Merging Churches

For those of you reading this from somewhere other than Corpus Christi, let me catch you up on what's been happening with our church. As most of you know, it is not at all uncommon for churches to split. That's often heard of, and sometimes they even make the paper (if it's a particularly ugly split). But a merger... now that's uncommon. And that's what we're doing.

It's a long story and the entire thing is chronicled at our Sr. Minister's blog, churchmerger.org. It started in early summer when Jess Cole, the Sr. Pastor of Christ Community Church (CCC), felt the gentle call of the Spirit to talk to our church, Christ Family Fellowship (CFF) about the possibility of merging.

The two Sr's got together and prayed over the idea. Both felt a need to present it to the leadership of the churches. After several months of prayer, fasting, emotional roller coasters and sleepless nights, both churches voted this past weekend to approve the merger. The combined vote was almost 95% in favor.

We have lots of unanswered questions. Hopefully, these can be answered soon as we begin meeting together on October 22, 2006. We had to work through lots of theology and tradition. After all, we are a former Church of Christ and they are a former Southern Baptist. You can imagine some of the discussions we had.

We hope that the city of Corpus Christi, which is Latin for "Body of Christ", will see what the body of Christ looks like by the merger of two churches instead of the split of one into two. Or three. As of this week, Christ Point Church is born.

At least I think that's what it will be called. We're still working on that one too.