Thabiti Anyabwile wrote a short piece on church membership for Christianity Today’s Off The Agenda blog called Church Membership? Yes. I enjoy reading Thabiti, he has a lot of wisdom to share. On this particular issue however I think he is defending something that is both extra-Biblical and unnecessary.
He makes four points that are supposed to support church membership. I wanted to look at all four of them and make a few comments.
First, you cannot practice meaningful membership or community where anonymity reigns. If people don't know each other, then it's impossible to knit the relationship fabric that is so central to biblical Christianity. So you need a practice that clearly reduces anonymity and increases interpersonal knowing.
This is the first and the most inexplicable. When someone becomes a “member” in most churches I have been in, they are presented for membership and a vote is taken. How does that foster a sense of community and overcome anonymity? In churches with a couple hundred “members”, how well do they know one another and if they do know each other, is that because of or in spite of formal church membership. To the contrary I believe that the formal membership system actually encourages anonymity by creating “fellowship” on Sunday morning where there is little or no interaction. Some of our closest friends are folks who lived by us and we attended church together with them. Neither of us were members in this church and neither of us attends there now. We still are good friends because we built a relationship with one another and most of that happened outside of the church walls. We spent time in each others homes, over coffee, in Bible studies in other homes. Our kids played together and we prayed for and with each other. If anything, formal membership gives a false sense of community and perhaps even harms fellowship instead of encouraging it.
Second, you cannot practice meaningful membership where gospel commitments and imperatives are not explicitly expected. Membership exists in large measure for the impartation of spiritual grace (1 Pet. 4:10–11), the exchange of love (John 13:34–35), correction (Gal. 6:1–2; Matt. 18:15–17), and so on. Membership means we are better together than we are apart. The membership process should make this clear, calling the members to "sign on the dotted line" of loving others across economic, social, linguistic, cultural, and other barriers.
I am not sure what being a “member” has to do with that. Do I really need to “sign on the dotted line” to ensure that I love my brother? Do we love one another because we truly view one another as brothers and sisters or because we signed onto a formal church membership covenant? I agree that we need to be committed to each other, love each other, correction and edify one another. I just don’t see where formal membership is required or even a benefit to seeing that happen. I can be in fellowship with other men and women without worrying about them having a membership in the same church as I do.
Third, you need a practice that makes it clear that people are submitted to and desiring of pastoral oversight (1 Pet. 5:2). You cannot practice meaningful membership or community where anti-authority, anti-leadership, anti-accountability attitudes predominate. I'm afraid that these attitudes explain much of the resistance to membership; people don't want to be accountable. They imagine that their accountability to Jesus may be maintained without any accountability to His people. But it's among His people—through their love and care and commitment—that Jesus ordinarily establishes accountability with His sheep.
Should we submit to “pastoral oversight” because we are formal members in a local church or because we are admonished to in Scripture? Where we gather on Sundays, there are three elders. If any of them came to me with a word of correction, I would heed them because they are elders and fellow brothers in Christ even though we are not “members” nor is there a membership at this assembly at all. We have no formal membership with this assembly outside of the shared salvation we have received. I would flip that around and ask where the accountability really takes place in churches with formal membership. I am not anti-accountable, or anti-leadership, or anti-authority. I am anti-church traditions without Scriptural command or example!
Finally, we need a membership process that maintains the Bible's temporal sequence of conversion, baptism, membership and communion. The observable pattern of the New Testament is: first, gospel preaching; second, hearing mixed with faith; and third, public profession of faith in baptism, which marks entrance into the covenant community, and consequently the privilege of communion at our Lord's Table.
This fourth point is the most troubling. Conversion, baptism, communion yes. But slipping in membership is more than a stretch. There is absolutely no mention of any sort of formal membership, no membership process, no admission to the Lord’s Supper based on membership whatsoever in the text. Someone who is in open sin and rebellion is removed from fellowship and therefore doesn’t partake in the Supper but in 1 Corinthians 11 we are called to examine ourselves. Even 1 Cor 5, which is often cited as support for membership, makes no mention of formal membership, instead the body is to avoid such a person and (v. 5) not even eat with them. To read formal church membership into that is dishonest. In a small fellowship where the community knows one another, church discipline moves from rhetoric to reality. Holding “church membership” in good standing is nowhere seen as a prerequisite for coming to the Table. People who make a public profession of faith and are baptized are recognized as being in communion with the Body, but then we slip in this formal church membership stipulation that seems to me to hearken back to Roman Catholicism rather than Scripture. Rome used church membership as a club to enforce its power. Being ex-communicated was tantamount to losing one’s salvation (i.e. there is no salvation outside of the Roman church). Church membership was a control mechanism and we unfortunately have kept that tradition alive. It is not used today in the same way that the medieval Roman church used it but it still is as absent from the Scriptures.
