One
of the more contentious issues that I have to deal with as a pastor these days surrounds
the issue of local church membership. Believe it or not, what was a generation
or two ago a foregone conclusion for most church attending families and
individuals has become a counter-cultural declaration these days against a
(false) understanding that aligning with a church is somehow a betrayal of
biblical principles. Consequently I've been devoting a lot of time and prayer
over the last few months to coming to a better understanding of what local
church membership entails and why it’s important for Christians today. During
my studies I have learned some things that I didn't previously understand and
it’s shifted my convictions on the matter from one of bewildered
acknowledgement of a necessary evil to one of strong support and conviction of
its importance. What follows is something I've been working on this summer that
after some undoubtedly necessary revisions will, I hope, form the basis of our
corporate teaching on the issue of church membership and the foundation of a
new church membership course. I hope it speaks to you.
Why associate with the
Church?
In
light of recent bad press covering scandals in churches, of declining
attendance across the country and the perceived irrelevance of churches, and of
negative attitudes toward perceived judgementalism, arrogance, politicisation
and self-centredness by Christians and their related groups the idea of
following Jesus without embracing the local church has reached historic levels
of popularity. Post-Congregational
Christianity is a buzz word these days that many people have bought into
with the idea that the local church is beyond redemption as an institution and
that connection through Christ with the invisible or universal Church is
enough. While this approach may seem attractive to many who have been
disillusioned with or hurt by a local congregation of believers the idea of
pursuing the Christian life apart from a vital connection with a local body of
believers is thoroughly unbiblical.
There
is a famous passage in the book of Hebrews that exhorts believers to not give
up meeting together as the local church – on the surface for a Christian that
should be enough; God commands so we respond. In many ways the mandate to be
connected to a local body of believers is an open and shut case, but the
Scriptures don’t leave us without reasoning behind this command.
And let us consider how we may
spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting
together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another —and
all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Hebrews 10:24-25
If
we look back to the account of the creation of the world we learn that from the
very onset we were created to exist in perpetual relationship. We were created
in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), the image of a Trinitarian God who exists
in perpetual and perfect relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit –
relationship is in our DNA; it’s who we are made to be. Moreover when God first
creates man he identifies the only
aspect of his creation that is not ‘good’ – man’s aloneness (Genesis 2:18).
From this crisis God creates woman, and man and woman are united in a horizontal
relationship that mirrors the vertical relationship that man had with God
himself. Community was God’s plan from the outset – but sin entered the world
and that community was shattered.
In
the aftermath of the fall many things changed for humanity; peace became war,
pleasure became toil, everlasting life was corrupted by death and the perfect
community of ‘we’ became in the words of theologian Henri De Lubac, “the Detestable ‘I’.” Independence is a
word that we celebrate and a concept that we aspire to in our cultural setting
– but independence was not part of God’s original plan for us – it is in fact a
curse of the fall. Even from early on in the unfolding of God’s redemptive
drama we see the indicators that one of the things God wants to set right is
our estrangement from each other. When God calls Abram the first thing he
promises is to make him into a great nation (Genesis 12:2), this wandering
nomad was to see the fulfilment of God’s promise in the creation of a community
of salvation. When Moses leads the Israelites into the wilderness, the very
first thing that God has him do is to organise them into a worshipping
community –a pattern that has carried through in the practice and priorities of
God’s people even into the church age where the first Christians are described
as a people who continually met together in worship (Acts 2:42-47).
Every day they continued to meet
together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together
with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the
people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Acts 2:46-57
Association
with a local church is therefore about recognizing and embracing the way we
were designed to live with the image of God imprinted upon us. We were made to
be a part of God’s redeemed, worshipping and world-changing community. We were
saved into the invisible Church and we are called, invited, exhorted and
commanded to work out our salvation in the context of the local church. So how
do we go about doing that? That’s where the concept of church membership
arises.
Why affiliate with a local church?
