Sunday, May 24, 2009

Group 3 - non-conformists or rebels?

In the post Three groups... one church? I suggested that there are three different types of person within the church and that the third is 'People who don't believe it right to be told what to do by Group Two and who don't want to tell Group One what to do'.

My youngest son branded them rebels - a term I was not happy with as it expressed something unintentional. After discussion with him we realised group three included both non-conformists and rebels.

Thinking back on this a few days later I am now unhappy with the term non-conformist. Wikipedia puts it thus:

Nonconformist was a term used in England after the Act of Uniformity 1662 to refer to an English subject belonging to a non-Christian religion or any non-Anglican church. It may also refer more narrowly to such a person who also advocated religious liberty. The term is also applied retrospectively to English Dissenters (such as Puritans and Presbyterians) who violated the Act of Uniformity 1559, typically by practising or advocating radical, sometimes separatist, dissent with respect to the Established Church.

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers (founded in 1648), and those less organized were considered Nonconformists at the time of the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Later, as other groups formed, they were also considered Nonconformists. These included Methodists, Unitarians, and members of the Salvation Army.

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians and the Salvation Army all have groups one and two as the majority. To call them nonconformists doesn't fit with the group three definition. We need another word.

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