Welcome back to Apostolic Life in the 21st Century, a podcast that is dedicated to helping modern

day believers live out the teachings of the first century church. With us again today is Dr. David

K. Bernard. He's going to help us. Today we're actually going to address

a question that has to do with the United Pentecostal Church International. Dr. Bernard is the

general superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International, so there literally is not a better

person to help us answer this question. Dr. Bernard, here in the United Pentecostal Church,

we have something that is known as affiliated churches. Now, based on my limited experience, I think

there might be some misunderstanding about what that term means and how affiliation actually works. So can you start today by just telling us

what is church affiliation? Yes, well, I'd like to use this for a more broader view and then we'll

focus on that question. So the UPCI is a fellowship of ministers and churches.

Now I've often heard the term it's a fellowship of ministers.

It's only half true.

It's a fellowship of ministers and churches.

So if you look at the constitution of the UPCI, technically and officially, all members are

credential ministers and missionaries and members of affiliated local churches.

So we're going to come back to that.

So actually, every local member of an affiliated church, we consider to be a UPCI member.

Now, as far as voting rights, local church members have voting rights in their local church.

Credential ministers, certain categories have voting rights in their section based on their jobs.

But then all credential ministers have voting rights at the district level at the general level. So there are

different kinds of membership that have different types of voting rights. But in our theory,

we consider not only preachers, but also church members to be members of the UPCI. So we're not just

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