A Display of God's Glory/Membership

From Gospel Translations

Revision as of 18:01, 16 July 2008

Let’s begin by admitting that the whole idea of church membership seems counter-productive to many today. Isn’t it unfriendly, and maybe even elitist to say that some are in and others out? Can we go so far as to say that it is even unbiblical, and maybe even unChristian? The end of Acts 2 simply says that “the Lord added to their number” (that is, to the church) those who were being saved. Isn’t that all there is to it? Also, in Acts 8, an official of the Ethiopian government had been traveling in Palestine and was returning home on his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. Philip was led by the Holy Spirit to intercept him and talk to him; the man believed and was baptized. In that case, wasn’t the Ethiopian automatically a member of the church?

I. Commitment-phobia membership

All of this is more important than many people today think it is. In fact, I’m convinced that getting this right is a key step toward revitalizing our churches, evangelizing our nation, furthering the cause of Christ around the world, and so bringing glory to God!

American evangelicals are in pretty desperate need of rethinking and reconsidering this topic, especially our own fellowship of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention. According to one Southern Baptist study a few years ago, the typical Southern Baptist church has 233 members with 70 present at the Sunday morning worship service. My question is this: where are the other 163 members? Are they all at home sick, in a rest home, at college, on vacation, or in the military? Maybe some are, but all 163 of them? What does this convey about Christianity to the world around us? What do we understand this to mean about the importance of Christianity in our lives? And what is the spiritual state of those people, if they’ve not been at church for months, or even longer? Is their non-attendance really any of our business? To understand this, we need to first ask the question, “What really is a church?'

II.What Really is a Church?

The “Church” is Not a Building

By the word “church” we refer not to an organizational unit of a religion. We don’t refer to Buddhist churches or Jewish churches. By “church,” we don’t fundamentally mean a building; only in a secondary sense is it that. The building is simply where the church meets, thus the New England puritan name for the church building, “meeting house.” The earliest New England churches looked like large houses from the outside. It was just the house where the church met.

The Church is a Clearly Defined Community

According to the New Testament, the church is primarily a regular assembly of people who profess and give evidence that they have been saved by God’s grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. This is what a New Testament church is; it is not a building. The early Christians didn’t have any buildings for almost three hundred years after the church began. From the earliest of times, though, local Christian churches were clearly congregations of specific people. Certain people would have been known to make up this assembly, and others clearly known as outside of it.

In the New Testament

Thus the censures taught by Jesus in Matthew 18 and Paul in I Corinthians 5 envision an individual being excluded, not from a political community, but from a distinct social one. While we don’t know for sure that physical lists of members existed in the earliest Christian churches, they may have. The idea was not unheard-of. We know that the early church kept lists of widows; we know that God Himself is presented as having a list of those in the universal church in the Book of Life. And we know from II Corinthians 2 that both Paul and the Corinthians could clearly identify a majority of a certain set of people which they understood to be those who were members of the church, i.e. those who were eligible to vote.

In the Old Testament

The idea of a clearly defined community of people is central to God’s action in both the Old and the New Testaments. From God working with Noah and his family, to Abraham and his descendants, to the nation of Israel, to the church in the New Testament, God has chosen to maintain a distinct and clearly separate people in order to display His character. God’s intention has always been that there be a sharp, bright line distinguishing those who trust in Him from those who do not.

Baptist are Historically Unique in this Understanding

This concept of the church as a gathered community is something that has distinguished Baptist Christians from many others. At the time of the Reformation the relationship between state and church was both close and complicated. The discipline of either the church or the state often carried consequences from the other as well. It was assumed that everyone born within the bounds of a certain political jurisdiction should be able to be a member of the state church. The recovery of the baptism of believers at the time of the Reformation threatened this association at its very roots as Baptists recovered the New Testament idea of the church as a congregation of those both personally professing and giving evidence of regeneration.

A Side Note to Historians

One interesting side note for historians—the church as a voluntarily covenanted community of believers is an important contribution that Baptists particularly have made to our nation’s religious liberty. This may surprise you. Some today see Baptists as the forces of benighted, oppressive, religious totalitarianism. But that is far from the case historically, and it is terribly ironic. In some senses, the freedom some use to speak and write about our bigotry is protected by the very understanding of the church that we Christians who are Baptists have advocated in this country for three centuries.

The church is not finally something that is for you and