Theology Thursday: Church Membership - What, Why, Who

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question:
What is church membership for? Who is a church member?

At MCC, we desire to practice meaningful membership, and believe that doing so is a crucial aspect of the discipleship process and vital for living out our mission to know God and make him known, for realizing our vision to Love20, and for embracing each of our four core values: unity in gospel truth, spiritual formation, theological thoroughness, and relational authenticity.

As such, we'll spend the next few Theology Thursdays diving into MCC's membership philosophy and policy. We'll start today with what church membership is, why it's important, and who it's for.  

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
The premise of church membership is that local gatherings of Christians committed to Jesus and to one another are the primary expression of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.

The church is not simply another voluntary civic organization, such as the Kiwanis or a country club. Neither is the church a business or a service provider, catering to or serving customers. Clubs exist due to common interest. Businesses or service providers exist due to common needs or desires.

The church comprises all of this, but more: the church has a king who requires the obedience of his people. The church is a family with mutual responsibilities, expectations, commitments, and expressions of love, and unified under a common mission. Christians are not consumers, they are adopted children in the family of God.

The local church is an embassy of Christ’s Kingdom. What is a church member? It’s someone who walks through the embassy doors claiming to belong to this Kingdom. “Hello, my name is Christian.” A church member is someone who is formally recognized as a Christian and a part of Christ’s universal body.

Jesus didn’t leave us to govern ourselves and declare ourselves his citizens. He established an institution that both affirms us as believers and then helps form us in that belief. The church is the authority on earth that Jesus has instituted to officially affirm and give shape to the Christian life.

For the Christian, church participation is not optional. Once you choose Christ, you must also and always choose his people, too.

While the “embassy” metaphor lends itself to images of governmental authority, church authority works differently; the church exercises its Christ-given authority very differently than the state does. Christian authority, Jesus says in Matthew 20:26-28, is exercised by giving our lives up for the sake of others, as he did for us.

Christian authority is not about coercion or manipulation, it works by the tender, effective, and heart-changing power of the Word and the Spirit.

The gospel is not just about how God saves us from the “dominion of darkness,” it’s also a message about how God saves us into the “kingdom of the Son he loves” - a kingdom bustling with other redeemed sinners who, like us, are now citizens of heaven (see Colossians 1:13, Ephesians 2:19). The gospel is about how God reconciles us back to him, and reconciles us to his people.

By joining a church, we commit to other redeemed sinners and show the world that Christ has indeed reconciled us both to God and to each other. It’s not enough to merely have Christian friends with whom we occasionally gather - friends we pick and choose according to our own tastes. What truly displays the gospel is when we commit to love and care for a group of people that includes folks utterly unlike us. We display the gospel when we gather each week to serve people who sometimes share only one thing in common with us: Jesus.

The Apostle Paul in his letters to the brand new church in the years after Jesus’s life and personal ministry emphasized the familial nature of the community of believers. Though they came from a variety of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds, Paul said the church is a family because its members share the most important core identifying characteristic: they believed in and followed the crucified and risen Messiah Jesus.

“...so in Christ,” Paul writes in Romans 12:5, “we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

And in Ephesians 2:19, he says “...you are members of God’s very own family...and you belong in God’s household with every other Christian.”
 
The example set for us by the New Testament Christians is that faith was always practiced in group settings, together in communities centered around the truth and grace of the gospel. The New Testament knows nothing of rogue believers who are saved and committed to Christ but remain uncommitted to the people of Christ. When we commit to the Jesus-filled life, we agree to prioritize this core characteristic over our other identities and personal preferences.  

Though we may sometimes be tempted, this means we cannot live out our faith alone. We must do it together, in a church family; rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn (Romans 12:15), bearing one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), encouraging one another (1 Thessalonians 5:11) toward love and good deeds (Hebrews 10:24), devoted to one another (Romans 12:10).

A survey of the New Testament reveals quickly that the Christian life is not merely about affirming the right doctrines or about pursuing individual, isolated virtues. Instead, scripture consistently shows that the Christian life revolves around the local church - a structured community with people of different ages, ethnicities, interests, and economic backgrounds.

To be a Christian is to belong to a church. Church membership is how the world knows who represents Jesus. Church membership does not save, but it does reflect salvation.

So, what is church membership? Here’s one definition:

Church membership is a formal relationship between a church and a Christian characterized by the church’s affirmation and oversight of a Christian’s discipleship and the Christian’s submission to living out his or her discipleship in the care of the church.

There are several elements here:

- Church leadership, representing church membership, formally affirms an individual’s profession of faith and baptism as credible.

- Church leaders and church members promise to give oversight - teach, guide, pray, hold accountable - to that individual’s discipleship.

- The individual formally submits his or her discipleship to the service and authority of this church body and its leaders.

In essence, the church body says to the individual, “We recognize your profession of faith, baptism, and discipleship to Christ as sincere and true. Therefore, we publicly affirm and acknowledge you as belonging to Christ and welcome you into the care and oversight of our fellowship.”

In essence, the individual says to the church, “Insofar as I recognize you as a faithful, gospel-declaring church, I submit my presence and my discipleship to your love and guidance.”

Church membership, in other words, is all about the whole church body taking specific responsibility for its individual members, and its individual members taking responsibility for the whole church.  

Joining a particular local church is an outward reflection of an inward love - for Christ and for his people. And, as we see so often in this life, the greatest love is rarely merely spontaneous; it is more often planned, premeditated, and characterized by commitment.

Next week: The biblical support for church membership. 

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.