In Auckland next year, regional leaders of CV Partner Churches will meet to consider the theme, ‘Our Future Together’. It could be a defining moment.

I’ve just been with a Co-operating Venture (CV) Parish that has melted down. I spent three days sitting with individuals and small groups, listening to their stories, reflecting, and praying with them.

This is not atypical. It represents a cohort of CVs that have little understanding of, or subsequent  commitment to, the partner churches - Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian - that host them. Over a period of time they’ve become increasingly congregational, a community church, reflecting the Christian makeup of the small community in which they find themselves. There are vestiges of their denominational heritages present, but they are small, aged, and take no part in leadership.

At the other extreme I’m aware of a CV that was formed the same year (nearly 45 years ago), where everyone knows who the Methodists, Presbyterians, or Brethren are. I’m not sure if this is any healthier. As you might guess the average age of this congregation is significantly older.

We are finding ourselves ultimately losing the former category (the congregational community churches) as they find the strictures of partner church polity too burdensome to manage. Some of us  may be sanguine about this. My concern is that we have lost an opportunity – these fellowships potentially represent our growing edge – and God knows we need one. Somewhere.

I’ve been struck by the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ narrative of the early church – the first seven years find it exclusively Jewish. Even though they have Jesus’ ‘Great Commission’, and have experienced the pure flush of that amazing Holy Spirit outflow on that day of Pentecost, it has not occurred to anyone that God/Jesus actually intended that they reach out to Gentiles – the rest of us.

Peter’s encounter with God on the rooftop in Joppa, as we find it in Acts 10, was a truly shocking experience for him. It shook him to the core. While the Christian church had rapidly expanded following the persecution resulting from the trial and martyrdom of Stephen, these early Jewish Christians had gone to Jewish communities along the trade routes and settled in to the synagogues, their marae, as they were still culturally and by practice, Jewish. It’s here they got to talk about Jesus as the long-promised Messiah, and the church grew.

Peter’s visit to the Gentile Roman Officer Cornelius at Caesarea, caused a furore in the church. Many believed that the new Gentile converts should be required to follow the Jewish law. All of it. The Jerusalem Council met, Jewish Christians, to decide the Gentile question. Where they landed was even more shocking (to my mind) than all that lead up to this point. They issue an edict. It went like this: Ac 15:28 It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements - 29 You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

That’s it. Four things. Cast more as a good suggestion than a commandment. Today we may even dispense with three of them. They were not even presented with a Statement of Faith – things they had to commit to believing to determine their orthodoxy.

Which brings me back to CVs. These are our ‘Gentile Churches’. We are now in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century. Most of the polity of the partner churches dates back to the 18th century and for some. much further back. Perhaps it is time we had a fresh look at what it is we require of our CVs, and as we do, will have an opportunity to see what it is we require of ourselves.

Kings Birthday weekend next year will be an opportunity to discuss these matters. I’m actively engaged in recruiting Regional Leaders of the Partner Churches – Bishops, Presbytery EOs and Moderators, and Methodist Synod Superintendents - to be part of the conversation. It will be in Auckland. The theme? ‘Our Future Together’. This could be a defining moment in our life and history.