At my church... Part 3

[steve-in-kville]

Part three. May be the end of these polls for a while. Thanks for participating.

Some of these questions are a little wide open. Use your best judgment when voting.

[Neto]

Our congregation doesn't belong to a conference, but I LEFT the General Conference of the Mennonite Brethren Church when I joined here. (So I checked that one, but it's not really the case, in one way.)

Our congregation has a websites, and it has a button to see the bulletin, but they rarely get it posted until MAYBE several weeks afterwards. (So I didn't check that box.)

They do perform the Evangelical-Protestant baby baptism substitute of 'Baby Dedication' early in each year, covering the babies born in the previous year.
This is what in anthropology we would call a 'Cultural Substitute', something done to ease the mind of people who had given up something which was previously central in their belief system.
An example from the Banawa: I recently mentioned their practice of the severe ceremonial beating a girl receives when she 'comes of age'. I don't recall that we ever openly confronted them about this, partly because the chief, a very soft-hearted man, was already opposing it, and the people had started doing it in a much more ceremonially way, where the lashing was not so brutal that the girl could not walk on her own for several days afterwards. They had a cassette recording of this same ceremony from a related tribe in which you could hear the switches coming down on her bare flesh, the screaming, and the voice of the girl's mother, yelling "Don't STOP!, Don't stop!" It was a heart-wrenching thing to listen to that tape. The Banawa still faked the crippling effect of the beating, with two women basically carrying her over to the house afterwards, just as they had when it was actually necessary. Also, they rubbed a red dye on the switches, so that red marks would be visible on the girl's back and legs, faking the bleeding welts which resulted in the older traditional beatings. (One of the men told me afterwards that 'It wasn't done right.' He mentioned other ceremonies, and told how it had been done 'in the good old days'.) Don't get me wrong - it DID still hurt, and there were also real welts.
Anyway, cultural substitute - The Christian men suggested that instead of the beating, they should still bind the girl on the whipping rack, somehow make the marks on her back, but then pray for her. It probably sounds bad to admit that we didn't strongly confront this practice, but we went in knowing that we would not be there 'forever', and that after we left there would very likely not be another missionary to take our place. Practices that are stopped by force will just 'go underground' - that is, they would just do it when we weren't there in the village. And even if you DO manage to stop it entirely, things of this sort will usually come back. Also, we wanted THEM to take the lead, to personally grapple with it, and decide what to do. Anyone who begins to follow Jesus receives the same Holy Spirit as we all claim to have received. The Holy Spirit has a complete understanding of what ceremonies like this mean to the people, and He knows what should be done about it. They needed to rethink what the whole thing meant, and decide if that underlying belief should still be supported in their redeemed way of life.
So I guess you can tell that I do not support 'baby dedications'. Parent dedications, fine. If they want to reaffirm their initial commitment in respect to each additional child, that's great.

[QuietlyListening]

We had each of our children dedicated basically it was a time of saying we were committing ourselves publicly to raise our children in the Lord- each has since been baptized as a believer.

Our present church does not do children dedications. We do have a time of honoring high school and college graduates.

Bulletin recently went from the old folded style to a single sheet front only and probably heading away from that soon. Moving more and more to technology as the pastor is really into technology.

[Josh]

Our church does live-streaming but audio only.

There is one video stream of a Holdeman church service floating around. A wedding was conducted in a nearby MC Canada or MB church, due to the large number of guests. They asked the AV folks at that church to stream it, and they streamed the video too. Only video of a Holdeman service I’ve ever been able to find.

Our church services are not supposed to be recorded but… technology being what it is, it’s quite easy to record a livestream.