Membership, Church

For most Christians choosing a church home is one of the most difficult decisions they feel called upon to make. Do you go where you are needed or where your needs will be met? Do you choose a church that will be best for your children even though it is less stimulating for the parents? Do you go to the church nearest to your home or nearest your work? Should you choose a church in the home—with its intimacy and life-centeredness—or a large church with programs and groups for all ages and interests? Is loyalty to a denomination important, so that moving from one city to another means getting connected with the “branch” store in the new location? Are there specific dangers in joining a nondenominational community church with no external links or systems of accountability beyond itself? This dilemma is made worse by the lowered expectations of church membership in the Western world compared to the biblical understanding.

Pseudomembership

In a society characterized by “throwaway” relationships, membership is something “tried on,” exchanged or not practiced at all. This is deeply tragic because the experience of peoplehood is central to Christianity. Several problems militate against church membership that has a for-better-or-for-worse quality.

Church shopping. In the Western world church is treated as a commodity. Many people shop around for the “best” church and when they find it, join it, remaining only as long as the church maintains the excellence of its product—contemporary worship, good music, great preaching and a womb-to-tomb program. For their part, church leaders conform to the culture and adapt their product to gain a larger share of the market.

Church dating. Further, membership in the church today is much like the common-law marriage euphemistically called “living together.” Cohabitation is an unwritten emotional contract in which a man and a woman agree to live together so long as they both shall love and their mutual needs are met. It is non-covenantal. Indeed, to get married is to change the dynamics of the relationship so profoundly that it could spell the end! In the same way many people associate with a local church, possibly with their names on the church roll, but have not made a covenant to belong. When the first sign of trouble comes or another church down the road seduces them, they are gone.

Church hopping. Polygamy has a parallel in church membership. God originally intended that a man and woman would belong in a two-shall-become-one marriage involving leaving, cleaving and one flesh (Genesis 2:24). In the same way, we cannot make concrete our membership in the people of God by belonging to all the local congregations in the world, or even two or three, a rapidly growing trend. Membership needs to be made concrete in a specific fellowship where we can be known, loved, rebuked, exhorted, disciplined and equipped for service.

Church swapping. There is a further parallel to the polygamous marriage. In our society rampant divorce leads to serial polygamy, one spouse after another, though still in some ways belonging to former spouses. In the same way some people move from church to church. Often this happens in the context of relocating in another city. The average Canadian and American moves every four to five years, thus militating against the long-term relationships that make church membership both challenging and maturing. This mobility can be resisted. But when it is not, people often fail to leave the former church emotionally. Again, using marriage language, we say they cannot “cleave” (Genesis 2:24 KJV) because they have not “left.” They have not gone through a process of grieving that would have enabled this to take place.

Rethinking Membership

Throughout church history, membership has taken many forms. In the early church becoming a Christian meant joining a despised and persecuted sect in an all-or-nothing way—often with considerable risks involved. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, being a citizen began to be identified with belonging to the church. This situation prompted the monks to flee to the desert to form voluntary and high-commitment Christian communities as a protest against an increasingly worldly church. For several centuries this two-level membership existed and still does in most of the Christian world today. Following the Protestant Reformation, however, people were left with a choice between state churches (where, again, citizenship was equivalent to church membership) and so-called free churches involving voluntary membership often at great cost.

Roman and Orthodox churches made use of the parish concept that both assumes membership (if you live in an area) and invites participation at a more-than-nominal level. There are some parts of the world in which there is such a high percentage of Christians—in some African countries, for example—that we have technically something close to Christendom—a Christian society, though tragically we must note that nominalism is rampant and there seems to be little connection between faith and everyday morality. But for most of the world Christendom is past, and we must reinvent church membership by returning to our source document, the New Testament.

