The Well is governed by a constitution, which describes the intent and principles of the church, and bylaws, which govern specific processes of the church necessary for administration. You can read the documents yourself, but here are the highlights...
- The Well will be governed by a pastoral team, an elder's team (which assist in the ministerial work of the church), and a deacon's team (which put the ministerial vision of the pastors and elders into action). The structure here is different from what we may be accustomed to, but it is founded strongly in the models found in 1 Timothy 3:1-13. The best analogy I can make is that "elders" are very similar to what our current deacons would be at BGBC and the deacons (spiritual leaders) are really more similar to the current church counsel (ministry/action leaders).
- The Statement of Faith (IV), which is a rough summary of beliefs, is very closely aligned with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, though we should note that we are not currently affiliating with the SBC. Having alignment with their statement of faith keeps "the door open" in case we want to move in that direction in the future.
- Please take a look at the church covenant (article VI); it's the best description of what we want this body to be.
- Section 7.2 (note that section 7.1 and 7.2 are out of order right now... we'll fix that) gives us a lot of flexibility to change things without too much headache for the next year or more.
A big theme in this document is that we want a mission-minded church, focused on doing what it takes to reach people for God. We can see this in the section on finances where we say that a budget must maintain a $1:$1 ratio of administrative/support spending to ministry/mission spending. What this means is that we will allocate at least 50% of our resources to ministry and mission. This is the type of things that you can do when building a church from the ground-up. There are many other examples, but I just wanted to emphasize for everyone that we mean what we say when statements are made about not being inhibited by "the way things are normally done". We want to earnestly seek God's way and passionately pursue it!
DAILY PRAYER A Prayer for Church Planting
God of new beginnings, we pray this mission we are undertaking is one that glorifies your name. We pray that any action we take is an action that serves and worships your life and teachings. Keep us accountable to each other and to you to ensure we have hearts that remain pure and motives that remain incorrupt. Everything we do, we want to do for you. In your son's holy name we pray, amen.
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