ABSTRACT
The Valley ministers are all men and married with children: four are in their mid-forties, one in his late-fifties and one in his mid-thirties. The prior notion that human beings are adopted into the family of God provides a precedent for demoting biological relatedness. Firstly on the grounds that it seems to the author to be biological adultery, but secondly because of the muddle and complexity and pain that people are introducing to three or four-fold relationships. ‘The Baptist church’ is imagined by the ministers as a network of autonomous churches loosely linked in a Union. This model is envisaged in contradistinction to other religions that are said to have an overarching and hierarchical authority in terms of both doctrine and administration. Autonomy emerges, then, as a valued and valuable feature of the Baptist church: ministers identify the autonomy of local churches in choosing their minister, in what the minister preaches in the position they take on a particular social issue.
