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On church membership

Even if a church doesn’t have something formally called “membership”, they still need to know:

  • Who (by name) the leadership is responsible to shepherd
  • Who should be counted as fellow believers and mutually cared for by others as believers (Galatians 6:10)
  • Who is in good standing and not “purged” (1 Corinthians 5:9-13)
  • Who, if an outsider asks, is attached to that local church

If you don’t want to call that membership, then choose another term (some use “partnership”). But there needs to be a category between “guest” and “leader”.

As an evangelist this is tremendously helpful to me. When I meet someone who *claims* to be a Christian, I want to know if another body of believers has recognized the credibility of the profession of that person’s faith.

Let’s normalize and de-stigmatize membership. It’s not a dirty word. We can give it a healthy meaning. Don’t let culture (or the government) dictate the church’s ecclesiology. If it makes us weird, then let’s be weird.

If we’re going to conceptually purge our churches of the very idea of membership, then we need to be honest about the kind of radical divergence this is from historical Christianity.

This is also important because Utah has real false teachers and false public influencers. They claim to be Christian and even attend a local church. We need to be able to ask: Which faithful local evangelical church approves of what you’re doing? Who is backing you? Are you rogue, or are you really doing this with the blessing of your church elders?

This is also helpful for those church visitors who keep coming but have a false assurance of their salvation. The very matter of membership often creates conversations between pastors/members and a person who needs some shepherding toward faith and repentance. It’s such a pastoral win!

My friend Michael writes:

Assurance is a community project. The idea that a community can corporately regard an individual as “Gentile and tax collector” (Matthew 18) on the basis of bad fruit pushes us to recognize that professions of faith may be contradicted by the community, but conversely, can and should be affirmed by the community when the profession can be deemed credible, on the basis of good fruit.

Nominal Christians have largely abandoned their biblical duties that Christians are called to. Within community they are called to submit to their leaders and encourage and strengthen other believers, exercising their spiritual gifts to look after each other. Good questions for “Christians” who have no connection with the local church “how are you obeying the biblical command to submit to your leaders? And how are you expressing love for God’s church, which the Bible says is the evidence that you know God? (1 John).

“Church Membership” is a description (take it, or use your own) of what it means to be regarded by the community as a believer, to submit to and be accountable to its God instituted leadership, and to be accountable to the community as a whole, loving its people in community life. Again, if you don’t love God’s people, God’s word says you don’t have God’s love in you.

The specific sin of avoiding accountability and membership in a local church setting is an especially pervasive and unique challenge in our modern context. By its very nature it exacerbates the responsibility that we have to confront those who name Christ in their sin, because it removes the Matthew 18 system of community decision process and forces us as individuals to act as judge, jury, and executioner with how we will regard a “Christian hermit”. This is the unfair position that we are put in when we encounter Christian hermits, whose claim to have union with Christ must be affirmed, ignored, or contradicted (those being our only logical options); but it is the position that we are consistently faced with in this day.

As Christians we have a challenging responsibility, especially in this day, to begin to contradict these claims. For too long I, for one, have been willing to practice affirmation or to simply ignore the Christian hermit’s profession of faith, without challenging the individual with the biblical responsibilities of church membership and attendance. We should be patient and gentle in our confrontation, but be willing, ultimately (maybe after some time), to say to the Christian hermit, “I will not be party to your sin by ignoring it, and so I cannot call you brother until you repent of this sin, and join yourself to Christ’s church. Please, friend, follow God’s word, and come into a formal relationship with the visible church.”

We should trust the response to God’s hands. Christ’s sheep hear his voice and follow him. False professors ultimately represent the falsity of their profession by remaining outside. We must not forget that an individual’s response to Christian community is one of the criterion by which we would judge their profession of faith, not just an outward appearance of zeal and sincerity. If “they went out from us” can show that “they were not of us”, perpetual avoidance of Christian community does the same, and provides us with a measure of spiritual insight that we should not ignore.