Belonging to God. In the Bible we are invited, first of all, not to join the church but to join God! The nuptial invitation of Jesus is simply to belong to him forever. We then become a child of God in God’s family (the family of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; John 1:12); we call God Abba; we dwell in the love of God, which is the love eternally expressed between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Becoming a Christian is simply getting “into” God. Once joining God, we are automatically members of the people of God. Formalizing that membership in terms of belonging to a specific local congregation is important for Christian growth, but it is meaningless unless we have joined God. Decide for Christ and you have already decided for membership in the church. We cannot have Jesus without his people; he is married to his bride, even if that bride, as the English poet Swinburne once sneered, is “leprous.”

Belonging to God’s people. It is impossible to experience all the “togethers” in Paul’s letters without have specific people to whom you are joined. Paul crafted new words by joining the Greek word syn, “together with,” to nouns and verbs to communicate that it is impossible to be in Christ alone. We are members together, joined together, heirs together, embodied together, growing together, being built together and held together. In addition there are all the “one anothers” in the New Testament. Belong to one another (Romans 12:10); carry one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2); forgive one another (Col. 3:13); love one another (John 13:34); and speak the truth to one another (Ephes. 4:25). The individual Christian—in the Western sense of an isolated person—does not exist. Join God and you have joined God’s family. “Sir, you wish to serve God and go to heaven?” asked a “serious young man” in response to a question from John Wesley. “Remember that you cannot serve him alone. You must therefore find companions or make them; the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.”

In reality this is a great boon. The local church is a place to belong, serve, grow and know God together. We belong together not because of our appearance, expertise, usefulness, race or performance but because of whose we are—an identity formed through being and becoming rather than doing and achieving. We serve together because ministry is not a number of solo efforts by religious entrepreneurs but the synergism of spiritual gifts combined in dynamic partnership. We grow together because the church context is a life context that nurtures maturity as we continuously rub shoulders with (and sometimes rub the wrong way) our brothers and sisters in Christ (see Church as Family). We know God together because each person’s experience, gift and personality enlarge ours; it is “together with all the saints” (Ephes. 3:18) that we can know the width, height and depth of the love of God.

There is nothing like the church on earth. God’s church is a collection of ordinary people who have nothing in common except their love for Jesus but who call each other brothers and sisters and would risk their lives for each other. Jews and Gentiles, black and white, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, extrovert and introvert, experience a miraculous equality that is, nevertheless, not a bland sameness: “All for one, and one for all.”

Belonging to sinners. But here is the rub: the church is a community of sinners in process of being saved. When people join a church, they have what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called a “wish-dream” (p. 26) of the perfect community. Some spend a lifetime looking for the perfect church. Not finding it, some try to start their own. The reason is very deep: they are not prepared to commit themselves to sinners. So, like Judas, they make only a partial commitment to the people of God as they find it. As an astute African once said, like Judas they find their identity in rebellion against their brothers and sisters. God hates such visionary dreaming. God wants us to love real people, not ideal people, just as God does. There is a profound spiritual issue involved in this. If we refuse to associate with sinners, we are implicitly forgetting that Jesus has associated with us.

Belonging to sinners covenantally. There must be something like “for better or for worse” involved. When trouble comes, when a leader fails, when there is a budget crunch, when there is fighting, it is tempting to leave and find another church where we can experience, at least for a few months, a religious equivalent of infatuation. Some people move from one church infatuation to another because they are in love with the idea of being spiritually stimulated. They want romance rather than covenant marriage, but by running on a romantic high, they short-circuit spiritual growth and have only superficial relationships. Almost all of the exhortations in the New Testament (such as “be filled with the Holy Spirit”; Ephes. 5:18) and most of the promises of the New Testament (such as the fruit of the Spirit; Galatians 5:22-23) are community messages. They come through belonging, not flirting. So joining the church is a covenant issue.

Choosing a Church Home

People go about choosing a church in different ways.

Choosing unconsciously. Many people choose churches that unconsciously fit their personality or spirituality types. If they are given to emotional expressiveness, they choose a charismatic church. If they love structure, they go for a liturgical community. If they have recently received the gift of tongues, they choose a church that maximizes spiritual gifts rather than one that takes social justice seriously. If they love classical music, they go to a church with a pipe organ rather than one that composes new songs. Yet we grow most when we are challenged in a diverse community (see Spiritual Formation; Spiritual Growth). The habituated, structured person may profit from immersion in a spontaneous fellowship; the person who loves the unpredictability of a Spirit-filled fellowship often needs more structure and depth. We may grow more, and contribute more, in a fellowship that does not merely reinforce our “strengths,” which often are weaknesses in disguise. Yet all of this assumes we have a choice—something that is alien to the New Testament.

