W. Jackson Watts
When the Commission for Theological Integrity published an essay about church membership in its inaugural edition of De Doctrina, it wasn’t a random decision. It revealed a collective sense that the doctrine of the church (ecclesiology) has been too often neglected in the National Association of Free Will Baptists. It may even be downright dismissed in some settings.
One might feel better (or worse!) about the situation to discover that serious Christians of many denominational backgrounds and theological persuasions feel this way also. I think that the explosion of “Next Steps”-types of classes for new churchgoers is one sign that points to the growing desire of churches to introduce people to what it means to belong to their particular church.
Now, such classes alone don’t prove that churches are being biblical and wise. But they hint at the fact that church leaders know, at least implicitly, that they need to avoid casually absorbing newcomers into the population of the church. People need biblical instruction and expectations, among other things.
The main argument that I made in “Church Membership: A Theological Issue?” is this: we can treat membership as a merely practical “how-to” concern (or ignore it altogether) while failing to see its profound theological significance. However, membership is deeply interwoven with understandings of what the church is, what salvation is, and what the future means for life now. To neglect a clear and thorough account of membership will diminish our evangelism, discipleship, and the very nature of the church.
I stand by what I wrote and pray that it will help our churches and leaders. That said, if I failed to do anything, perhaps it was to assume too much about what some of our working definitions of church membership are. Perhaps I didn’t do enough to combat hazy, subjective, loose ideas on the topic.
Let me offer one of the best ones I’ve ever seen from Baptist theologian Jonathan Leeman in his marvelous little book, Church Membership:
A church member is a person who has been officially and publicly recognized as a Christian before the nations, as well as someone who shares in the same authority of officially affirming and overseeing other Christians in his or her church. (29)
Leeman’s definition of membership is based on (1) his exegesis of Matthew 16 and 18, and (2) his definition of a church. Of the latter he says,
A local church “is a group of Christians who regularly gather in Christ’s name to officially affirm and oversee one another’s membership in Jesus Christ and his kingdom through gospel preaching and gospel ordinances.” (62-63).
These two moves are crucial. How can you look upon a mass of individuals assembled in a particular room on a Sunday morning and say, “Good morning, church,” if you don’t have a right idea of what the New Testament calls a church?
Likewise, how can we treat people with the proper kind of spiritual seriousness if we don’t know the difference between a sheep and a goat? And what should our churches do to acknowledge that people have moved from the goat pen to the sheep pasture?
What Are Members?
The subtitle of Leeman’s book is an essential phrase concerning membership: “How the World Knows Who Represents Jesus.”
I always find it humorous whenever a professing Christian finds fame, whether in film, music, or sports. If you ever bump into someone from their hometown, they will be quick to claim them. They may even claim them as a Baptist, Presbyterian, or whatever church they once belonged to. It’s interesting that this never happens when a professing Christian (and member on a church’s roll somewhere) is accused or convicted of a serious crime. No one from that church steps up and says, “Yep, he/she is one of ours!”
Why? People intuitively know that such people are capable of somehow representing a person, group, institution, or cause. Christians are Christ-followers. They bear his name. Likewise, his church bears his name.
Leeman’s work on membership reminds us that by virtue of true conversion and proper baptism, Christians have been recognized as Kingdom citizens, spiritual people with spiritual authority, disciples who bear Jesus’ name.
How Are We Approaching Membership?
This claim leads to a harder question: is this the understanding of conversion, catechesis, and baptism that we are communicating? Do we teach, preach, and model a clear conception of being a member of the body?
There are countless ways we can get this wrong. I certainly have sometimes. One of the major errors is to side-step the entire notion of authority and accountability.
At heart, we’re all individualists. Like the era of Judges, we tend toward “doing what is right in our own eyes.” Church membership blows this mentality out of the water. It says, “You do not belong to yourself. You belong to God, and you belong to others.” In short, this is a call to accountability.
The notion of authority is wedded to the matter of accountability. Why should anyone see themselves as accountable to others through church membership? According to Matthew 16, believers have been entrusted with the authority to affirm and oversee the professions of other believers. This is entailed in the phrases of the “keys to the kingdom” and “binding and loosing” things on earth. These images refer to spiritual authority, discernment and decision-making by God’s people on earth.
In overseeing the professions of others, we are responsible for their discipleship and well-being, which brings together accountability and authority. (Interesting that the language of “binding and loosing” only shows up again in Matthew 18, a crucial chapter on church discipline.)
Authority is certainly a fraught issue. Our minds immediately envision the abuse of authority, not its legitimacy and benefit. However, all we need to do to realize authority’s importance is observe the dysfunction in families, schools, workplaces, governments, and churches. People are failing to do what they are authorized to do, while also doing what they aren’t authorized to do.
Membership and Ordinances
Other errors with accountability and authority pertain to the ritual life of the church. Let’s focus on baptism.
