of votes to pass.
At the same time, a revised and expanded Affirmation of Faith was up for approval. All of the articles passed except the one on the church, which, it was felt obviously, did not clearly specify that ruling, teaching elders must be qualified men. A committee was then struck to come up with a clearer article on the matter over the next two years.
Involved in proposing the motion for making complementarianism binding on FEBC churches were a number of churches (8-10) in BC (as well as others across the FEBC). In the BC region of our denomination, they have interpreted our denomination’s complementarianism to mean that the “senior pastor” of the church must be a qualified man, but other pastors in the local church can be women. The 8-10 churches of this region that were involved in proposing the motion to make complementarianism binding across the FEBC have been deemed “divisive” by the region and next week, the BC churches are meeting to expel these churches for their “divisiveness.” Of course, in my mind, the real issue is that these churches take exception to the BC interpretation of complementarian.
In their defence, the BC region claims to be majoring on the primary issues of the Faith and that women in the ministry is a secondary issue. But then so is baptism, as I noted above. And by their logic, churches engaging in the baptism of infants can rightly belong to our denomination.”
To access the entire article: https://michaelazadaghaykin.substack.com/p/confessions-create-communities-on
