Holy Joys Podcast
A discussion of theology and ministry practice, all for a holy, happy church. A ministry of holyjoys.org.
Holy Joys Podcast
Church Membership, Discipline, and Discipleship
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In this episode, Dr. David Fry and Johnathan Arnold discuss the church membership crisis and why the church needs to retrieve a biblical understanding of membership for every baptized believer. The relationship between church membership, discipleship, and church discipline is discussed.
You're a member if you're connected to Christ. That's true, but 1 Corinthians 12 immediately starts talking about your spiritual membership in terms of your participation in a visible body.
SPEAKER_02Growing churches, the fastest growing churches, are not churches that are growing by winning the unchurched or by getting the unchurched to go to church. They are growing from people who are leaving what they perceive to be unhealthy churches and are going to a church that they presume is healthier because it's big.
SPEAKER_00You're listening to the Holy Joys Podcast, co-hosted by Jonathan Arnold and Dr. David Fry. Visit us at holyjoys.org and stay tuned for weekly discussions of theology and ministry practice. All for a holy, happy church.
SPEAKER_01We're going to talk about something now that is very important to both of us, something we've spent quite a bit of time of reflection on, and really you have done a lot more work on than I have, being able to implement it in the context where you are at, and being in a context where that's a little bit perhaps you have more flexibility to do that. And that is local church membership for all baptized believers. So let's start out by just talking a little bit about church membership. Where are we at right now in terms of the state of membership, the perceived uh crisis of membership, and uh how it is that the church right now really, really views this uh formal system?
SPEAKER_02I think there's widespread acknowledgement of a at least a vague notion of a crisis of membership. Uh I think it varies from place to place. So I think that you know a pastor of a fairly small congregation has this sense of, you know, we need you, we need some some young blood in here, we need some young people becoming members so they become the leaders. So there's that aspect of it. That's certainly is a true crisis. Uh many churches don't have replacements for their current generation of leaders. Uh so that creates a crisis. Uh, but I would want to say, not um you know, with a sense of uh cynicism, uh, but uh that there's also a membership crisis in large churches. Uh megachurches are having a membership crisis. Let me give you an example. Uh two large churches that run uh over 10,000. Um I've talked to pastors in both of those churches about their their small group ministry. And and then I've also uh spoken with small group leaders within those churches. And what I have found is that these churches are very much centered on their weekend worship uh program, their production. But outside of that, and they do have a lot of programs and ministries that they have, but for the most part, you know, thousands of people come to say a Saturday night or Sunday service, they they go through their worship uh time, and then uh they scatter into many geographic areas, and a few of them will attend a small group that is quote unquote sponsored by that church. But what actually happens at that level of church is wildly unaccountable. And uh so I had one group leader say, Yeah, we uh you know we'll get together and uh you know if it's nice outside, we'll sit around the bonfire and drink beer and just you know chat. And then I talked to another from the same church, uh someone else who said, Yeah, like we meet, you know, the coffee shop and we do serious Bible study every week and we really dissect, you know, the uh but it's not related to the sermon. It's like they've they're doing their own Bible study that's published by whoever, and they're working through, you know, the book of John or something. So what I've the reason I call that a membership crisis is because uh even a large church doesn't seem to understand how the members fit to the body uh and how they really relate to each other. There's a huge disconnect between this you know massive worship experience where thousands of people are present and then the groups of eight or ten or or twelve people who are gathering somewhere else. It's like they're two different churches, and so there is a membership crisis. Um if we just go by numbers, uh it's very clear that in North America that there is a crisis of membership. And included in that is that the growing churches, the fastest growing churches, are not churches that are growing by winning uh the unchurched or by getting the unchurched to go to church. They are growing from people who are leaving what they perceive to be unhealthy churches and are going to a church that they presume is healthier because it's big. But what if we listen to the Willow Creek leadership, they would tell us after all of their experiences over the last 30 years, and they would say, don't equate big with health. Just because we get thousands of people here does not mean that our church is healthy. And and they they've been saying that since the 90s, right? Um and and so and they were on the cutting edge of the whole church growth movement. So the membership crisis is real, and we all feel it maybe in different ways. But if you're in a if you're a pastor in a small church, don't think you're the only one that has a membership crisis. It's across the board, and it may look a little differently in different situations.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I want to get back to something you said about uh the relationship between the member and the body, because I think that's the common denominator between a small church or a large church, whether it's 30, 3,000, you know, 300. Um, the way that membership functions in those various contexts uh is often something that is really not clearly connected to uh life in the body. When we hear membership, I don't think we associate that often with 1 Corinthians 12. We're not seeing the theological connection there or understanding that that's really how membership developed. We're seeing membership almost as like some kind of club membership. It's almost like some kind of special status that some Christians get if they buy in to all of our denominational distinctives or something. And so membership becomes really about preserving either the future of this church, we've got to replace the older ones, or you know, strengthening the core, or it becomes more about something pragmatic, preserving our distinctives, you know, who we are, maintain our identity, we've got to draw a line around those things, then it actually becomes something that's that's theologically grounded, or about discipleship, or about, you know, that biblical concept of membership. And I think that goes back to something we've talked about so many times is the over-spiritualization of the church. Why would we need to connect, you know, the church bringing you in as a member with 1 Corinthians 12 or any of those Romans, any of those passages about membership? That's talking about spiritual membership. You're a member if you're connected to Christ. That's true, but 1 Corinthians 12 immediately starts talking about your spiritual membership in terms of your participation in a visible body. The hand foot metaphor is talked about your relationship with other believers, um, insiders versus outsiders. You need to use that 1 Corinthians 5 language. So I think where to resolve this membership crisis, whether you're a small church or a large church, the starting place has got to be getting back to the theological foundations for why churches even have this membership thing at all, uh, why it ever even developed in the history of the church, and realizing how far we've really strayed from that.
