I find it fascinating how, sometimes, a series of events (such as a conversation or an article) leads us towards a particular conversational path, reading direction, or even a way of thinking. In the case of this post, as you have no doubt already discerned based upon the title, my recent “series of events” has lead me back to thinking about church membership and what it means for the Christian and the local church.
As by way of my usual disclaimer, allow me to state up front that this has been an evolution for me. I grew up in a “typical” Southern Baptist church. I have pastored a “typical” Southern Baptist church and I now serve as a pastor of a liturgical Southern Baptist church. Membership has been a part of my church lingo for as long as I can remember. However, it’s this lingo that I have evolved on and what I’m hoping to unpack a little in this post.
I doubt that anyone serving in a pastoral ministry role during the COVID19 pandemic (and now in the wake of its aftermath), hasn’t in some form or fashion thought about this issue. Most, if not all, of us can look around our local sanctuaries during worship and quickly pinpoint where someone should be, but aren’t – either because they are concerned due to the virus or they have simply allowed the virus to recalibrate how they approach the gathered body of Christ in worship (and usually not for the better).
Without wandering down the rabbit trail of my thoughts on online “worship” or streaming “worship” (and you could include television worship in this as well for the older folks who watch the megachurch channel on Sundays) – there has been a noticeable change in how folks and families view their commitment to the local church body. While this has been a growing trend for decades (and is also nothing new, even in US history), the COVID19 pandemic seems to have exacerbated this issue… or made us more aware of it. Recent Gallup polling from earlier this year has shown that church membership in the United States has fallen below the 50% for the first time in American History.
With all of that said (and while I won’t claim to have the answer to the problem, nor do I think that what I will propose below will fix the issue), I do think that there needs to be a change in language… a change in lingo… a change in how we as ministers and Christians approach church membership and teach church membership – not only to our current members, but also to new members. We need better language. And we need not look beyond the language of Scripture to give us this new, better lingo.
Membership in Scripture
Let’s address the elephant in the room before we move into the conversation on lingo change… is Membership even found in Scripture?
Are you sitting down? You ready? The answer is: No. No… the language of membership is not found in Scripture…. explicitly. The same is absolutely true of the term “Trinity.” But, like the Trinity, Scripture does explain and give examples of membership within its pages.
Now, any critically thinking person would rightly ask the obvious follow up question – “If Scripture doesn’t explicitly mention membership, then how can we determine membership based on Scripture? Where is membership found?”
Let me thank you for asking the question! Let’s do a very brief Biblical Theology on Membership and, for the purpose of this post, point us to where we can see membership within the pages of Holy Scripture.
Old Testament
Determining Membership from the Old Testament may seem fairly obvious to most – Membership within the people of God is found explicitly within the ethnic nation of Israel herself. In many ways, this does not directly equate with membership within the local church, but this does begin to bridge the gap in the proposal of changing our lingo (which I will get to down below).
From a 30k foot view of Scripture, we quickly see that God called out a particular ethnic people with which to dwell and with which to covenant. We call them the people of Israel because they are so named after the Patriarch Jacob (who’s name was changed to Israel in Genesis 32:28). Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, particularly in the persons of Ruth and Rahab, we see instances of people who were not of the ethnic people of Israel being brought into the people of Israel either through marriage, conquest, or even request. The Old Testament Law given through Moses offers provisions on how an individual can be made part of the ethnic people of Israel.
But, here’s the point… God, in his mercy and grace, is a God who chooses for himself a people to dwell with and to covenant with. In the Old Testament period this was exclusive to the ethnic people of Israel, with provisions for foreigners who wanted to be brought into the nation. While we wouldn’t explicitly say that this is membership… in the language of 21st century America, we can comfortably make this comparison.
New Testament
That’s the Old Testament… what about the New? We’re under the grace of God, not the Law. So… where do we find membership within the New Testament.
Again, taking a 30k fly over of the Bible, if you would direct your attention to the left side of the aircraft you will see below us The Acts of the Apostle’s chapter 2. We know Acts 2 as the day of Pentecost and Peter’s sermon on Pentecost. If you continue to make your way through the chapter we see in verse 41: “those who received his (Peter’s) word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” Meaning… these folks believed the Gospel, were baptized, and were received into the people of God.
During the events of Acts 2-8:3 everything takes place within Jerusalem. There were so many partly because so many had come to Jerusalem for the series of Feasts that were taking place. After 3000 were baptized on the day of Pentecost, they stayed in Jerusalem instead of going back to their homes across the Roman Empire. In chapter 6, we read that even more folks had been added and the issue of care for widows became a problem for this first church. But the point here is…. for however long the events of Acts 2-8:3 took place, these 3000 plus folks were all part of the same church who, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the braking of bread and the prayers… a the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42 & 47). After the event of Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7:54-8:3, we see in 8:1 that, “they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria…” taking with them the apostles’ teaching, the fellowship (gathering), and the breaking of bread, and the hours of prayer. Leaving us to appropriately conclude that they created their own local expressions of the greater body of Christ… they created local churches, local gatherings for the purpose of worship, prayer, and the sacraments.
But… where is membership? We see membership not only in gathering, but in discipline, in discipling, in praying, in healing, etc… we see this throughout all of the rest of Acts in Samaria, Asia Minor, Greece, and even in Rome. We see in Acts that Paul and Barnabas (and later Mark, Timothy, Titus, Luke and so on) being sent out as missionaries from specific local churches (Antioch and Ephesus in particular). We see Paul sharing the Gospel and then establishing local churches (Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica). We see in the epistles each of the Apostle’s exhorting local churches and their leaders to properly care for and shepherd their churches. We see in the letters written to specific individuals (Timothy, Titus, Philemon) the encouragement to care for the people of God in their local context (Timothy in Ephesus, Titus on Crete, & Philemon to accept his run away slave, Onesimus, back as a brother in Christ). We see in Hebrews, the author encouraging the persecuted church in Jerusalem specifically. We see in the Apocalypse of John (Revelation), letters, warnings, and encouragements written to specific churches in specific places.