Amidst all the hand-wringing over church membership, I have to wonder why we spend so much time defending something that even proponents admit is based at best in loose inferences from the text and if they were being honest would admit is based almost entirely on tradition and pragmatism. When you get past the rhetoric about church discipline, there doesn’t seem to be much substance to the discussion. It strikes me that we have a couple of problems:
A dependence on tradition
Church membership is so old, so engrained in our church traditions that it is presumed to be just the way it is. It is part of the lengthy list of things we do in the church that are just assumed: Senior pastors, paid clergy, Vacation Bible school, ritualistic observances of the Supper. It is so ingrained and assumed that we never even bring it up and if we do we give it a cursory treatment.
A sinful lack of trust in the text
On issues like church membership, it is high time we let the Word speak for itself. The Scriptures are silent on formal church membership. That silence serves as a green light for too many of us to fill in the blanks. It seems as if we read the New Testament accounts of the church and decide that that was fine for them but we live in an enlightened era. They didn’t have to deal with budgets and buildings and salaries and argumentative church members and zoning laws. I would say that at least is true, they didn’t have to deal with all of that and neither do we. We have chosen to make church more complicated and cumbersome, and in doing so have sapped much of the energy from the fellowship. We have created our own problems and then created our own solutions. We are supposed to believe in the sufficiency of the Scriptures and yet we still see fit to speak where the Scriptures are silent and be silent where the Scriptures are clear.
If we have a Biblical view of the church, especially the local church, that is we recognize that the local church is made up of regenerate believers, church membership becomes unnecessary. The local church is a visible manifestation and gathering of the Church universal in a particular location. The local church is not an institution in and of itself. The local gathering is vital as an outlet for the church to meet, edify, love, pray, admonish one another but it has taken on a life of it’s own that is unhealthy and extrabiblical.
He makes four points that are supposed to support church membership. I wanted to look at all four of them and make a few comments.
First, you cannot practice meaningful membership or community where anonymity reigns. If people don't know each other, then it's impossible to knit the relationship fabric that is so central to biblical Christianity. So you need a practice that clearly reduces anonymity and increases interpersonal knowing.
This is the first and the most inexplicable. When someone becomes a “member” in most churches I have been in, they are presented for membership and a vote is taken. How does that foster a sense of community and overcome anonymity? In churches with a couple hundred “members”, how well do they know one another and if they do know each other, is that because of or in spite of formal church membership. To the contrary I believe that the formal membership system actually encourages anonymity by creating “fellowship” on Sunday morning where there is little or no interaction. Some of our closest friends are folks who lived by us and we attended church together with them. Neither of us were members in this church and neither of us attends there now. We still are good friends because we built a relationship with one another and most of that happened outside of the church walls. We spent time in each others homes, over coffee, in Bible studies in other homes. Our kids played together and we prayed for and with each other. If anything, formal membership gives a false sense of community and perhaps even harms fellowship instead of encouraging it.
Second, you cannot practice meaningful membership where gospel commitments and imperatives are not explicitly expected. Membership exists in large measure for the impartation of spiritual grace (1 Pet. 4:10–11), the exchange of love (John 13:34–35), correction (Gal. 6:1–2; Matt. 18:15–17), and so on. Membership means we are better together than we are apart. The membership process should make this clear, calling the members to "sign on the dotted line" of loving others across economic, social, linguistic, cultural, and other barriers.
I am not sure what being a “member” has to do with that. Do I really need to “sign on the dotted line” to ensure that I love my brother? Do we love one another because we truly view one another as brothers and sisters or because we signed onto a formal church membership covenant? I agree that we need to be committed to each other, love each other, correction and edify one another. I just don’t see where formal membership is required or even a benefit to seeing that happen. I can be in fellowship with other men and women without worrying about them having a membership in the same church as I do.
Third, you need a practice that makes it clear that people are submitted to and desiring of pastoral oversight (1 Pet. 5:2). You cannot practice meaningful membership or community where anti-authority, anti-leadership, anti-accountability attitudes predominate. I'm afraid that these attitudes explain much of the resistance to membership; people don't want to be accountable. They imagine that their accountability to Jesus may be maintained without any accountability to His people. But it's among His people—through their love and care and commitment—that Jesus ordinarily establishes accountability with His sheep.