SPEAKER_02Right. So the idea of membership is a metaphor that is used throughout the New Testament, uh, particularly by Paul in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, almost that entire chapter, and then again in some occasion, uh, some brief occasions, such as Ephesians 4. Um, it is certainly the most often used metaphor for the church. The church is the body of Christ, each of us are members one of another. Uh, I like the way uh I like to make this point from 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul says you know, the body, that is the church, does not consist of one member but many. And uh I and the reason that's so important is because we have to understand this metaphor is telling us something about our relationship with Christ, not just our relationship with other believers, but it's telling us something about our relationship with Christ. And that is that contrary to the song, uh, the little song that we sing, that little ditty that says, you know, if if uh if if yeah, though none go with me, still I will follow, right? And there are a couple of other little choruses that we sing like that. You know, if I go alone, if I walk this road alone, then I'm still going through. No, no, if you're walking through, no, if you're walking alone, you're not following Christ. Um I don't know who you're following, but it's not Christ, because Christ is followed by the church. And the church always consists of more than one. Uh he says that very, very clearly in 1 Corinthians 12. So this it is a metaphor, and it is a metaphor of a physical body that just as our body is composed of hands and feet and eyes and ears, all those are mentioned here in 1 Corinthians 12, uh, so it is with the body of Christ, so it is with the church. Uh so it is a metaphor uh that I think is ri rich and deep in in meaning and symbolism. Uh, maybe uh if we want to go that direction, we can break that down a little bit. But I actually have a whole uh six-week class just on that uh that passage, uh talking about uh that class is uh biblical ministry. Uh that is helping each member find their place in the body and how they fit, uh which I think is uh worthwhile giving attention to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so membership is about um formal membership, then, is has got to be connected to our being members of Christ and members of the body. So formal membership is about acknowledging that somebody is a member of the body of Christ, and then the this local church, which is an expression of the body of Christ. So right now we think about membership as kind of this other thing that's kind of like not really a biblical thing, but it serves a pragmatic purpose of separating our denomination from other denominations, making sure our distinctives are preserved. But if we realize the history of membership, how it's been used throughout the history of the church, it was actually drawn from these biblical passages and this biblical metaphor, and it was about separating believers in the church, the body of Christ, members of the body of Christ, from unbelievers, non-members, people who aren't. So it's about recognizing their spiritual membership in a visible way. Um, it's it's not about uh it's about us drawing a line around who's really part of this church, who's really part of the body of Christ, and who's not. And where I like to start with this is try to try to tap into some of the gut instincts that I think some people share. I I've always been troubled, or at least for a very long time, troubled with how on a Sunday morning we will sing, um, you know, I'm so glad I'm a part of the family of God. Or at a funeral, when we all get to heaven. We all know the people we're shaking hands with or that we're singing next to, we all know that some of them aren't going to heaven. We all know that some of them aren't part of the family of God, but we invite them to sing this, we we sing it with them, and then we have no way to draw a line who's around who's really part of the church. And so it becomes very difficult, I think, then, to help, or at least far more difficult, to wake people up to the realization that, oh, wait, I'm actually not part of the church. I'm actually not part of the family of God, right? And so for me, membership is also an issue of holiness. You know, we think that that right now membership is a matter of holiness because it's about preserving our holiness distinctives, but I want to say more fundamental than that, like way more fundamental than that, is separating the people of God from the world. And that's what membership has always done until very recently, like what, 100 years, 200 years maybe, until this concept just got lost. We lost the theological, as I understand it, and then it just got slowly turned into something else. Um, and I'm like, man, and I one of the questions that um you know I've had people ask time and time is like, how do you help people you know in the congregation to really realize that they're not, that they're not saved or that they really aren't part of the family of God? It's like, well, I think one of the first things you've got to do is draw a line around who is really part of this body. Who are you extending the office of the keys to and saying, we acknowledge your membership in the kingdom, we bind this on earth, we forgive your sins. You know, we we affirm the forgiveness of sins at Jesus says in John 20, you know, in Matthew 18, we see that that's our responsibility as a church is to acknowledge their spiritual membership in a visible way in this body, because outside of participation in the visible church, people are lacking vital assurance that they're part of the spiritual church. Um so yeah, I mean, just like a huge paradigm shift there that that really needs to happen.
