thou shalt not dance. thou shalt not drink.

I'm just curious but do you think it's "okay" for a church to regulate what its leaders and small group leaders can do (i.e., let's just say for example the regulation of alcohol consumption or dancing at weddings)? Like, is it biblically-based to hold to such standards especially if persons under such standards feel they're extra-biblical and therefore, not necessarily essential?

Last night at small group we got into this discussion after I found out that the southern baptist denomination has these types of rules (or variations of them) and that just scared me a bit. I'm all for people being "above reproach" in living out their lives but I'm not sure it's biblical to set standards that YOU believe to be above-reproach-living that the Bible doesn't really ever address. We didn't get into a real deep discussion about it but many of them (new believers, so this seemed foreign to them) were wondering why in fact our church does hold this to be true. Is it just b/c of our southern baptist affiliation? I don't know. All I know is that my church may appear to be adding stuff to the Church standards and then telling everyone it is one of the essentials (which it's not)! Oh well. I'll be dancing some tonight in the car on the way home but thankfully, I'm not with my small group from church and so therefore, it's not wrong. However, if we all were in the car dancing together, then THAT would be a TOTALLY different story!!! (sense the sarcasm mixed with cynicism?)

Yikes.