Should we submit to “pastoral oversight” because we are formal members in a local church or because we are admonished to in Scripture? Where we gather on Sundays, there are three elders. If any of them came to me with a word of correction, I would heed them because they are elders and fellow brothers in Christ even though we are not “members” nor is there a membership at this assembly at all. We have no formal membership with this assembly outside of the shared salvation we have received. I would flip that around and ask where the accountability really takes place in churches with formal membership. I am not anti-accountable, or anti-leadership, or anti-authority. I am anti-church traditions without Scriptural command or example!
Finally, we need a membership process that maintains the Bible's temporal sequence of conversion, baptism, membership and communion. The observable pattern of the New Testament is: first, gospel preaching; second, hearing mixed with faith; and third, public profession of faith in baptism, which marks entrance into the covenant community, and consequently the privilege of communion at our Lord's Table.
This fourth point is the most troubling. Conversion, baptism, communion yes. But slipping in membership is more than a stretch. There is absolutely no mention of any sort of formal membership, no membership process, no admission to the Lord’s Supper based on membership whatsoever in the text. Someone who is in open sin and rebellion is removed from fellowship and therefore doesn’t partake in the Supper but in 1 Corinthians 11 we are called to examine ourselves. Even 1 Cor 5, which is often cited as support for membership, makes no mention of formal membership, instead the body is to avoid such a person and (v. 5) not even eat with them. To read formal church membership into that is dishonest. In a small fellowship where the community knows one another, church discipline moves from rhetoric to reality. Holding “church membership” in good standing is nowhere seen as a prerequisite for coming to the Table. People who make a public profession of faith and are baptized are recognized as being in communion with the Body, but then we slip in this formal church membership stipulation that seems to me to hearken back to Roman Catholicism rather than Scripture. Rome used church membership as a club to enforce its power. Being ex-communicated was tantamount to losing one’s salvation (i.e. there is no salvation outside of the Roman church). Church membership was a control mechanism and we unfortunately have kept that tradition alive. It is not used today in the same way that the medieval Roman church used it but it still is as absent from the Scriptures.
Amidst all the hand-wringing over church membership, I have to wonder why we spend so much time defending something that even proponents admit is based at best in loose inferences from the text and if they were being honest would admit is based almost entirely on tradition and pragmatism. When you get past the rhetoric about church discipline, there doesn’t seem to be much substance to the discussion. It strikes me that we have a couple of problems:
A dependence on tradition
Church membership is so old, so engrained in our church traditions that it is presumed to be just the way it is. It is part of the lengthy list of things we do in the church that are just assumed: Senior pastors, paid clergy, Vacation Bible school, ritualistic observances of the Supper. It is so ingrained and assumed that we never even bring it up and if we do we give it a cursory treatment.
A sinful lack of trust in the text
On issues like church membership, it is high time we let the Word speak for itself. The Scriptures are silent on formal church membership. That silence serves as a green light for too many of us to fill in the blanks. It seems as if we read the New Testament accounts of the church and decide that that was fine for them but we live in an enlightened era. They didn’t have to deal with budgets and buildings and salaries and argumentative church members and zoning laws. I would say that at least is true, they didn’t have to deal with all of that and neither do we. We have chosen to make church more complicated and cumbersome, and in doing so have sapped much of the energy from the fellowship. We have created our own problems and then created our own solutions. We are supposed to believe in the sufficiency of the Scriptures and yet we still see fit to speak where the Scriptures are silent and be silent where the Scriptures are clear.
If we have a Biblical view of the church, especially the local church, that is we recognize that the local church is made up of regenerate believers, church membership becomes unnecessary. The local church is a visible manifestation and gathering of the Church universal in a particular location. The local church is not an institution in and of itself. The local gathering is vital as an outlet for the church to meet, edify, love, pray, admonish one another but it has taken on a life of it’s own that is unhealthy and extrabiblical.
3 comments:
Another great post, Arthur! I agree that the arguments for church membership do not up under scriptural scrutiny. In fact, I've found that church membership tends to divide Christians from one another - especially if they don't share church membership.
-Alan
This is excellent.
"We have chosen to make church more complicated and cumbersome, and in doing so have sapped much of the energy from the fellowship."
I've been thinking about this lately re. nursery (how many sermons have I heard about the importance of people volunteering for nursery?) and how it's exactly the opposite of my ideal (keeping the kids with me!).
Your blogs are fantastic. I am so blessed to have stumbled on them!
Arthur,
You answered Anyabwile well!
The Scriptures are silent on formal church membership. Be careful here, Arthur. I actually think formal membership is upheld by Scripture:
But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as HE desired. (1 Cor. 12:18) God places us? Yes. Now what could possibly be more formal than that? See where I'm coming from?
BTW, I recommend my Re-Thinking Church Membership blog series.
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