SPEAKER_02One of our challenges today, and I think this is a fairly modern thing, is that our worship times are mixed, right? It's a mixture of sinners and saints. And so this is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I would dare to say it's probably largely a Western phenomenon as well. Uh because through the history of the church, the time of corporate Christian worship was a time of communion, and that was for the saints, that was for the baptized, right? And but now today we have uh you know our Christian worship is our primary means of evangelism. Uh, it is a largely, you know, many churches are largely evangelistic, uh, so that sermons are uh maybe geared towards winning the lost uh often. Um I I think this has shifted maybe a little bit, but uh, you know, the the um church growth movement, I mentioned Willow Creek in a in a you know earlier discussion, how they distinguished you know the seeker sensitive or you know, the seeker service, right? Versus you know their Christian worship service. And they made a they tried to make a really clear distinction. Well, what happened with that? What happened with that is all the nominal Christians really loved the seeker service, and so that's what they started going to, and it was just a a big big mixture. Well, I I've seen that happen. Uh I've seen that and I and I do preach evangel evangelistically, you know, occasionally. I am you know quite frequently call people to response, and sometimes that's a call to sinners. Uh so that that is a challenge that we have, and it's it's it's not going to go away anytime soon. Uh, I'm not gonna get up on Sunday and say, if you're a sinner, would you please just excuse yourself from the service so that us Christians can just uh but we do take communion uh every Sunday, and uh we do have people who don't take communion. Uh so I think that's a really important recognition that this puts us in a place of really having a difficult time of distinguishing why membership matters.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I just wanted to quickly interject. Um, I think it has definitely made the problem worse. But I do think of like 1 Corinthians 14, which says, if all prophesy and an unbeliever or outsider enters, he is convicted by all. He's called to account. Uh the secrets of his hearts are disclosed, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you. So here he says he describes an unbeliever as an outsider. And then this is drawing back on 1 Corinthians 5, where he talks about who do you judge, right? Who do you judge in church discipline? And you judge insiders, not outsiders. Well, the the thing about this is that without formal church membership, we have no way to decide who is an insider and outsider. Is an insider somebody who says they're a Christian? Well, if that's true, then are you saying that somebody who walks into your service for the very first time and says they're a Christian and is living in adultery, you're gonna start the Matthew 18 process? I mean, you're gonna start, you know, they're subject to discipline here. Uh, you know, who is that? You know, is it somebody that comes six months to your church, right? At what point? Well, for church history, you know, that's why membership has been practiced as something that's not just optional. It's actually been considered biblical and necessary because you can't even like obey these passages. The lines are so blurred between the insiders and outsiders.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so there's been a little bit of a rebellion that I have heard personally in the last 10 years against membership altogether. So people have suggested to me, pastors have said, you know, I think we're just gonna get rid of membership. And every time I hear that, it's like, no, no, no, no, don't get rid of membership. What you need to do is get rid of your idea of membership and recover a biblical idea of membership. Uh, because as as you you alluded to this earlier, uh, membership in Scripture is what distinguishes believers from unbelievers. What we have done in the modern church is membership in nearly every church, and certainly probably in every church I've ever been in that has membership, membership is what distinguishes some believers from other believers. You're a member of this church, not that one. And uh or or you are a member of this church and you're not and you are this kind of Christian, and you put some sort of subtitle on that, right? You are a conservative Christian, or you are a Methodist, or you are a Presbyterian, or you are some label that's added to Christian. Now, I understand why those labels are helpful. Um I use them, I understand that. But that is something that that's another discussion, and it's an important one. But that only takes place after we have had the discussion of what is biblical membership, what's the core of the idea here? And it is that membership, even in a local church, is supposed to be that which distinguishes, as you put it, insiders from outsiders, or as Paul put it, I guess, uh insiders from outsiders, believers from unbelievers. And uh and so recently, you know, we we've had uh in 2014, you know, major revision of our church manual, and we contemplated you know a multi-tiered membership structure. Uh, we didn't end up doing that. Uh, but in the process of discussion, you know, we were talking about uh how do we incorporate those who are believers within our congregation but don't meet the qualifications of membership. And in those discussions, uh you you can only imagine the different different things that are being said and different perspectives, but I was I was actually very, very surprised at how quick some people are to want to push some who claim to be Christians and and I think are, but to to exclude them, to put them in the category of outsiders. And I'm gonna say, you know what? We may have a membership that's that's fairly restrictive, but that doesn't make them outsiders. And we've got to figure out how to cross that that bridge. Uh because they're they may be young in the faith, uh, maybe they are spiritual infants or spiritual children, but they're not outsiders. And we need to make sure as the church that we don't that our whatever we do with the membership thing, we don't create that sort of distinction. Because I don't honestly, from first Corinthians twelve, that's not just uh just a a poor way of doing it. I think it's biblically wrong.
SPEAKER_01It's sin. Yeah. I have no idea what it is. It is.
SPEAKER_02Right. To say yes, it that's exactly what that is. To say to a fellow member of the true body of Christ, sorry, you're outside, you're not part of this local body, that seems to me to actually be sin.
