PART IV
Local Christian Freedom
The Articles in this Part protect the substantial freedom intentionally left to local Christians. That freedom exists within the common Christian foundation and the Constitutional Requirements already established. What the Charter leaves open should remain genuinely open, and what the Charter establishes as a boundary should remain clear.
Article 14. Legitimate Christian Diversity and Local Discernment
14.1 Unity in Christ Without Uniformity
Proximity Fellowship seeks unity in Christ without manufactured uniformity. Christians do not need to become identical in every theological interpretation, church tradition, cultural expression, or local practice before they can gather together faithfully.
The common Christian foundation provides sufficient ground for fellowship while leaving room for meaningful differences beyond it. Diversity that can be carried faithfully within the Framework should not be treated as a defect merely because it is visible.
Unity should therefore be sought through shared allegiance to Christ, attention to Scripture, love, truthfulness, patience, and mutual responsibility rather than through pressure to reproduce one person’s preferred form of Christianity.
14.2 Different Christian Traditions
Participants may come from Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed, evangelical, independent, and other Christian traditions. A Participant is not required to abandon or conceal an ecclesial identity merely in order to participate.
Proximity Fellowship itself is anchored in the historic Protestant Christian tradition as stated in Article 1. That theological location should remain clear. It does not require every Participant to become Protestant, nor does it require the Framework to pretend that Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and other Christian traditions hold identical understandings of Scripture, authority, sacraments, ministry, or doctrine.
Clarity and hospitality can exist together. Christians may enter fellowship honestly without requiring either the Framework or the Participant to conceal where each stands.
14.3 Theological Differences Beyond the Common Foundation
Beyond the Foundational Christian Confession, Participants may hold different convictions on many theological questions. These may include baptism, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, church government, predestination, the detailed order of salvation, creation models, theories of atonement, forms of worship, and the timing and manner of events surrounding Christ’s return.
Such differences may be held seriously. Proximity does not ask Participants to become indifferent to theology or to treat every interpretation as equally persuasive. Convictions may be taught, discussed, examined, and challenged with appropriate humility.
Where the Charter has not made a matter part of the common foundation or a Constitutional Requirement, disagreement on that matter should not automatically become a test of Christian legitimacy within Proximity Fellowship.
14.4 Matters the Charter Leaves Open
A matter is genuinely open within Proximity when the Charter neither includes it in the Foundational Christian Confession nor establishes a Constitutional Requirement governing it.
Open matters may be addressed locally according to Scripture, Christian conviction, conscience, prayer, wisdom, circumstances, and applicable law. A local fellowship may develop a practice that serves its Participants well without presenting that practice as the universal position of Proximity Fellowship.
Local freedom includes the freedom to make real decisions. It also includes the discipline of remembering that a useful local decision does not become binding upon every other fellowship merely because it has worked well in one place.
14.5 Conscience and Mutual Accommodation
Participants should exercise Christian conscience thoughtfully before God and with serious regard for Scripture and the good of others. Freedom of conscience does not require every personal preference to be adopted by the fellowship, nor does shared fellowship require a Participant to surrender every conviction.
Where differing convictions can reasonably coexist, Participants should seek practical accommodation with humility and goodwill. This may involve explaining that a practice is optional, allowing a Participant to abstain, arranging different opportunities, seeking mutual agreement, or simply accepting that sincere disagreement remains.
Accommodation should not become coercion in either direction. A majority should not unnecessarily compel a minority in matters the Charter leaves open, and an individual should not insist that every personal conviction govern the whole fellowship.
14.6 Freedom Does Not Require Participation in Every Practice
A Participant should not be assumed to endorse or take part in every practice that another Participant regards as legitimate. Where a practice is permitted but not required by the Framework, a Participant may ordinarily decline to participate according to conscience.
Declining an optional practice should not by itself be treated as rejection of the fellowship, disrespect toward other Participants, or evidence of spiritual deficiency. At the same time, freedom to abstain should be exercised in a way that does not deliberately disrupt the gathering, humiliate others, or violate their dignity and safety.
The Framework seeks room for Christians to gather together without requiring each person to perform every permitted expression of Christian life.
14.7 Disagreement Without Contempt
Serious disagreement does not justify contempt. Participants should be free to state convictions clearly, ask difficult questions, challenge interpretations, and explain why they cannot share another person’s conclusion.
Such disagreement should avoid mockery, humiliation, personal caricature, factional hostility, and the assumption that every difference proves bad faith. The strongest argument should not need cruelty in order to remain strong.
