Thoughtful comment from a Net friend:

I would like to open my account by saying that I have been a member of [our mainline denomination] for only seven years, but even in in that time I have noticed a slow drift away from ecclesiology, as the first discourse on matters of church polity, toward a discourse of organisational management. This has resulted, I think, in a disasterous set of regulatory changes which reveal very little interest in what the church is as church (rather than as organisation). Now clearly the church IS an organisation and an institution, and I would be the first to say that the church cannot exist without them. But I fear that much of the organisational change in recent years has been done without a recognition of the primacy of ecclesiological reflection in that process. In short, the current regulations are confused about what the church, as church, actually ought to be and do!

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