SPEAKER_01Right. And it's not enough to let them hand out bulletins at the door. It's not enough to let them, you know, do something behind the scenes. You have to embrace them as a member of the body. So the question becomes if my love towards the household of God, towards the hands and the feet and the nose and the ears, if that love, if I have a responsibility to love those members in a way that I don't have a responsibility to love outsiders, there's a different kind of love within the family of God. I need to know who I'm responsible to love that way. I can't even obey that command unless those members, that membership has been clearly defined. And right there, you just immediately shift to see how you can't just turn this membership thing into a merely spiritual concept. That's not how Paul treats it. Paul treats it as it's something embodied, something visible, something discernible. There's insiders and outsiders. And it just becomes impossible to even obey biblical commands. It becomes impossible to exercise church discipline. And that's why I really think this, like, there's just a couple things, you know, that I think are like this is like matters of like absolute necessity that we recover this because like this is an area of like necessary reform, or the church just can't even be healthy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think one thing that that could be done to help reform and get back to a real biblical, you know, 1 Corinthians 12 notion of membership is this distinguish between the the timeless, clear biblical requirements for believers and those things that are more dynamic and local. That is, a local body may need to, and has, by the way, the authority to uh to create a life through you know some policies or rules that enforce harmony in that body. But that has to be dynamic. That is, it's subject to change and maybe frequent change because you're bringing new members in all the time. And especially if you live in a multicultural uh context, each new member, each new believer is going to bring a dynamic that's going to slightly change that. And so I think what we've done is we've put everything in the basket of essentials. And everything doesn't have to go in the basket of essentials because everything's not essential. Keep the essentials what they are, but recognize that within our own congregation, we may need to have some rules that help this local family know how to maintain harmony. I think we have, I think we see examples of that, certainly throughout Christian history. Um I think Augustine points out several of those in his letters. And I would say that it seems that Paul is aware of some of that dynamic as well. Um and I think we need to be cognitive of that. So I don't want anyone to walk away from this and say, well, then you know, are you saying that we should have no special rules or or we should just throw the doors open? And I would say, well, no, no, no, no, because the where where discipline comes in, you know, a manual of discipline and expectations, where that comes in is it comes into play for what is necessary for the harmony of this local church. And sometimes you do have to have guidelines that the whole body agrees upon, but you have to remember those things may be dynamic, they may, they may change from time to time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01No, that's a wise, maybe we should linger here a minute. But, you know, I feel so passionately about this. I get into this mode where I just want to hammer this because I'm so troubled by the the way I see members treated, you know, people that really are members of the body being excluded. But but I do think you're right. And the the thing that I've tried to do is like when I've had this conversation with some with some conference leaders, is um is basically say, what you think about as membership right now, let's call that conference membership. Let's just call that something else. Let's it's for a minute. Whether or not membership is even the right word, but let's let's think about that like some kind of club membership, something else. Okay. What I'm what I'm really talking about here is something different. I mean, I mean, there's almost there's almost no overlap with what you're doing. Let's call that local membership. Let's go and and that's where you get the two-tier thing come in. Um, which, you know, whether or not that's helpful, I don't know. Probably it's the best path forward. I recommend Phil Brown's paper here. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_02Well, I I think I think membership is local. Uh it's it is uh yes, there's a universality to it. Membership is is a Catholic term, uh universal term, but membership in particular in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 has to be local because everything that he's describing here is taking place between real individuals who are interacting with it with each other in a look in a particular locale.
SPEAKER_01Right, yeah. Yeah. So uh basically local membership then, let's call it local membership, just to distinguish it for uh for a moment, is about in this local body saying, here are the people that we are, you know, acknowledging that they're they're Christians, they're members of this body. And for bit from biblical standards, that is the same thing as baptism, right? There's no difference between baptism and membership. Baptism is membership. However, you need a formal system of membership beyond baptism for obvious reasons, right? So we have people who come into our church who are baptized somewhere else. We didn't baptize them. We didn't make that visible demonstration that we're welcoming them into our number. So now we've got to have some distinct formal way to say we affirm their baptism here. You know, you know, we've talked about this in the past a little bit, but you know, baptism is about their visible entrance into the covenant community. It's about them, them stepping out into the same baptismal waters. It draws a line around the church. That's the same thing membership does. Formal membership then is just a way of affirming their baptism. So when you talk about the qualifications for membership, I just always want to say, like, that's whatever those are, they've got to be the same thing as the qualifications for baptism. Nothing more, nothing less. If you're prepared to baptize somebody, you should admit them into formal membership. If there's anybody in your congregation right now who's been baptized somewhere else, if you're prepared to affirm their baptism, or if you would baptize them if they hadn't been baptized before, you should bring them into formal membership. Because that's what it is. It's the same thing.
