DENOMINATIONS AND ISSUES
You have been guiding your congregation through a discussion of conflict in the church and its historical consequences. First you looked at conflicts that led to division within the worldwide church over its 2,000 year history. In the second phase, you looked more specifically at separations within the Presbyterian denomination within this country. If people are interested, you might identify specific beliefs that separate different denominations.
Your homework in preparation for that discussion would be to go on Google or another search engine and ask the question about the essential issues that distinguish one denomination from another. Among other sites, I found this site helpful http://www.churchfinder.com/denominational-churches. You can begin with the major Protestant denominations, e.g. Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Baptist, etc, but you can easily research other denominations and branches within denominations.
In your message to your congregation, you identify the denominations with which you are working and then list some key beliefs, governance structures, etc. and ask people to try to match issues to specific denominations. You might encourage people to pick out a couple of beliefs that interest them and do their own Google research for greater understanding.
BRINGING IT HOME
The third stage of your interchange is to bring the discussion closer to home. Ask people to make a list of up to seven issues that they think may be a source of tension among the several churches in your community. Ask them to look at their list and note where these are the same or different issues that divided churches in the past. You might make note of the fact that frequently people forget the issues that caused a division, but the denominations remain separated. Note that you will develop that issue further in a later session.
From their list, ask them to identify the top two or three that they think might be of serious concern for members of your congregation. Tell them that when you receive their suggestions, you will prepare a composite of the main issues that were identified.
Ask them to take one or more of the issues that people have identified and see if they can state in one or two sentences the essence of the issue. This is not to argue the issue but to describe what the issue is all about. For example, people are divided over whether to use real wine in the Lord ’s Supper.
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In the next blog, we will examine the role of conflict within the Christian community and how to invite people to participate in such conflict in a healthy manner.