Choosing geographically. The New Testament situation finds its closest contemporary counterpart in small towns in rural areas where there is only one church. Where there are several churches in a town, one for each denomination, the situation is usually settled by remaining in the tradition of your family. Moving from one to another becomes a matter of small-town gossip, though this is not a good reason to refrain from making a change. Choosing a church home in larger cities that serve a mobile society is like trying to choose a product as we wander through a supermarket: often we end up relying on advertising to tell us what to do. Most people opt for trying out a number of churches by attending Sunday services. Usually this involves taking the spiritual temperature of the people by assessing the quality of worship and the friendliness of the people and by “tasting” the sermon. This method of discernment is just as illusory as assessing the prospects for a life partner by attending a series of high-school dances. Worship is much more than worship services. It is not even intended primarily for our benefit and pleasure. And real fellowship is experienced not in a handshake at the door and a hug during the service (see Sugar, Sugary) but in sharing all the dimensions of everyday life with other believers. Sermons are meant to evoke faith, not to entertain.

Choosing discerningly. A better way is to find out what various churches believe, their mission statement, whether they believe and practice every-member ministry. Interview some of the members as well as some of the leaders. Ask to meet with people in their homes rather than in the church building. This gives you insight into the translation of faith into everyday life.

If you pray continuously and keep a journal, choosing a church can become a spiritual discipline. It will raise all kinds of questions that can be turned into contemplation: How has God made you? How should you resolve the competing agendas of self and family? Have you dealt with hurts you experienced in previous fellowships? What are your own longings for service and ministry? Why do you feel most comfortable in some situations but more challenged in others? Do you still have passion for God? Do you love God’s people as they are? In short, there may be no better way to overcome the ubiquitous pressure to treat membership as a commodity than to go deeper with yourself, your God and your closest neighbors in life—usually spouse and family. But how do you join?

The Lost Art of Joining

Systems thinking helps us understand and respond to the complexity of joining a church. In systems thinking the whole is more than the sum of the parts: the body is not just a collection of individual believers but a living whole with a life of its own. Each local church is a unique system. Further, except in large churches (see Megachurch), every member is related to every other like elements in a mobile; move one element and every other element must adjust. The relationship of members in a healthy system is characterized as interdependence—that lovely balance of the twin needs to be “me” and to be “we” (Friedman). Persons are not merged into one homogenous sect as in the “melting pot church” or loosely connected as in the “bouquet of Christians” church (Collins and Stevens, p. 21) without mutual ministry and belonging. The first church tends to codependence, the second church to independence. While sometimes we are called upon to join such churches and gradually help challenge and even change these systems, a different image of the church emerges in the early Christian writings.

The body, family or covenant church—all New Testament metaphors (see Collins and Stevens, pp. 92-107)—has interdependent members, coordinated together, enriching one another through their diversity. The body is more one because of the many.

Joining a new system. Understanding the local church as a system is most helpful in joining a church. First, one cannot really join if one belongs to another church and has not left. Leaving precedes cleaving, though it is usually a process rather than a single event. Further, each local church is a unique system, and in a sense, membership is not transferable. You must join this unique community for what it is. Comparisons are both unwise and counterproductive.

The joiner and the joined. Joining involves not only the joiner but those being joined. Some new members are frozen out because the system is stuck—frozen for fear of getting bigger or unwilling to have “our cozy fellowship” changed by the addition of new people. So joining the church is a spiritual discipline not only for the joiner but also for the rest of the church. Old members must keep joining, since the church keeps changing as members leave and join. Why are we so unwilling to change? What is it about this new member that threatens us? Do we want to grow, not so much in numbers as in faith and life?