SPEAKER_02So the challenge with many membership structures is that any member is eligible for any leadership. And that's a problem because scripture is very clear that every member is not, uh, is not uh doesn't qualify for uh leadership. And so I think there has to be a distinction in that. Um but I agree, you know, you said baptism is is membership. The way I've said it is discipleship is membership. And if we understand the relationship between discipleship and baptism, um baptism as a physical manifestation of one's you know commitment to Christ and his body, um, I think that's important. Um but until we understand membership within the context of a life of discipleship, I think it's gonna be hard to make any sort of positive change and real biblical change uh within any context. This is true in the most conservative of churches and the most liberal of churches because it's across the board. I do not think that this is particular to uh you know to to a conservative church. This is true across the board.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just to reiterate a little bit, you know, Acts 2 is an important passage here. You know, at Pentecost, you have the Spirit come, you have the so-called birthday of the church. Um, and so you have this whole crowd of people, right? They're Jews from across the world who've gathered, and the spirit comes and the gospel is preached, and some of them respond, you know, in faith, uh, in their hearts, right? So we might say that the moment somebody believed that message, truly believed in Christ, they were, they were at that point spiritually united. But they say, brothers, how should we, how should we, what should we do? How should we respond? Peter says, repent and be baptized. You know, repentance, believing unto salvation, and baptism are not separated. Your your entrance into the spiritual church is not separated, disconnected from your entrance into the visible church. It's not as though Jesus sent the Spirit to create this spiritual body of disconnected members scattered throughout the crowd. No, he created a new community. Just as the old people of God and you know, Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea, Paul says it's a baptism. Now at Pentecost, the members are stepping out from the crowd, they're getting into the same baptismal waters. Ephesians says we have we're one body, one baptism, visibly marking them off as the people of God. And as they're baptized, they are added to the number. Those who received his word were baptized, and they were added to the number. So there's there's a connection here between you're visibly now part of this community, and you continue in visible fellowship with this community through the breaking of bread, which is the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist. We see that in Acts 2. Uh at the end there, I think it's like verse 47, something like that, or uh verse 42, that's what it is. 42. So anyway. Yeah, 42. Right. Yeah, Acts 2, 42. So we, you know, what we see here right from the beginning is that the one body is marked off by one baptism, which is this visible membership. And we've got to start thinking about um the the sacraments as being about the markers of the covenant community, not just this individualistic uh act, you know, act where when we baptize people now, we tend to sing songs with the word I in them. You mentioned that earlier, and not the I of the b the voice of the body of Christ, but the the very individualistic I, right? I have to like, I mean, it's just it's just literally mind-blowing to me that baptism, which has always been about the marker of the one body, this communal activity, one person entering into the many, has turned into an event which is all about I'll I'm gonna follow whether no one goes with me. Who's baptizing you? So none go with me. Are you saying all these people are gonna fall away? Like, what do you what is that even go ahead, sorry.
SPEAKER_02So I I need I need to say something here because you brought up something that is a that just really um irritates me, and that is I've already made the point earlier that uh membership is is a local uh manifestation of our connection with Christ, right? This is why I do not like baptismal services at like say a church camp meeting, uh unless your whole local congregation is gonna come and be there with the baptismal candidate. Okay, fine. But what what you're doing is you're taking someone out of their local church and doing something that is extremely important for that local church, but you're taking it away from them. And so you know, denominational leaders, pastors, stop the baptismal services at camp meeting unless you're gonna have your entire church local church there present.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and Bible colleges as well.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so I yeah, I mean, yeah, for sure. I mean, I just it's that is a local uh sacrament that is so important for that local church. So with that said, all right, so off that for a second. Let you've kind of brought this up, but I want to uh share in my mind what I call the the logic of membership. And I have three words that I use, and I use this in my class, uh my class on membership, and uh it's it is in my mind, it summarizes the the flow and the logic of scripture pertaining to membership. And there's three words, and I think the order matters, but the three words are believe, belong, and become. And if we contemplate those three words, believe, belong, become, if we if we move the order around, if we change that order, it does all kinds of things theologically and practically. So if we take, you know, believe, belong, become, and we move it around and we say something like become, believe, belong, it it really makes a theological shift. And that's what actually a lot of churches have done. You only belong, or will only believe that you believe if we see a certain amount of sanctification taking place in your life, a certain uh uh by which they mean a certain level of compliance with our expectations, and then we'll see that you really believe, and then we'll uh allow you to belong. Uh so all sorts of manipulative things happen in membership when you get the that logic out of order. I really think the biblical logic is believe, that is, all who come to faith in Christ are believers, and in that moment belong to the full body of Christ. They belong to Christ Himself, and they believe to and they belong to the body. And as someone who belongs as a disciple of Christ, they become. As in Romans, justification comes first, sanctification follows. Those who are justified are called to be sanctified. Uh so that's believing, belonging, becoming. And I think that order really, really matters.
