MALYON
Better Together! RECENT CHURCH MERGERS IN QUEENSLAND BAPTISTS
It was like something that would happen in the movies, not in real life.’ This was the way a member of the Living Temple church on the Gold Coast described the experience of being in a church merger. Given that the church is commonly understood to be a growing and spreading organism, many would say that churches should not be merging, but planting. This is certainly the case in much of the developing world, but in the Western world, many local churches are struggling to remain economically or socially viable. One option for them is to merge with another Baptist Church. There have been several Baptist church mergers in the last decade, where two churches have joined together to form a new church. I visited four of these churches in 2016 to see how it happened and how it was now going. 1. Eastside Community Church is an amalgamation of a smaller (30 members), older church with property (Bayside) with a larger and younger church (Eastside) without property, but some money set aside for property. 2. Cannon Hill Baptist Church entered a partnership arrangement with the larger Birkdale Baptist Church in October 2013. A group from Birkdale committed themselves to the rejuvenation of the smaller Cannon Hill congregation. 3. Sandgate Baptist Church and Geebung Baptist Church combined in May 2012 to form Connect Baptist Church. Sandgate was a larger church, which had sold its property, and was looking
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