Many have asked me over the years, questions like, “Why should I belong to a church?” or, “Is church membership biblical?” All churches used to have membership, but today many do not. Is membership an outdated tradition, or are there some sound, even biblical reasons for continuing it?
We know that church membership neither saves you nor makes you holy. But it is an expression of both salvation and sanctification. It is the closest thing we can get in this life to demonstrating our unity with one another, and the clearest evidence this side of Heaven that we realize that becoming like Jesus is not like singing a solo, but belonging to a choir.
Our American individualism and drive to be independent fly in the face of the New Testament “one-anothers.” We are afraid that someone will judge us; we are frightened that we will not live up to someone’s expectations; we smugly feel that we can go it alone; we have been betrayed in other churches. The possibilities are endless, for negative church experiences are legion.
But just as the divorce rate is no excuse to abandon the institution of marriage, neither are church splits an excuse to jettison the practice of church membership. In the case of marriage, the best thing we can do is preserve our own marriage in helping our partner grow, doing all we can not to become a divorce statistic. In church, the best thing we can do is to belong to our church, and support it in the ways defined by our particular church’s understanding of itself.
In our church, we see ourselves as a family of families, and membership is simply the acknowledgment that we are God’s children, see the need to align ourselves with other believers, and be accountable to and for others. While we don’t recruit folks to join, we do invite them to join. The “requirements” are simply a heart-felt affirmation of our confession of faith, including believer’s baptism, and a desire to walk together as we have all agreed.
We often speak of “dysfunctional families,” but whose family hasn’t had some dysfunction? And yes, all churches have dysfunctions. But our goal, God helping us, is to be a local Body of Christ, “from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16, ESV). The parts are the members, and as we are, so is the church.
If church, to you, is merely a buffet of activities, services, classes, and events from which you, as a consumer, choose, then membership will not be an issue. No one joins a restaurant. But if you understand church as God’s family, then membership is a straightforward and wise step in understanding, confessing, and experiencing that reality.
“Now you are the body of Christ and individual members of it.”
1 Corinthians 12:27