He was a Christian, a pillar in the community, a world-renowned physician, an exemplary family man, and he was elected to serve a three-year term as elder. I was just out of seminary at the time, a new member of the church staff. One evening my wife and I were invited to his home for dinner. During our time together, he confided to me that he really didn't have time to attend the elder meetings, but he thought that was excusable, given his demanding schedule. What was important, he said, was that his name be connected with the church.
I admit that sounds awfully conceited of him, but at the time it didn't seem so. He was such a gentleman.
He finished his three years attending less than a fourth of the meetings. A new slate of elders was elected. One evening about three months after his term had ended, this gentleman showed up at an elder meeting. Everyone was glad to see him but a little puzzled over why he was there. Finally, someone asked him.
His brow furrowed as he said, "This is the night we meet, isn't it?" The others in the room began fumbling for a discreet way to inform him that his term had expired.
When I heard about the incident, I had a good laugh. Then I got mad. I had bought his line about the main thing being the association of his good name with the church. Now it came to me that his attitude denied just about everything the New Testament teaches not only about eldership but also about the body of Christ. It was then and there I decided that if I ever got a shot at being a senior pastor myself, I would quickly put some teeth back into being an elder as well as a church member.
I have had my chance these nine years and have worked hard at it. I am now more convinced than ever that congregations should make membership a very serious thing for every Christian.
Against the Tide
I know what I am trying to do flies in the face of a lot of current practice. Where I live, the fastest growing churches minimize the idea of membership. It is seen as an outdated formalism. What matters, they say, is not that you are a "card-carrying" member of the institution but that you actually participate in the fellowship. They have a point. But it is a half-truth, and as the British diplomat remarked in Lawrence of Arabia, an outright lie is better than a half-truth. In an outright lie you know where the truth went, but in a half-truth it is easy to forget.
Why emphasize church membership? Because every Christian is a member of the church, that's why. "The same act which sets us in Christ," writes P. T. Forsyth, "sets us also in the society of Christ." When a Christian joins a particular congregation, he or she merely bears witness to what is already the case spiritually.
The rejoinder to what I have just said is "If we all are already spiritually joined together in the body of Christ, what's the big deal about membership in a local congregation? What can a membership card add?" Those rhetorical questions are usually followed by a lot of disparaging talk about the organized church as opposed to the true, "spiritual" church.
That kind of response is proof that the Gnostic heresy is still alive and well. The Gnostics, you will remember, set the spiritual against the material and said only the spiritual mattered. For them, the material world, with its concreteness and particularity, was a hindrance to realizing the spiritual, and the more they could avoid it or minimize it, the more spiritual they would be. The Incarnation only appeared to have happened, they said. God could not have inhabited a physical body in space and time, for space and time were evil.
By the same token, it is the Gnostic heresy that lies behind the disparagement of the concrete, particular, organized church. For just as God once stooped to take on concrete, particular, organized flesh, so his Spirit continues to stoop to inhabit his church. The church is to be just as visible and concrete as its Lord was during his public ministry. As a matter of fact, it is through the church that our Lord's public ministry is carried out in the world today.
In the church, as in the Incarnation, there is no dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical. Professor Dale Bruner has argued in a presentation to a group of collegians, "The alternatives are not 'spiritual or organizational,' they are 'spiritual organization' or 'unspiritual chaos.' The church of the New Testament is not a spiritualized, ghostly community of believers without form or organization; it is the organized church of Corinth, Ephesus, and Philippi with real, concrete governments and leaders and elders and institutions—and this is the will of God. The historical Christian church is not invisible. The Christian church is precisely as visible as the Christian man."
Paul's metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ best illustrates this. Can you imagine a man saying to his fiancée, "Dear, we are spiritually one. Please, let's not spoil it by having a public ceremony and moving under the same roof and making love and opening a joint checking account and getting all organized to live together. Let's keep this lovely thing between us spiritual." The fiancée might well doubt the future of their relationship.
In the New Testament, the reality of the spiritual is measured by the degree to which it becomes physical. To join a particular part of the body of Christ is not to bring something into existence that was not there before. It is simply to make actual what is spiritual, to prove that the spiritual is real.
