Healthy Associations of Unhealthy Churches
L ast week I attended the Cane Creek Baptist Association’s Youth in the Harvest for the first time in several years. I even got to lead the singing, which is always a pleasure. For those of you who have no idea what the Youth in the Harvest is, it is a monthly youth meeting. I assume it’s a Missouri thing, but it’s not unlike youth meetings that other associations have had. It struck me while I was there that it is ironic that healthy church associations are typically made up of small churches. By healthy I mean that the association has frequent meetings that draw several churches. The Cane Creek Baptist Association has two meetings a month. One is the Youth in the Harvest and the other is the Third Sunday Singing. They also have a Fifth Sunday Meeting that meets the weekend of the fifth Sunday. And they have an annual meeting. They have about twenty churches, which is relatively large for a local association, but I’m not sure any of their churches run more than a hundred in Sunday Sch...