We see these things in the New Testament in how they are addressed to churches in order to deal with the issues and struggles in their specific local contexts… Ephesus isn’t exhorted to discipline the unruly members of Corinth and Titus isn’t instructed to usurp Timothy’s authority in Ephesus. And while we do not get the language of membership explicitly we do get it implicitly. While we ought to always rightly acknowledge the greater body of Christ around the world and from all eras, we also rightly understand that, as the Gospel goes out, local expressions of the body of Christ are established, and people gather together for the purpose of worship, fellowship, discipline, the sacraments and encouragement.
Membership as Covenant
So let’s turn our discussion back towards the conversation surrounding our lingo. Why do I think we need to reconsider how we approach this necessary topic?
Because, frankly, when we approach the church as “members” we approach it like we would approach our local civic club, gym, country club, or YMCA. It’s a place that exists primarily to meet my felt needs for a particular time in my life… not a place to which I commit my life, my emotions, my talents, my skills, and even my innermost personal self. It only exists to meet my needs and when it no longer does, I can simply go find another one and “move my membership.”
Honestly, I think this has become a major issue more within the last hundred years or so, more than it was throughout most of Christian history. We can blame most of this on the advent of the internal combustion engine and the automobile. When the Ford dealership opened down the street, it opened to us a whole new way of doing life, the local church included.
My suggestion, then, as you probably noted from the section title above, is that we think of membership as covenant. This is odd language to us, particularly in the West where we can “vote with our feet.” But if we were to continue to take our 30k foot flyover of Scripture, we quickly begin to see that our God is not only a choosing God… but he is a God who covenants. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Israel, David … the Church (And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins, Matthew 26:27-28).
If our God is a God who covenants, and we are His people who enter into covenant with Him and we are to be like Him … then membership is better understood as covenant. And here’s why: Covenant helps us better understand our connection to Christ Jesus within the local church. Consider with me one particular place in Scripture and then we’ll pick up this discussion again in a later post after some interaction with one another.
In Ephesians 5 we are given directions from the Apostle Paul on the covenant between husbands and wives and it’s relation to Christ. We rightly turn to this passage of Ephesians 5 when discussing marriage, doing marriage counseling, or even encouragement in marriage. But consider the relation to Christ and the Church in this passage… to Christ, we are his bride. Just as we would nourish and cherish our own bodies, Christ Jesus nourishes and cherishes his church.
While it is true that you need to personally read Scripture, pray, and grow in Christ, we are not meant to do it alone. In his new book Rediscover Church, Jonathan Leeman boldly states in the introduction, “a Christian without a church is a Christian in trouble.” This is because the church is more than a country club, it’s more than the local gym or the YMCA… it is the covenant people of God for whom Christ died. The church is essential. And when we covenant together as God’s covenant people, we are proclaiming to the world (and more importantly, to one another) that here in this place and this time is a local expression of the body of the Lord Jesus.
In a marriage covenant, it is understood that the first few years of marriage are the hardest because, more than anything else, a new husband and wife are learning to live with one another’s quirks, likes and dislikes, smells, and habits. But… because there has been a deeper commitment than dating, it’s also understood that a husband and wife will work through those differences and come to a place where they lovingly accept or compromise for the sake of a more peaceful life together. (Note: all of this is predicated on the idea that marriage is holy and that divorce is not an easy out when things get frustrating or hard and the understanding that it’s best to wait until marriage to live together).
The same is true with the church! This is the challenge of our lives in the kingdom of God: along with our own growth in Christ Jesus, the work of discipleship and evangelism, and even gathering for worship… we are to contemplate the mystery that is the Church. This is harder than we realize, but absolutely necessary, especially when we realize that, regardless of how awkward, how frustrating, how stinky (or too much perfume), how under or over dressed … no one approaches God except by his mercy and his grace. No one can sneak into the wedding feast. We all must be invited.
And because we all need God’s grace to even get into the door, it’s essential that we realize that every local church will have it’s scars. It will have that one elder or pastor that just rubs you the wrong way. It will have that one old lady who’s a bit too bossy and thinks it’s her job to run the church. It will have that one old guy that will always be too much of a close talker and desperately needs a mint. But it will also have you with your flaws as well. But when we covenant together, and not join in a membership letter that can just be moved when we feel like it, we accept the fact that this is a lifetime commitment (barring moving or a local church becoming completely apostate, along with other biblical reasons to move on).
I think we use the language of membership because it just feels natural. We could even use it to mean “covenanting” but it just doesn’t seem to carry the weight that it needs to. I don’t know how to make this change, but I do think that a change is needed, particularly in our current era and culture.
I’ll end with this: I guess my desire is simply to emphasize the desperate need that we actually have for one another. For gathering and worship, yes… but also for much more. Life together is actually life together. Not “see you next Sunday, but leave me alone until then.” I don’t think a change in lingo will accomplish this on its own… but I do think it’s a start.
So, Christian (especially if you haven’t returned to church since the COVID19 outbreak) don’t join a church, covenant with a church. Commit to that local church, wherever you are while God has you there. Not only for your own good, but for the good of the church. Because, as Leeman noted… a Christian without a church is a Christian in trouble.
The SouthTown Pastor 