It is true that a name on a membership roll makes for nothing in itself. But how seriously can we take a person who says he wants to be part of the church but doesn't want to sign his name publicly? It is true the organized church is filled with foibles. But are those who shun a commitment free of foibles? To paraphrase a line from Chesterton, one gets the impression they believe in the One Holy, Apostolic, and Absolutely Pure Church of Christ, of which they regret to say they are the only members. Yes, the church is blemished. But Christ still loves her, says Paul, not because she is without blemish but that he might one day present her so. He sees the church, warts and all, and knows he must first love that which he would change. The church on the corner is not the church it should be, but it is the church that will one day be all God has called it to be. To go public and join it is the first step in loving it as Jesus does.
Getting Practical
So we emphasize membership. The church I pastor, like many others, fleshes out its conviction by requiring ten weeks of membership classes for everyone who would join the church. This underlines the importance of one's decision.
We stress at the outset that coming to the classes is not a commitment to join but to take the necessary steps for making a responsible decision whether to join. Of course, most people who sign up for ten weeks of two-hour classes are already fairly sure they want to join. But not all actually do. That pleases me—not that they decide against joining, but that they take the issue of church membership seriously enough to be honest about it.
I repeat, the reason for the classes and the membership covenant flow directly out of New Testament teaching on the nature and purpose of the church. But there are other reasons. One is historical precedent. We know that in the early centuries it was the church's practice to require a year of instruction before baptism. In many parts of the world, a lovely custom was observed at the end. The catechumens were baptized the night before Easter, symbolizing their identification with Christ in his death.
Until the period of instruction and baptism was complete, these men and women were dismissed from the worship service just prior to the Eucharist. Even though they had professed faith in Jesus Christ, they were not allowed to partake of the Sacrament until they had been made ready for responsible church membership! Our ten weeks of classes sound like a big deal to many. To a pastor in the second or third century, we would look positively superficial. (Which we are, but that is another article.)
Another reason for the classes is prophetic. By emphasizing church membership this way, we swim against the current of American culture. Membership flies in the face of the outrage of church shopping and consumer religion in which people move from church to church and preacher to preacher on the basis of private shopping lists. The typical American Christian increasingly chooses a church not because of the lordship of Christ and his call for disciples but because of how shrewdly a given church has marketed its services. It is the almighty individual and his or her needs that stands in the center of this appalling state of affairs.
In Flannery O'Connor's apocalyptic novel Wise Blood, Hazel Motes meets a semiliterate street preacher named Onnie Jay Holy. He is preaching "The Holy Church of Christ without Christ." Why join his church? Onnie Jay gives three good reasons.
Number one: "You can rely on it that it's nothing foreign connected with it. You don't have to believe nothing you don't understand and approve of. If you don't understand it, it ain't true, and that's all there is to it. No jokers in the deck, friends."
Number two: "It's based on the Bible. Yes sir! It's based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpitted."
Number three: "This church is up-to-date! When you're in this church you know that there's nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don't know, all the cards are on the table, friends, and that's a fack!"
No one is better than O'Connor in using the grotesque and bizarre to make a point. Unfortunately, a character she meant to be grotesque turns out to be not that far from reality in the modern church. Our membership classes may be just spitting into a gale, but they are attempting to challenge Onnie Jay Holy's "Church of Christ without Christ."
Membership classes also help build a stronger congregation. It is a proven fact that the manner in which a person enters a church (or any organization) greatly influences the way he or she will function. Men and women take their allegiance to Jesus Christ and his church seriously because, in part, they took the time to be instructed in what church membership means. They also form friendships with other classmates that last years after the classes are over. The bigger a church gets, the more important those contacts become.
I also get to know new members in a way I could not if there were no classes and I were not teaching them. Teaching is a chore—I've taught them for the last nine years—but it is more than rewarded by the relationships I am able to form with members of my flock.
There is much we do not do that we should. Our most glaring fault in Irvine is that we do not do enough to help these new members into the mainstream of the church. When the classes are over, they are more excited than they will probably ever be about the church. Too often they become disappointed when we fail to help them find their place. But that in no way erases the value of the classes. We must simply meet the expectations we create.
The goal of us all is that Christ be able to present the church holy and without blemish one day. We cannot do that ourselves. It is his work. Whatever we do to aid him, we are called to love the church as he does and to find concrete ways to put that love into practice.
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