Baptism is an entry rite; it’s not just a celebratory act for people who have found Jesus. It’s a more comprehensive act that symbolizes inner transformation and communicates our belonging to God and to God’s people. We must always make clear the who (converted people) and what (immersion) of baptism, but also the why (obedience, testimony, and union with the body).
A careful, serious approach to baptism would cause some of us to rethink how we’re approaching it. For example, while I’m not advocating for excessively delaying the baptism of those professing Christ, we need to rethink the push toward spontaneous baptisms. There is no Scriptural requirement for them to be immediate. Though Scripture provides a few examples of ones that appear to be immediate, it is largely silent on the timing of baptism. How should we think of those examples?
The context helps explain at least part of why we see these, and why some of the catechesis and instruction might have occurred post-baptism. Jewish society already had background understandings of baptism as both an act of cleansing as well as an entry rite for outsiders. Yet the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus augmented the cultural preunderstandings of the time. Both clearly associated baptism and following Jesus with repentance and faith.
As soon as the first distinctly Christian sermon was preached at Pentecost, Peter told the convicted inquirers that they should, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ.” Then, “those who received his word were baptized” (Acts 2:38-41). There’s no ambiguity here as to what was being conveyed, believed, and acted upon.
Thus, I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that people in the early apostolic age would have been less susceptible to misunderstanding baptism’s meaning. Such misunderstandings (and hasty affirmations of people’s conversion) are precisely what wisdom seeks to avoid.
In today’s religious climate, baptismal views are all over the map. (Granted, they’ve had two thousand years to multiply!) But I’m advocating for caution because I’ve encountered countless 30, 40, 50, and even 60-year-olds who ground their spiritual security in a trip to the baptistry. The vast majority of them were reared in Baptistic settings.
We need to communicate to new converts that baptism isn’t primarily about checking spiritual boxes or mere celebration. Instead, it is an induction into the life of the body. While I do think sometimes separating baptism from the act of uniting with the church in membership can be appropriate, especially with younger children, we can make a biblical case to approach baptism as preparatory and typically coinciding with membership, provided this latter point is clear to all involved.
Membership Clarity Requires “Church” Clarity
I mentioned above that church membership and the actual definition of a church are deeply connected. This is logical but increasingly ambiguous today.
Return to the newcomer/new member/next steps classes earlier. What are we often teaching? Anecdotally, I find that they tend to focus on a set of practices newcomers are asked to commit to, should they become a part of the church. Emphasizing practical expectations is a reasonable and important way to highlight the need for obedience. Then again, we need to ensure we don’t overemphasize the “how” of membership” without the “why” of membership. (We need both!) The “why” of membership is tied to the fact that Christians are members of a body of identifiable believers in covenant community with one another. All our obedience, practices, and “values and vision” exist within that frame.
I’m increasingly concerned that we are viewing churches as organizations that launch, which people later join, instead of bodies formed as people unite with or submit to them.
In a way this concern is related to a distinction that has long existed: the organization and the organism, or my preferred one, the trellis and the vine (See Marshall & Payne, 2009).
In our modern social and legal landscape churches must organize themselves in a way that respects Caesar but also concedes a bit to the realities on the ground. The moment we decide to meet in a particular public space and not out in someone’s field, we must consider what it means to be “public.” We are subject to a civil, legal, and regulatory regime that we may or may not like, but is unavoidable.
We employ people and thus withhold taxes on some employees. We have buildings open to the public, and thus we have annual inspections by a fire marshal. We carry insurance coverage that will, to some degree, ensure the sustainability of an organized ministry. These are just a few of the dozens of accommodations we make that create something like a recognizable church in the public domain.
Some of these accommodations are necessary, while others may simply be wise. But in our effort to construct, “launch,” or organize a church, we cannot set aside a New Testament conception of the church. I don’t think anyone intends to do this; perhaps the main issue is that they think that the Bible gives an endless amount of flexibility to the issue.
It’s fair to argue that one reason why the Bible doesn’t resolve every ecclesiological question is because the Lord intended for His Word and Spirit to grant flexibility to believers across millennia and civilizations. The people of God would inevitably look different and organize themselves differently depending on time, space, and circumstances. However, if we’re not to lose the true nature of the church and its membership, we cannot relegate all questions of ministry to the “indifferent” (what some of our ancestors called adiaphora). Some things belong in that category, but not everything.
Conclusion
For all the practical decisions we must make about membership, we need to (1) aim for a thoroughly New Testament one; and (2) couple it with a thoroughly New Testament conception of the church.
Not every detail of the apostolic age is for our own. (Free Will Baptists will think here about things like tongues.) But the apostles wrote letters to churches. What they lay down as commands must be obeyed. What can be inferred by “good and necessary consequences” should be observed as faithfully as we can. Even the patterns of Scriptural history and reasoning need to be studied carefully. If we intend to call ourselves sola Scriptura Christians, then we must apply that aim to ecclesiology, as well as other areas.