SPEAKER_01Can I just interject quickly to qualify? I think when you use the word order, you you are specifically talking about a logical order, not a temporal a temporal order. And and I think that's that's important because it's not as though you believe and then later on in time you belong. Right. But there's a logical order that you believe. Not chronological. Not chronological, not temporal in time, but yeah, but logically. And then the becoming, really, you already become something new. You're a new creature in Christ when you believe. Absolutely. So it's like there's they're all at the same time happening initially, but if you scramble them around in the way they're actually lived out and visualized in the life of the church, that's when you get so problematic.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So so good point. So and I have made that distinction in the past of between logical and chronological, but what happens is when the order gets reversed, not only do we reverse the order, but we add that chronological element to it. So when you put become first, we do that because we want it to be chronological, and it's not. So, yeah, so I think that's a point worth worth considering. So let me ask you this question or ask those who are listening, you can answer it yourself. At what point does a person belong? That is, when do they belong to the body of Christ? Uh, here are some suggestions that people have made. One is when they start attending church, when they make a confession of faith, uh, when they're baptized, or when they comply with the church rules for membership. Those are four common uh responses. Uh only one of them is correct. Uh the other three are terribly wrong. And if you've been listening to this podcast, you should have the right answer, right? Um But there I I would I would endeavor to say that the that oh go ahead. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01No, I was just thinking about how this plays itself out. There's so many examples. Like there are so many people in our churches who they're they are in all practical ways no more uh accountable to the body and no more belonging to the body in any tangible way than somebody who walks off the street into the service for the first time. Now, I think what we've done is we know instinctively something's wrong here. I mean, if you just read your Bible, something's not right here. So we we kind of like create ways to draw the lines that membership should be drawing. So we'll only call certain people brother or sister. We we kind of call them brother or sister because we kind of have in our minds that they're really part of the body. But then there's some people we're not really sure about. You know, so we kind of like create these ways. Or we use dress standards or denominational distinctives to determine who's really, you know, really a member here. You know, we we gotta draw the line somehow, or we it it undermines the holiness, the unity, the charity, that you know, all everything is undermined. And then you have a lot of people who are feeling this. You know, I can't tell you how many couples, young couples, like in their 20s, who have said, I can't even become a member in my church. And they're thinking about leaving because they don't really feel like they belong. And so you can't just spiritualize this. You can't just say, well, we we call, we know they're our brothers and sisters, we know they belong here. You know, we we we we extend the hand of fellowship and we let them, we plug them in, we use them. No, no, that doesn't, that's not enough. You've got to, you've got to use the office of the keys. You know, you've got to, you know, you've got and then for accountability, we end up talking about accountability, we hear that word all the time. I think part of our accountability crisis, if we want to use that word, is connected to our membership crisis. You can't hold somebody accountable unless they've been acknowledged visibly and publicly as an insider.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, discipleship and discipline go hand in hand, right? You can't you can't have discipleship without discipline. And you can't have discipline without discipleship. Uh, you cannot uh enforce a disciplined life within any sort of social gathering without loving a person, without experiencing that loving fellowship that takes place within a membership. Um so discipleship and discipline are just two sides of the same coin. Um may they're just synonymous words uh in reality. Um, but yeah, don't don't disconnect those. Uh they have to be connected. And don't think that someone who leaves a congregation because they can't become a member or they're they don't qualify. Um I think it's wrong to just write them off as, well, they're just too rebellious to line up. Well, no, no, that's not necessarily the case at all. Um so membership, and this goes back to the logic of believe, belong, become. Members, uh membership uh ought to be the place where a person can grow as a disciple. It ought to be about growth and a body coming along and helping each of the members mature in faith. That's exactly the point that Paul makes in Ephesians 4 when he uses body language. It is the members of the body helping one another to grow and to mature in Christ. That ought to be happening uh for uh for all members. And our membership, by the way, ought to reflect a spectrum of people who are at different places of their spiritual growth. It really ought to reflect that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I actually have my Bible open there. So Ephesians 4, 15 to 16, uh speaking the truth in love, were to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part or member is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. So there's the becoming. So you become, you're built up in love as you are connected, as you belong. And as that's demonstrated throughout scripture, um, it involves a visible membership. It involves, you know, really. I I like to make the joke, you know, that um, you know, it's one thing to say that we we love one another, we speak the truth in love, and that's how we grow, until you're sitting on the same committee meeting together and you've got to decide what color the carpet is. You know, it's really in rubbing up against one another in the local body and those those, you know, speaking words of admonition and encouragement to one another, and really in a way that we don't to outsiders, and really knowing who we're responsible to love in those ways, who we have to love as a one another. That the body builds itself up and grows. So again, we cannot, we cannot detach the spiritual reality from its visible manifestation.
SPEAKER_02Right, right. And it is the life, a lived out membership that visualizes the presence of the church, the body of Christ. Kevin Van Hooser said the church is neither everywhere nor nowhere. It's always somewhere. Well, we have to have a way to visualize that somewhere. And that somewhere is the lived out membership of believers in union, in harmony, in love, in all of those one another commands in the New Testament. That's what it means to be a member. These are people who are committed to one another in a particular locale. They're committed to live out the one another's toward each other in order to manifest the presence of Christ.
SPEAKER_01Good. I think that's one of the reasons why I resist a little bit the common saying, the church is a people, not a building. And I understand that that's true, but I worry that what that does is say the location doesn't matter. The emplaced nature of the body doesn't matter. So, okay, if the church is a people, does that mean we're the church when we're scattered in our individual homes? Well, it does, insofar as you're spiritually united to Christ, but if you never assemble, are you really the ecclesia, the assembly? You know, we are a people, a church is a local church, is a people in a place. That place is usually a building. So I don't know how helpful it really is to say that. So we have to start thinking about okay, what is the church, what is the church? The church is a people in this locale. We're low, there's a locality to it. That locality is a representation of the church universal. But in this church, you're mixed with unbelievers who come in. So how do you draw a line around who's really part of this church? That's baptism membership. Um, and then as you bring some people into that membership, you know, really visibly join them to the other members, they're going to grow up with the body as a whole, not just when they go into their prayer closet alone, as important as that is, but as really being part of a life-giving body and being connected to that in a visible, formal way.