Christian love does not require silence, ambiguity, or surrender of conviction. It does require that another person’s dignity remain intact even when the disagreement is substantial. Where continued fellowship becomes impractical, Article 13 provides room for separation without unnecessary hostility.
14.8 Diversity Within Constitutional Boundaries
Local Christian freedom exists within the constitutional identity of Proximity Fellowship. Diversity cannot be used to set aside the Foundational Christian Confession, the Constitutional Requirements, or the public integrity of the Framework.
Accordingly, a local fellowship may not use the language of diversity or conscience to redefine Proximity’s biblical canon, present the Deuterocanonical or Apocryphal books as part of Holy Scripture in the name of the Framework, replace the marriage standard established by Article 6 with a contrary Framework position, disregard safeguarding requirements, excuse coercion or abuse, or otherwise contradict an express constitutional boundary.
A Participant may personally hold a different conviction on a matter where the Charter permits personal disagreement. That personal conviction does not automatically exclude the person from ordinary fellowship. Yet freedom of conscience does not require Proximity Fellowship to enact that conviction as the public position or practice of the Framework.
Diversity within Proximity is therefore real and substantial, but not undefined. What is open should remain open. What is required should remain clear. In that balance, the Framework seeks unity without manufactured uniformity and conviction without coercion.
Article 15. Local Decisions, Practices, and Forms of Fellowship
15.1 Local Responsibility
Each Proximity Fellowship is primarily responsible for the ordinary life of its own gathering. Local Participants should take appropriate responsibility for meeting arrangements, schedules, communication, practical organization, distribution of responsibilities, local customs, and other matters that this Charter leaves to them.
Decentralization is not the absence of responsibility. The freedom to make local decisions carries the responsibility to make them carefully, honestly, and consistently with the Foundational Christian Confession, the Constitutional Requirements, applicable law, and the dignity and safety of those involved.
ProximityFellowship.org provides the Framework. It does not ordinarily direct the daily affairs of local fellowships.
15.2 Decisions Should Remain Close to the People Who Bear Them
Decisions concerning the ordinary life of a fellowship should ordinarily remain as close as reasonably possible to the people who will live with their consequences.
A matter should not be transferred unnecessarily to ProximityFellowship.org, another fellowship, or a distant authority merely because centralization appears more orderly. Local responsibility helps preserve both freedom and accountability.
Where a decision materially affects particular Participants, their experience and concerns should ordinarily be heard. Responsibility is healthiest when those who carry the practical consequences are not treated merely as observers of decisions made for them.
15.3 Shared Deliberation
Participants should ordinarily deliberate together about matters that significantly affect their shared life. Good deliberation seeks understanding before judgment, listening before conclusion, and sufficient clarity before action.
Prayer and attention to Scripture should have an appropriate place where the nature of the question calls for them. Participants should also be willing to distinguish theological conviction from personal preference, practical necessity from habit, and genuine principle from attachment to a familiar arrangement.
Shared deliberation does not require endless discussion. Its purpose is responsible Christian judgment rather than procedural perfection.
15.4 Consensus Where Reasonably Possible
Where reasonably possible, a local fellowship should seek substantial agreement before making decisions that significantly affect its common life. Consensus can help preserve trust, reveal concerns that might otherwise be missed, and reduce unnecessary pressure upon minorities.
Consensus does not mean that every Participant must agree with every detail before anything can be done. Nor should one person be able to prevent reasonable action indefinitely merely by refusing agreement.
The aim is not unanimity as an absolute rule. The aim is to make serious decisions with enough listening, patience, and mutual regard that Participants can understand how and why the fellowship has acted.
15.5 Other Fair Methods of Decision
Where consensus cannot reasonably be reached, a fellowship may use another fair method of decision that suits its circumstances. This may include a majority decision, agreement among those carrying a particular responsibility, or another method that Participants have reasonably accepted.
No decision-making method should be treated as spiritually infallible. A majority is not automatically correct because it is larger, and a minority should not be treated with contempt merely because its position did not prevail.
Methods should remain proportionate to the matter. A small practical question does not need the same process as a decision that substantially affects the identity, safety, finances, or continuing life of the fellowship.
15.6 Local Customs
A local fellowship may develop customs that help its Participants gather faithfully and consistently. These may concern meeting times, shared meals, prayer patterns, welcoming newcomers, communication, care for children, hospitality, or other ordinary features of shared life.
A custom that works well may be valued without being elevated into universal law. Length of use does not turn a local habit into a Constitutional Requirement.
Participants should remain able to ask whether a custom still serves the purpose for which it developed. Tradition can be a gift when it serves fellowship. It becomes burdensome when familiarity alone is treated as sufficient reason that it must never change.
