OUR STRUCTURE

Leslie Thomas, our senior leader serving the whole Fellowship with an apostolic oversight, observes:

"The Fellowship's first twelve years have been a time of growth and with that has come a wrestling with the issues involved in changing from being a single congregation to a network of local churches in covenant relationship with each other, but with substantial local autonomy.

" Our express desire is to maintain a flexibility of structure that can respond to an ever-changing situation but to do so in a way that is faithful to the spirit of the New Testament church as expressed in the Scriptures. We embrace the five-fold ministry (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers) of Ephesians 4 as being a necessary and God-given pattern for the church and we are committed to all-member ministry. We recognise that leadership and ministry are distinct, thus into this equation also come the roles of elders, overseers and deacons.

"As we seek to formulate and practically express this in ways that are both faithful to Scripture and appropriate for our specific calling, we recognise that we are very much a dynamic ‘work in progress’ and how we work this out will change, but what follows is our experimental model for the time being."