SPEAKER_02This goes back to a how physical theology relates to the church. Uh, you know, we uh we talk about you know sacraments. Obviously, that's an important part of our physical theology. Uh, you know, manifesting, visualizing our fellowship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, uh, both in baptism and in the Holy Eucharist. Uh, but you know, the the place of corporate worship uh is not insignificant. It is, it represents something. And that this is why architecture has always been so important to uh to Christians through the ages, uh, because it symbolizes something, it sends a message. Um and no, unfortunately, today a lot of the churches uh today send quite a different message. Um but uh the the grandeur and the beauty and the the majesty of those old you know churches. We just went to the National Cathedral here not too long ago, and uh there are many elements of that you know cathedral that I love, and there are some that I don't like at all, but um but it is majestic and it's it gives you a sense of awe. And it reminds us of you know when we enter into a place like that, it reminds us visually of why we're there. It should. Our head immediately rises, our eyes immediately look upward, right? That's that's the whole point of that architecture, is to draw our to unite our our eyes upward. You sing in a large open you know cathedral, you sing and the voices blend together. I mean, all of that is carefully you know thought out by Christians through the ages. It's very intentional. So what's happened then today is uh you know, a lot of buildings, most churches are not like that, right? We don't we have the money to go build a big cathedral. And so we put up something that's very economical, just very uh utilitarian, and we get by, and then we um but then we uh do one of two things. We either uh mistake the church for the building entirely, or we think that the building has nothing to do with it. And uh it has something. That's the truth. It has something to do with it, but it's certainly uh it's it that something is the visualization of our gathering. It is a gathering spot, and then hopefully there's something within that gathering spot that can remind us of what we're doing when we get there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's good. That's helpful. So I think uh we have a few minutes left. I want to come back to your emphasis on discipleship. So, you know, if we go back to the Great, let's just go back to the Great Commission, make, you know, go and and make disciples. Make disciples is the primary command there. How do we do that? Baptizing them, teaching them everything to obey everything Jesus commanded in the triune name, we're baptizing them. So discipleship is sacramental. Discipleship is fundamentally sacramental. You you don't, there's a and there's a logic to it, right? You teach them all things which I've commanded you after you baptize them. And really that begins at baptism when you pass on the faith, you know, with using the creed or a confession, some kind of confession of faith. So with discipleship, it's like when you baptize somebody, a new believer, an adult, if you if you're baptizing an adult believer, with infant baptism, you know, there's a lot of questions there about how that relates to discipleship, but let's assume we're we're baptizing an adult into the church. There's a relationship that's being entered there. This you don't baptize yourself. You don't take a cup of water and dump it over yourself in the name of the Father. You're baptized by the church into the church with the expectation that you're being baptized into the church to be taught and obey all things which Jesus commanded. So baptism is like the church's pledge. We are bringing you into the discipleship community, and we're gonna expect you to obey everything Jesus commanded. And baptism is like my pledge that I'm coming into the discipleship community, I've counted the cost, and I'm gonna participate now in this life. So this brings us then to the fact that okay, when the church baptizes somebody for the sake of discipleship, that's part of it, especially if they're an adult believer, then what happens if they don't obey everything Jesus commanded? The church places their visible approval on someone, they extend the forgiveness of sins, they exercise the office of the keys to welcome them in. They the line that was drawn around the church has been bubbled out to extend to expand to include one more member. What happens if they don't fulfill their discipleship and they they have counted the cost, but they they walk away or they don't fulfill their vows? What happens then?
SPEAKER_02So of the one another commands in the New Testament, half of them have to do with keeping one another from sin or restoring one another from sin. And you know, that restoration uh is is laid out. We need to talk about that sometime. That's that's beyond where we are right now. Uh but there is a a process that is fairly clear in a number of passages in the New Testament that needs to be implemented, and then there are consequences for the one who does not fulfill that uh that restoration and and submit to the authority of Christ through the Apostolic Church.
SPEAKER_01And that's Matthew 18, that's 1 Corinthians 5, that's Titus 2, that's so many different places. And this is why, you know, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to obey any of those passages without church membership. So if you have somebody that goes through the Matthew 18 process, they get to the step where they refuse to listen to the church and they have to be cast out of the fellowship, what does that mean? Does it mean they're not even welcome to attend? Well, not necessarily. Maybe there's an attendance ban, right? But what it has meant for, you know, most, well, what, all of church history besides the like last very short period of time is exclusion from the Lord's table. Because, and this is where baptism and the supper, you know, the Eucharist relate to one another. Baptism is your visible visible entrance into the church. You become a visible member. You continue to participate in the body by participating in the Eucharist, and your exclusion from the table, from communion, is you you being excluded from membership in the church. The word excommunication literally means exclusion from communion. Um, and so this is why I have been you know pretty strong about closed communion, is I think it creates so many difficulties, then uh it blurs the line. But at the very least, somebody who goes through that Matthew 18 process has to be banned from the table because that's where membership is affirmed. So just as we see in Ephesians, there's one body, one baptism, Paul says. Paul also says, because you eat one bread, you are one body. So how do you exclude a member from the body? You exclude them from the bread.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So we will do a later podcast just on uh on church discipline, uh, including excommunication. And yes, you you're right. That that is what it looks like. If that's what it looks like, many churches apparently are excommunicating almost everybody because they never serve communion, and so you're essentially excommunicating everyone. Um there's such there's such a um starvation of the sacraments within many local churches that this there is no discipline. You you there's no uh way of visualizing or even formalizing discipline. Um that's a that's that's another aspect of membership crisis, all right? Talking about uh not not the ones who are not members, but that's the sort of membership crisis of the of the members who those who are members. So we need definitely need to come back to that. And uh and I would say we have uh all of this is within the context of discipleship. Discipleship is membership. And uh we have to be able to address the front end of membership and this back end of membership. Uh how do we bring someone into the church and then how do we keep them? Uh and I say we, I how how does how does the body, how does it function in order to uh keep the body in good health and growing in health? That's what we're called to do. And uh the Holy Spirit obviously is the is the one who forms the church and sustains the church, uh, but uh we have a responsibility to uh look out for one another. And on this this back end of discipline, of maintaining you know church purity and you know the marks of the church, uh that that is that's the responsibility of of the members and restoration, in particular responsibility of the spiritual leaders.