Joining the past. It does not take long to discover that there are unresolved problems in most local congregations. Some of them go back to the pathology of the founding pastor or to major families whose power was thwarted at some point. Usually a small incident in the present provokes a turmoil in the fellowship far beyond its importance because of problems passed from one generation to the next. But these crises are great opportunities to identify unresolved systemic problems and deal with them. To do this, we must ask a lot of questions to find out the history of the fellowship, to discover why certain people quit and left and why others quit and stayed. New members are often able to retain a measure of emotional detachment in such crises, ask pertinent questions, help identify problems and so equip the church to grow in unity, love and health.

If joining the church is an art that must be recovered, so must the art of welcoming new members. Often this determines the way the member will relate to and understand the church in future years (Crabtree, p. 12).

The Lost Art of Welcoming

Here are some steps churches can take to evoke deeper membership at the point of entry, ways that are consistent with both systems theory and biblical truth.

Give the new member time to join. Davida Crabtree advises not rushing people into formal membership and, when people are ready for it, requiring participation in several membership class sessions. Many churches treat membership as a marriage without engagement, without premarital counseling and without much forethought. No wonder there are so many church membership divorces! Such hasty marriages may be stimulated by anxiety. Trust will allow people to take their time.

Explain the systemic dimensions of membership. Crabtree touched on four themes in premembership classes: (1) the church’s way of working, (2) gifts identification, not only for in-church ministry but for all of life, (3) introduction to the ministry of the laity and (4) frank talk about faith and money, including the tradition, denominational relationships and setting in Christian history (pp. 13-14). Since true covenantal membership is mutual and bilateral, the process of receiving a new member is also an opportunity to expound the implications for the other members.

Make joining concrete and covenantal. Symbols are important in any organizational culture. For example, the offering of “the right hand of fellowship,” as it is called in some churches, or a similar ritual has a powerfully evocative impact on both the new member and the church (really the “new” church), just as the vows “for better, for worse” in a wedding service can hardly be witnessed without tears. If new members are welcomed officially by several representatives of the church, the act symbolizes joining the church, not joining the pastor.

Make joining a continuous process. The church you join tomorrow will not be the church you joined yesterday. A systemic approach to church membership will involve more than passing on information gained in a membership class. Members who have been leaders in other churches and some who have not yet been leaders will have to find a new leadership role in this new church just as pastors do. Church leaders will need to care for and support people through a process that may take months, possibly even years, as people find their own place in a new church. Remaining a member means participating in a continuous process of renegotiating one’s place in the system.

Be aware of the dangers of joining. Some people are all too ready to join—indeed to become addicted to the church. Some churches are addictive organizations (see Organizational Culture and Change) requiring a total commitment that should never be demanded. With unhealthy people their emotional health and the church’s well-being are inseparably tied. Their expectations of the church are the sum of what a healthy person should expect from family, church, neighborhood, school, extended family, friends, self and God. Tragically, we must confess that some churches love members like this because they “do all the work.”

In summary, church membership needs to be reinvented today. It starts with joining God and continues with joining God’s people. It continues through a process of continuous joining as the system we join alters and is altered even by ourselves. This turns out to be a profound spiritual discipline, since it raises important questions about ourselves and our relationship with the gospel. Often, as in a marriage, the moment when we feel like leaving a church can be the most important moment of spiritual growth.

» See also: Accountability, Relational

» See also: Baptism

» See also: Church Discipline

» See also: Discipleship

» See also: Equipping

» See also: Ministry

» See also: Service

References and Resources

D. Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper & Row, 1954); M. Bowen and M. Kerr, Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory (New York: Norton, 1988); P. Collins and R. P. Stevens, The Equipping Pastor: A Systems Approach to Empowering the People of God (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1993), portions quoted with permission; D. F. Crabtree, The Empowering Church: How One Congregation Supports Lay People’s Ministries in the World (Washington, D.C.: Alban Institute, 1989); E. H. Friedman, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: Guilford, 1985); G. L. Sittser, Loving Across Our Differences (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994).

—R. Paul Stevens