Fellowship of Non-Subscribing Christians - Annual Report 2014

8/11/2019 Fellowship of Non-Subscribing Christians - Annual Report 2014

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Fellowship of Non-SubscribingChristians

Annual ReportPresented to the

Annual General Meeting

AtMoneyreaghNon-Subscribing Presbyterian Church,

County Down

Saturday September 13 th 2014

An act of worship will take place at the church at 1p.m. led by theRev. Chris Wilson and will include an address by the Rev. Dr.John Nelson on The Principles of Non-Subscription

Agenda for the business meeting to be held at 2.30 p.m.Lyttle Memorial Hall

1.Welcome by the Chairman

2. Apologies for Absence

3.Minutes of Founding Meeting 2013

4.Matters Arising

5.Acceptance of Officers Reports

6.Election of Officers

7.Events

8. Questions and answers

9. Thanks to Moneyreagh Non-SubscribingPresbyterian Church


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Honorary PresidentThe Rt. Rev. Paul Reid

Officers Elected for 2013 - 2014

ChairThe Rev. Bob Pounder

Joint SecretariesThe Rev. Chris Wilson (Ireland)

The Rev. Tom McCready (Britain)

Treasurer The Rev. Brian Cockroft

Acting Membership SecretaryMrs Sandra Wilson

Press and PublicationsThe Rev. Bob Pounder

Chair and Publications Rev. Bob. Pounder

The foundation of the Fellowship in Moneyreagh on September 14th, 2013 was a small but highly significant event in the history of our liberal Christian tradition. For Christian Unitarians and FreeChristians within the General Assembly of Unitarian & FreeChristian Churches, the formation of the FNSC represents theclear recognition of the abandonment of the project to counter pagan and atheistic influences within GA. I recognise that the GAis no longer a recognisable Christian denomination.I understandthat a significant number who inhabit our churches, churches by

the way that were built for the worship of God and to celebrate theteachings of Jesus, are no longer Christian.

I believe that we want different things. The Fellowship has beencreated because Fellowship Christians within the GA want to be achurch in the real sense of the word. They need to be part of arecognisable Christian denomination that upholds the Christian

scriptures, and believes in the sacred right of private judgementas it applies to reading such scripture. Therefore, it is a churchthat is unambiguously Christian, a non-creedal church, a broadchurch, a liberal church and we find this church in theNon-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland. This is truly achurch which seeks to unite all Christians whether UnitarianChristians or Trinitarian Christians - in common work andworship. For Fellowship Christians in the General Assembly, theNSPCI provides that affinity and remains the unambiguouscontinuation of our tradition; the people and minsters of theNSPCI are our co-religionists.

In this past twelve months we have seen a steady growth in our membership and the publication of our first newsletter,The Fellowship.

On June 23rd we held a successful meeting at Stalybridge


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Unitarian Church on the theme Liberal Christianity or Liberal Religion? Thirty people attended to hear the Rev. Chris Wilsonand new members were gained.

Elsewhere in this report there are details of our online presenceand success. Here we are twelve months on from our foundingmeeting, back at Moneyreagh, confident that the next twelvemonths will see the continuation of our success and resurgence.

Bob Pounder

Founding Meeting FNSC, Moneyreagh 2013

Treasurers Report Rev. Brian Cockroft

Instead of a traditional Bank Account, which attracts bank chargesthe FNSC officers agreed with my proposal to open a Treasurers'

Trust Account at the Nationwide Building Account which is fee freeand pays a (tiny!) amount of interest. Bob Pounder, Chris Wilsonand Brian Cockroft are the three signatories, any one person tosign.

Our current balance is 150.01 comprising two donations frommembers and a penny interest. There have been no expensesclaimed since our foundation entirely due to the great generosityof members who have financed the production of 'The Fellowship'and other costs out of their own pockets. Whilst this generosityenabled us to get established we should not expect those whogive freely of their time and expertise also to finance the work of The Fellowship.

Our AGM needs to decide how we finance our work as we movefrom a fledgling group to an established Fellowship.

I have pleasure in presenting this report and thank those con-cerned for their generosity.

Brian CockroftHonorary Treasurer.


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Membership Report Mrs S.Wilson

Currently there is no charge to become a member of theFellowship. Membership gives access to the email user group as

well to as support in your Christian faith journey.Whilst it is not deemed necessary to pay a set fee for member-ship, there needs to be a Fellowship discussion at the nextmeeting to consider ways to bring in funds to facilitate theproduction of magazines and posters etc. without restrictingaccess/ engagement for those of modest means.

We started with only nine attending a meeting in Moneyreagh ayear ago to formally establish the Fellowship. We now have 26people identifying as members, ten of whom are clergy.

On the face book page, we now have around 55 individuals en-gaging with our postings giving us potential for growth. This is aremarkable achievement is such a short time.

Our membership currently consists of: Non-SubscribingPresbyterian, Unitarian Christian, Free Christian,Congregationalist,and Methodist.

We would ask that everyone who identifies themselves as amember of the Fellowship introduce our group to other

like-minded individuals, so we may not only grow in numbers butoffer support to other Christians who may feel isolated in their faith journey.

Sandra WilsonMembership Officer

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Events 2015Next year we intend to build on our success through our publications and by holding meetings and events in NorthernIreland and England.

Our 2015 AGM will be held at the Unitarian Chapel, Oldham,Greater Manchester, on Saturday September 12th.

Unitarian Chapel Oldham founded 1813On present site since 1971


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New Media: Our Presence on the Internet Report by Matt Grant

Following the founding of the Fellowship in September 2013, we initiallybegan our online work via a private email list - believing it would be bet-ter to build up a close-knit, mutually supportive fraternity before attempt-ing to 'go public' on the internet.

From June 2014, we embarked on building a web presence. We havedeliberately aimed to:

1). Make our web presence as cost effective as possible2). Use social media to raise awareness of and affinity with the

Fellowship.

The project currently costs 12 per year, and this is primarily for theURL name.

We have used the blogspot.com platform for the main website. Fromthere, we have developed auxiliary 'mini sites' on Facebook.com,Scribd.com, Flickr.com and Twitter.com. We have also ensured thehandle 'fnschristians' is registered as a name on all other major socialmedia platforms should we need them in future and to prevent any mis-use.

Our big success so far has been the development of a Facebook.compage which has 52 people signing up as 'likes' at the time of writing.These are not necessarily all members of the Fellowship, many are sim-ply users of Facebook.com interested in our work. The Facebook pageprovides usage stats and it is often recorded that we have a regular readership of 80 people for this page. We tend to publish interestingnews articles, discussion topics and resource suggestions on the page.

Going forward, we hope that the inclusion of a 'Resources' page on themain site will increase the number of people visiting and re-visiting themain site to use the resources on offer. This in turn will increase our visi-bility on Google.com. In turn, we hope there will be a positive impact onactual membership."

Documents

Fellowship of Non-Subscribing Christians - Annual Report 2014