Church
membership can be a touchy issue for people today. All sorts of reasons and
excuses are given as to why someone won’t make a formal commitment to a local
body of believers that they worship with. Some say that they hold membership in
the church that they grew up attending and that they don’t want to forsake that
commitment to establish a new one where they are worshipping; others are
insulted at the insinuation that their involvement and attendance at a church
in their current capacity as an adherent (someone who comes to church but is
not a member of said congregation) is not enough to get over the membership
hump; and others still object on theological grounds based on a
misunderstanding of scripture that local church membership is not a biblical
idea. Perhaps the best way to address these issues, as well as others that may
not have yet been voiced is to look at what church membership is and how it is
defined in Scripture.
It’s all about relationships
As
we have already established, we are wired for relationships. God created us to
be in relationships and then set about the task of creating worshipping
communities for us to express our need for interconnectedness and
interdependence in. The Church is the current embodiment of God’s provision for
that need. Likewise, the basis of local
church membership is also relationship; the local church is the physical
expression of the invisible Church and the way through which we have
relationship with God’s people. When we look at how we frame the nature of that
relationship that is local church membership we see two big categories of
expression. Membership in a local church is first an expression of love, and
secondly an expression of commitment.
Local church membership as
an expression of love
The
bible repeatedly echoes the theme that the defining mark of the Church will be
the love we have for one another. The scriptures testify that our love for our
Christian brothers and sisters will be our witness to the world (John 13:35),
the way we emulate Christ (John 15:12), and the way we express our devotion to
each other (Romans 12:10). More than that the scriptures give us examples of
how this love for our Christian brethren is supposed to be lived out.
Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. – Romans 12:15
Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with
one another in love. – Ephesians 4:2
Therefore encourage one another and build each other up – 1Thessalonians
5:11
But encourage one another daily – Hebrews 3:13
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each
other so that you may be healed. – James 5:16
Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. – 1 Peter 4:9
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but you can
see already that the ways in which we are called to live out our love for our
brothers and sisters in Christ cannot be done outside of the context of local
Christian fellowship. You cannot encourage someone with whom you are not in a
relationship; you cannot offer hospitality to someone with whom you do not
spend time with; you cannot bear with someone unless you exist in community
with them – participation in the local church is essential to living out the
Christian life. There is a difference between participation and membership
though – love can be expressed in both settings but the second aspect,
commitment – is only present in formalized membership.
By this everyone will know that
you are my disciples, if you love one another.
John 13:35
Local church membership as a
declaration of commitment
Commitment is a loaded term in these sorts of
discussions. As soon as we start down this path it calls into question the
sincerity of conviction of the many people in our congregation who have
consciously decided not to pursue formal affiliation with EAC through church
membership. At EAC we understand that to declare all non-members in our
congregation to be less than fully committed to the church is an
oversimplification of the situation and it is not our desire or intent to
put-down or malign anyone because of their objections to church membership. We
do however believe with a strong conviction that church membership is both
biblical and beneficial for both the believer and the church; and because of
that we unashamedly call those who decide to make EAC their church home to a
deeper and more explicit profession of commitment and affiliation with our
church. We believe that when carefully examined, the Bible testifies to three
different ways in which formal church membership is defined and encouraged: by
discrimination, by authority and by participation in the whole. Let’s begin by
looking at discrimination.
Local church membership is
defined by an act of discrimination
Discrimination in its most essential definition does
not have any connotations of bigotry or hatred associated with it. That
colloquial understanding of discrimination is a fairly recent semantic –
fundamentally, to discriminate is to make a choice. We talk about someone with
discriminating tastes as someone who is very choosy about what they buy, knowing
the differences between similar products that others may lump into the same
category. In the context of the church, discrimination is the act of
identifying who is in, and who is out. Over the course of the Apostle Paul’s
correspondence with the Corinthian church there is the issue of a particular
man from within the congregation that is having sexual relations with his
step-mother. Obviously this is seen as inappropriate and Paul encourages the
congregation to discipline the man by putting him outside the fellowship:
What business is it of mine to judge those outside the
church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel
the wicked person from among you.” – 1 Corinthians 5:12-13
The very idea of expelling this man from the
fellowship of the church necessitates that there is a clear delineation between
what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside.’ Paul and the leaders of that
congregation (at the very least) would be able to discriminate between the
people who were in and the people who were out. The story goes further than
that though – in 2 Corinthians after some time had passed in this man’s
punishment Paul writes the church again with further instructions that shed
even more light on this discrimination of membership:
If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me
as he has grieved all of you to some extent—not to put it too severely. The
punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient.
