How Wales leads the world !

Oh come on. I live in France and you don't get that much jingoism on the site do you ?

Anyway, I used to be a pastor and an apparatchik in the AECW, the Associating Evangelical Churches of Wales, and I hereby salute and applaud this worthy group. It has many faults - in fact all the faults that its constituent churches bring to it (and they bring the faults of each member - let us not forget !)

However the AECW has one humungous strength - it exists to unite confessional churches in Wales - that is churches that hold to, preach, express one of the reformed confessions of faith (e.g. 1823 Calvinistic Methodist, 1689 Baptist, Westminster, Savoy, etc. etc.)

This is a brilliant expression of gospel unity because it defines what we mean by the words evangelical and church - a confessional church, a gospel with content - but it also allows for diversity of conviction regarding church government, baptism, etc.

AECW accepts that its member churches have deep and strong convictions about baptism, independency, etc., but that they belong together because they believe, preach and express the same gospel in similar ways.

I mention this in the light of the American movements such as Together for the gospel and the Gospel Coalition (Why the two ? What am I missing ?).

This confessional basis is really important. It defines the gospel that we say unites us.

Comments

Martin Downes said…
So with EMW and AECW its like we got there before the Americanos
2:17 pm
Alan said…
You might think that.

I couldn't possibly comment.

:)
3:34 pm
Larry said…
It reminds me of NWA in Wales, or at a student mildly less confessional but never the less great UCCF.

I think Challies recently posted a brief post about the Gospel coalition with an explanation why its different to TftG... the latter being led from the top by Mohler, Duncan etc and the former hoping to be very much grass-roots church led not just by the big guns we all love to watch at conferences.
8:51 pm
Alan said…
Yes, I read that this morning. There's quite a structure, with participants, members, groups and something else I can't remember...
9:20 am
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