Let’s Drop Unbiblical Rules for Church Membership

Evangelicals are rightly concerned about keeping unsaved and unregenerate worldlings outside the membership of the local church. But ought they not to be equally concerned about the many redeemed who are being kept outside also?

An illustration will focus the problem. A “born-again,” baptized young woman applied for membership in a nationally known metropolitan church to which her husband belonged. She was refused. The grounds? She could not honestly sign the membership oath demanding total abstinence from certain social activities in which she occasionally indulged. (However, she was accepted at a top Bible college where the church’s pastor was a board member and had served as a teacher.) No one questioned her Christianity, sincerity, or desire to serve God. But she was denied entrance into a local church for lack of “social purity.”

As adviser of an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship chapter at a large state university, I have discovered that this requirement of “social purity” has many facets. Many young people reared with subcultural social attitudes and subsequently broadened by their college experiences find themselves rejected by their home churches. Some suffer direct attack from the pulpit or from belligerent brothers in Christ. Most of them feel adrift, like strangers without a spiritual home. One young man was forced to leave the church of his childhood, in which he had been called to the ministry, and ultimately found himself in a less evangelical church.

Almost a decade in the pastorate gave me further experience with the problem. Often a sincere but overly rigid group of inquisitors (the church membership committee) succeed in eliminating most of the tares and taking only the wheat; but in the process they invariably cast away some of the wheat. Although a local church should desire to have a membership that includes no non-Christians, something is wrong when this desire is carried out at the cost of excluding Christians who sincerely seek membership. Many a Christian “reject” is being escorted, unwittingly of course, by evangelical ushers into the pews of liberal churches. Why? Simply because he does not qualify for a separated society of “sanctified saints.”

Surely some drastic rethinking is in order. Evangelicals need to look again at the true nature and purpose of the local church as set forth in the New Testament. What are the conditions for membership? The biblical answer is clear: belief and baptism (Acts 2:41). To be sure, belief must be more than merely academic; it must involve personal trust in the living Saviour. Likewise baptism ought to be a reality and not just a ritual. But to insist on an extra-biblical kind of cultural and sociological separation as a prerequisite to membership is another matter.

There are surely cases in which entrance should be refused or delayed and others in which excommunication is necessary, such as the case of immorality mentioned in First Corinthians 5. But immorality is not the issue concerning us here; it is sociology. Could it be that some churches have wrongly understood themselves to be institutions of the purified rather than of purification? Are they accepting the hypocritical and rejecting the honest?

The New Testament makes it clear (especially in Acts 10 and in First and Second Corinthians) that the first-century church had in it all kinds of people, including some whose lives were far from exemplary. There seems to be no compelling reason why the twentieth-century church should erect stricter standards. It should not, of course, reduce the standards for Christians to the standards of Christians, which are usually much lower. But setting up secondary standards beyond the basic requirement of regeneration should be considered as undesirable as receiving the “wicked.”

Some will object that, if a church opens its doors to the “weak,” it will dilute the stream of its devotion. Not if it has a devotion worthy of the “weak” brothers’ emulation. Not if it can say humbly with the Apostle, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). What is often forgotten is that Christian morality is an ideal to be attained as the result of the edifying ministry of the church and not a condition to be realized before one enters the church.

The case comes to mind of the dedicated wife of a nationally known evangelist who, out of honesty, did not sign the oath of her local church prohibiting motion picture attendance because the family had attended a professional travelogue! In the same church there were less conscientious members who secretly attended Hollywood movies to say nothing of indulging in such sins as backbiting, pride, false accusation, and a host of other evils, indulged in by many who sign “purity pledges.” Why should honesty be penalized and hypocrisy permitted? Why should the traditions of men about church membership be allowed to set aside the commandment of God?

If the policy that “we don’t accept anyone who will smoke, drink, go to movies, or do other ‘worldly’ things or who will associate with those that do” were rigidly applied, the Apostle Paul and even our Lord himself would be barred from some congregations. For Paul exhorted Timothy to take “a little wine for his stomach’s sake” (1 Tim. 5:23), and Jesus associated with publicans and sinners.

“In those days things were different,” someone will object. “A stronger stand is needed in our corrupt society.” But Roman society of the early centuries was no utopia. History records the gladiatorial games and theatres—hardly wholesome Christian activities. The silence of the New Testament at this point is surprising. Never once does it directly condemn any of these “worldly activities.” Perhaps there was “a more excellent way” of approaching the matter than by demanding that Christians refrain from such things before being allowed to join the church (see Phil. 4:8).

There may be some truth in the saying, “The church popular is the church polluted”; but it is also true that the church “purified” may become the church petrified (cf. 1 Cor. 5:10). The important question is this: Is the local church an institution of the edified or of edification? Is it a group of people who are already perfect or who are being perfected? It is instructive to observe that the Lord’s threat to remove the “candlestick” of ministry was made to a church that had a very scrupulous policy about purity. The church at Ephesus could “not bear them which were evil” but had “tried them” and “found them liars” (Rev. 2:2). Perhaps their extreme precaution about purity overshadowed their passion for the redemption of the less pure. “Thou hast left thy first love,” they were reminded.

One thing is clear. There are a growing number of the redeemed outside many evangelical churches, and a good many of them are outside because of unbiblical pledges about “social purity.” The time has come for us to be disturbed at the attitude and policies of churches that, while rightly fearful of letting in the unsaved, have not been fearful of keeping out the saved.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.