– 2 Corinthians 2:5-6
The term ‘majority’
here once again requires that there be discrimination between those who are in
and those who are out. In fact a majority requires not just a general standard
of compliance but an understanding of a numerical threshold by which the
majority is measured against. By this example we can see how membership in the
New Testament scriptures is defined by the act of discrimination.
Local church membership as
defined by relationship to authority
There is an old proverb that says “He who thinks he
leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk.” By definition therefore,
to be a leader you must be leading someone – and to lead a group that group
must know who they are. The very fact that there are identifiable leaders of
New Testament churches necessitates that that there is some discernible group
that they are leading. In Hebrews 13 we are told that we are to submit to the
authority of our leaders and the pattern through the book of Acts was for Paul
to set up elders in every church he planted so that Godly leaders would be
shepherds of the flock (Acts 20:28, 1 Peter 5:2).
Have confidence in your leaders
and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who
must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden,
for that would be of no benefit to you.
Hebrews 13:17
Shepherds know their sheep (John 10:14), that is
they know who is a part of their flock and who is not – how else could the
shepherd go in search of the one missing out of one-hundred (Luke 15:4)? In the
same way, for local congregations to have shepherds the shepherds must know who
is in, who is out, and who was just visiting last Sunday. Membership is the way
we understand who is committed to the flock and who’s just grazing in the
pasture.
Be shepherds of God’s flock that
is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you
are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to
serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the
flock.
1 Peter 5:2-3
Local church membership as
defined by participation in the whole
The
last way in which we will demonstrate a biblical precedent for local church
membership is by demonstrating how each member is a distinct and important part
of a larger, measurable whole. To demonstrate this we turn to Paul’s famous
exposition on the Body of Christ found in 1 Corinthians 12:
For just as the body is one and has many members,
and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or
free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If
the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,”
that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say,
“Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it
any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense
of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?
But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as
he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?
1 Corinthians 12:12-19
It’s
a common misunderstanding that the local church has borrowed the language of
membership from the secular world and forced it upon the body of Christ in an
attempt to create a modern society out of a spiritual body of believers;
whereas the reality of the situation is that the opposite is true. The English
word ‘member’ traces its roots
through old French ‘membre’ and the
Latin ‘membrum’ where it was
originally translated in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible from the
Greek word melos which means
(unsurprisingly) a member part of the body. Its core meaning is that it is a
constitutive part of a larger whole – this was the original meaning of the word
and this was the thrust of the Apostle when he wrote the letter. Society
adopted the concept of membership based on what the Church practiced – not
vice-versa. Since once again the whole is a measurable quantity (something is
either complete or it is not) and since each member of the body is an integral
and unique part, we must draw the conclusion that there is some formal
understanding of membership within the local body of Christ at Corinth.
Now you are the body of Christ
and individually members of it.
1 Corinthians 12:27
And
if the churches that were planted by Paul had the practice of formal membership
then we can hardly make the argument anymore that the concept itself is foreign
to scripture and is an imposition of secular society upon the order and
function of the church.
And
if then, membership (as we see in scripture) is a declaration of connection to
a group (discrimination); if it is a declaration of submission to Godly church
authorities; and if it is the acknowledgement of participation in a larger
whole, with an important and specific role to play then it can rightly be said
that formal church membership is a commitment to the local church in a way that
simply attending church is not. The question then becomes – what’s stopping you
from committing yourself? What’s stopping you from entering into a formal
relationship with the body of Christ in which you can best practice Christian
love and service?