15.7 Local Forms of Worship and Fellowship
Within the boundaries of this Charter, local fellowships may shape forms of worship and fellowship according to their Christian convictions, cultures, circumstances, and gifts.
One gathering may include singing, structured prayer, teaching, and the Lord’s Supper. Another may be quieter and more conversational. A fellowship may meet around a table, in a home, in another suitable venue, or in a form that develops naturally from its circumstances.
Local freedom should not become competition over which form is most spiritual. The question is whether the form helps Christians gather faithfully under Christ, hear and respond to Scripture, love one another, and live responsibly together.
15.8 Local Leadership Arrangements
A local fellowship may arrange responsibility through a Host, several Hosts, elders, deacons, facilitators, teachers, stewards, other forms of service, or no formal titles where titles are unnecessary.
Article 10 provides the Framework’s guidance concerning leadership. Local freedom does not permit leadership to become ownership, domination, or personal control. Whatever structure is chosen should serve the fellowship and remain consistent with the character, accountability, and safeguarding principles established by this Charter.
A local arrangement that works well for one fellowship does not become the required model for another.
15.9 Local Practices Should Remain Reviewable
Local arrangements should remain open to reasonable review. Participants should periodically be willing to ask whether a practice still serves the fellowship, whether responsibility has become unnecessarily concentrated, whether a recommendation has quietly become a rule, or whether a local custom has become more rigid than its purpose requires.
Review should not be understood as distrust of everything inherited. It is part of responsible stewardship. Healthy arrangements should be capable of correction before a crisis makes correction unavoidable.
A practice may be retained because it remains useful. It may also be simplified, changed, or discontinued where the Charter permits and experience shows that another arrangement would serve better.
15.10 Temporary Solutions Should Not Become Permanent Rules Without Need
A difficulty may sometimes require a temporary rule, special arrangement, added safeguard, or unusual division of responsibility. Such responses may be wise for the circumstances that produced them.
The existence of one difficulty does not mean that every future fellowship or Participant must live under the same response. Temporary solutions should not become permanent expectations merely through inertia.
When the reason for a special arrangement has passed, Participants should be willing to reconsider whether the arrangement is still necessary. Development should solve genuine problems without allowing yesterday’s solutions to accumulate into unnecessary permanent rules.
15.11 Freedom With Responsibility
Local Christian freedom is substantial, but it is never freedom from responsibility. Participants remain responsible for the consequences of the practices, structures, and decisions they choose.
A fellowship should not appeal to decentralization as a reason to ignore foreseeable harm, financial integrity, safeguarding, lawful obligations, or the Constitutional Requirements. Nor should responsibility be used as an excuse to centralize matters the Charter intentionally leaves local.
Freedom and responsibility belong together. Local Christians are trusted to discern and act because the Framework expects them to exercise prayer, wisdom, conscience, humility, love, and mature judgment under Christ.
15.12 When a Local Fellowship No Longer Needs the Framework
A Proximity Fellowship may reach a point where the Framework is no longer necessary or useful for its continuing life. It may become part of another church or Christian community, adopt another lawful form, continue independently under another name, divide peacefully into other fellowships, or simply conclude that its season together has ended.
Such a development should not automatically be treated as failure. Proximity does not exist in order to make Christians permanently dependent upon Proximity.
Where a fellowship ceases using the Proximity Framework, it should represent that change honestly and cease presenting itself publicly as a Proximity Fellowship. Article 7 governs the public use of the name.
The measure of success is not whether a local fellowship remains attached to the Framework indefinitely. If the Framework has helped Christians gather faithfully, grow in maturity, and become less dependent upon a human structure, it has served its purpose.
The fellowship is the purpose. The Framework is the means.
Final Affirmation
Proximity Fellowship rests finally upon these convictions:
Christ is the Head.
Scripture is the norm.
No human being is indispensable.
The fellowship is the purpose. The Framework is the means.
May the Framework remain a servant.
May the fellowship remain Christ’s.
May Christians draw nearer to Him and to one another.
This resource may be freely downloaded, printed, and shared for the life and practice of Proximity Fellowship. The text may not be modified, Proximity Fellowship attribution may not be removed, sections may not be incorporated into another publication, and printed copies may not be sold, except with prior written permission from Proximity Fellowship.
Digital Resources
Publication links – not part of this publication’s text.
Read Online
- Proximity Fellowship Website
- The Proximity Fellowship Charter
- The Proximity Fellowship Quick Starter
- The Proximity Fellowship: A Guide to Christian Practices
- The Proximity Fellowship Seasons of Transience
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