The Purposes of the Intermediate Body

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Some time ago I posted about Churches Together in England's review of Intermediate Bodies.  At this week's consultation for Ecumenical Officers, we received an update on the review and made some further contributions to it.  I'll report on its findings once the review is published but today I thought some readers might like to consider this exercise from the consultation, yesterday morning.

The ecumenical officers were asked to rank the following 10 purposes for Intermediate Bodies in order of importance.  Most important should be number 1 through to the least important at number 10.  We were asked to do this twice, once for Intermediate Bodies in general and once for our own Intermediate Body.  It is likely to get too confusing if you attempt both as a comment, so the challenge is to do your own ranking for the purpose of Intermediate Bodies in general.  Feel free to add any comments.  I'll pass any comments and rankings to CTE.

These are in alphabetical order and I've added a letter to help you do the ranking.

• A.  Acting as a channel of communication between the churches.
• B.  Acting as an agency for the churches in relating to local government (county, metropolitan) and other statutory bodies.
• C.  Acting as the instrument through which churches at intermediate level are accepted as ecumenical partners
• D.  Acting as the sponsoring body for Local Ecumenical Partnerships
• E.  Being a sign and symbol of our unity in Christ
• F.  Enabling accountability to one another
• G.  Facilitating Church Leaders' meetings
• H.  Providing a forum for strategic planning of church life and mission
• I.  Supporting local ecumenical endeavour and Churches Together groupings
• J.  Other - please specify

Related articles

• What is a Local Ecumenical Partnership? (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)