SPEAKER_01You know, if you look at every Protestant definition of the church, which has strong patristic ties, um, the church is wherever the gospel is purely preached. You know, we get that part, but then also where the sacraments are rightly administered. I mean, that's that's everywhere. That's Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, it's all the same. What it meant for Protestants to rightly administer the sacraments, I mean, one of two marks of the true church is to bring people in and out of membership. And that's what it meant. It meant baptism and the supper, drawing the line around who's really part of this body, so that if you don't rightly administer the sacraments, you're not even a true church. This could not be, I think, more important to discipleship. And um, and I really appreciate your continued emphasis on discipleship because I do think um there is there is a perceived membership crisis by many. There is a perceived accountability crisis. We're talking more about accountability partners. We've got to be accountable Christians, right? There's there's a lot of perceived crises, but I think the most perceived crisis of all is the discipleship crisis. And I think what we're trying to say is if you want to address the discipleship crisis, start with the sacraments. Start with being belonging to the body, because it's only when you belong that you become. Start by addressing these other things that everybody wants to avoid, but still somehow have healthy discipleship. It's not going to happen. Uh they're inseparable. Sacraments, membership, uh, and I think that's why I've really made so much of my reading and thinking about sacraments is because uh they're not just one of many pieces of the puzzle. They're like the thing around which all of these other issues orbit. Conversations about membership, conversations about accountability, conversations about church discipline. They all orbit around the sacraments. Um, and that's that's I think what we really have to start with is a higher theology of the sacraments. And I'll just stop with this. So I've been reading Michael Byrd's Evangelical Theology, and he identifies four things that are necessary for the renewal of evangelical churches. I think he's absolutely right. One of them is a thick Catholicity. We've been trying to do that with Holy Joys, the Adfantes group. One of them is a high sacramental theology. We've been trying to do that as well. Um the third one eludes me. Uh, the fourth one is revivalistic preaching, which I think we we know. We've got to have that evangelist. It's very interesting. But there are a lot of churches. You know, I have a friend pastoring in a in a more in a church context that has all these structures in place, but they're all spiritually dead, right? They all need excommunicated. They're all members, but they all really ought to be excommunicated because they're, you know, there's people on the board or people in the, you know, that are members, have been members all their lives, and they're living lives of sin. They've got, they need to be, and that's what we'd see in the Roman Catholic Church, right? They have some of these structures, but if they had a revival, they'd excommunicate half or more of their members, probably. We, on the other hand, we know you've got to be born again. You've got to, you know, and amen, right? Amen. But if you don't get embedded into the life of the church, if you don't, you know, if you don't have the church, you're not gonna become mature. You're just gonna have a bunch of shallow spiritual infants. So anyway.
SPEAKER_02Sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, enough of that.
SPEAKER_02So so we're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about church discipline, restoration, excommunication. But let me just give this final, I guess, caveat and and say, you know, we we are not looking, and what you're you're not gonna hear from us is that we're just we're looking to excommunicate people. Uh we're we're looking to for the next person we can't. No, not at all. Yeah. Uh because we have uh the scripture has a lot to say about that. Again, our our thought on this ought to be guided by by God's own heart in Ezekiel 34. Uh, so uh definitely I look forward to coming back to that discussion. And uh hopefully what we have said here about discipleship and membership uh will be helpful to to pastors and conference leaders and and those who are in the decision-making uh meetings when they talk about how to uh better be the body of Christ and and uh to especially deal with some some issues at the local level that can help uh some some believers really belong, find that they really do belong in the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I told my wife, as much as I talk about church discipline and excommunication because I believe it's so vital and so neglected, it's like the most painful thing in the world. And um, I hope I never have to excommunicate somebody, but I'm sure that uh it will happen because that's it's it's pretty much we look at history, it's always happened. Um, and uh and it's it's unfortunately it's the way that it goes. Uh and the more aggressively you're baptizing people and you're bringing into people into membership, the more that you you take this membership issue seriously, the more you're going to need to think about church discipline excommunication because that's where it leads. And it's very difficult, very, very, very painful. Uh but yeah, look forward to getting back to this conversation and continuing it sometime.
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