Contributed by William Badke, MTh, MLS, Associate Librarian at Trinity Western University. You can contact him at [email protected].
Mission Baptist Church, with roots in the late 1800s, had early successes in Mission, BC, having a large Sunday School and a strong presence. Starting in the 1950s, however, the church was chronically challenged with significant internal discord, resulting in multiple splits over several decades. By the early 1990s, the congregation was down to 19 members and concerned about its very survival.
With unity issues still rumbling, three of its members, including myself, were appointed to steer the congregation until we could find a way to return to membership governance without splitting ourselves further. For months, we limped along until a retired Fellowship pastor took over as interim.
It was during these troubled times that we received a private communication from a small group of people claiming to represent another congregation, North Valley Bible Church, that was also struggling and was seeking a merger with us. Our three-member board found ourselves in the awkward position of fielding a request whose authenticity could not be verified. If we acted upon it and sought a merger with this church, we could well be helping a splinter group rather than the main North Valley membership. Thus, we responded by requesting a formal meeting with that church’s official leadership.
The meeting occurred, and we determined that North Valley really wanted to join us, seeing Mission Baptist as the receiving church. The other congregation was not officially Baptist, but in all doctrines they were baptistic. They were willing to accept our statement of faith without objections. Subsequent prayer and votes of both congregations gave us a mandate to move ahead with the merger.
None of us had done anything like this merger before. Initially the two boards began meeting regularly, praying, focusing on our common interests, and seeking to understand how the merged church would function. We soon realized that this needed to be, in essence, a “new church.” North Valley was subsuming its identity under that of Mission Baptist, but the name “Mission Baptist Church” was spoken of by many in the city as “that church where they fight all the time.” This was certainly not a legacy any of us wanted to preserve. The solution: We took the North Valley name from the other congregation and Baptist from ours, forming North Valley Baptist Church, with a newly developed constitution and bylaws. The BC Fellowship was involved throughout and provided helpful advice.
Several of us in leadership were concerned that merging two churches on paper might not work in practice if members from each original congregation clung to their former identities and social groups. However, the fact that we were starting something new helped us to acknowledge that the old was gone, along with its previous identities. Thus, within months, most vestiges of the original congregations began to disappear, except one: Mission Baptist had not forgotten nor relinquished its long history of discordant activity, at least not entirely.
Sadly, the church, a few years later experienced a final split, when a small portion of the original Mission Baptist congregation decided to boycott church services and financial giving, based on a perception that the church had changed too much and was becoming too modern in its worship. Very sadly, the remaining congregation of North Valley Baptist Church, after begging the dividing members to return and giving them time to reconcile with us, voted them out of membership. This was something for which we were roundly criticized at the time, though we did it with sorrow and a firm belief that the church could not endure months of division.
Almost immediately, the whole tenor of the church changed dramatically. We found our unity. For the past two and more decades, we have lived in harmony, resolving differences quickly and striving to maintain the fellowship of the congregation. There are few of us left who even remember our history, and the church is doing the Lord’s work.
Lessons learned:
- Cover the whole process in constant prayer.
- In any proposed merger, ensure that the leadership of each congregation are involved first before you discuss the matter with any individual congregation member or group.
- Determine reasons why the merger would further the Lord’s work. Simply believing you can be bigger and better with a merger will not be enough.
- Ensure that the leadership of the two congregations meet frequently and shape their vision and mission together.
- Get the constitution and bylaws settled before you merge. This is the time when you can iron out any differences in the way the church will operate.
- Consider a new name for your congregation as a sign that the merged church is a fresh start.
- Once the merger is complete, everyone, leaders, and members alike, must constantly monitor and enhance the climate of the congregation, seeking a unity of purpose and spirit.
- Beware of any challenges that have hobbled either congregation in the past, ensuring that those issues do not emerge in a new form to do damage to your witness.
- Praise the Lord for guiding you.