New Life Baptist Church, College Station Texas

Today we have the final post in our “Why Mem­ber­ship Mat­ters” blog series. In the first post, we iden­ti­fied a prob­lem: most pro­fess­ing Chris­tians sim­ply aren’t aware of what the Bible teaches about mem­ber­ship in the local church. Like Joshua Har­ris, most of us grew up expect­ing lit­tle, get­ting lit­tle, and giv­ing lit­tle to the local church.

In the sec­ond post, we searched the Scrip­tures and learned that Jesus died to purify for Him­self a peo­ple for His own pos­ses­sion. Then we saw that we are com­manded to encour­age and build one another up, reg­u­larly and face-to-face; that we are called to use our spir­i­tual gifts not merely for our­selves, but mostly to build oth­ers up in the church; that we are called to love one another, not in word or talk but in deed and in truth; and that we are to obey and sub­mit to godly lead­ers. We sim­ply can­not live out these bib­li­cal com­mands as God intends unless we are com­mit­ted to real peo­ple through a local church.

Today, I want to make a pas­sion­ate plea for you to stop dat­ing the church, to use Harris’s phrase. And to help me make my pas­sion­ate plea, I will bor­row from Thabiti Anyabwile’s book, What is a Healthy Church Mem­ber?, which we will dis­cuss in our sec­ond mem­ber­ship class on Feb­ru­ary 14th:

The mark of Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship is love — love of the kind that Jesus exer­cised toward his fol­low­ers, love vis­i­ble enough that men will rec­og­nize it as belong­ing to those peo­ple who fol­low Jesus.

Not sur­pris­ingly, then, a healthy Chris­t­ian is one who is com­mit­ted to express­ing this kind of love toward other Chris­tians. And the best place for Chris­tians to love this way is in the assem­bly of God’s peo­ple called the local church. Is it no won­der then that the author of Hebrews instructs us to “con­sider how to stir up one another to love and good works,” and then right away says “not neglect­ing to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encour­ag­ing one another, and all the more  as you see the Day draw­ing near” (Heb. 10:24–25)? (67)

Love is the essence of the Chris­t­ian life: God so loved us that He gave His only begot­ten Son for us. In response to God’s love for us, we are called to love God and oth­ers. And as we men­tioned in the last post, bib­li­cal love is not some­thing that we merely talk about. It is some­thing that we do for and to one another.

But that kind of love — Chris­t­ian love — demands an expla­na­tion. And the oppor­tu­nity to explain that our love for one another is based on God’s love for us in Christ cap­tures the essence of Jesus’ words in John 13:34–35: “By this all peo­ple will know you are my dis­ci­ples, if you have love for one another.”

So, my friends, I urge you: com­mit to encour­age, to love, to serve, and to sub­mit to real, bro­ken, imper­fect, fel­low believ­ers in Jesus Christ through the local church. It’s not too late to sign-up for our Spring 2012 Mem­ber­ship Classes. If you live out­side of Col­lege Station/Bryan and need help find­ing a healthy local church to join, con­tact us and we’ll help you. There is no bet­ter deci­sion you could make for your own spir­i­tual growth, the growth of other Chris­tians, and the good of the lost in your community.

In the first post, we noted that many peo­ple today are hes­i­tant to join a local church. For some peo­ple, that deci­sion is made for self­ish rea­sons. But for many pro­fess­ing Chris­tians, the deci­sion not to join a local church is not rooted in self­ish­ness, but in not know­ing what the Bible teaches con­cern­ing church membership.

Let me be up front: you will not find a verse in Scrip­ture that says, “Thou shall join a local church.” But I’m going to explain today that I don’t think that’s because the human authors of Scrip­ture didn’t think church mem­ber­ship was impor­tant. Rather, I think it’s because church mem­ber­ship was sim­ply assumed.

In the rest of this post, I’ll explain how we arrived at the con­clu­sion that every Chris­t­ian should be a mem­ber of a local church. I hope that God will use these state­ments and pas­sages in Scrip­ture to shape your under­stand­ing and practice.

1. Jesus gave Him­self for the church to redeem the church from law­less­ness and to purify for Him­self a peo­ple for His own pos­ses­sion who are zeal­ous for good works (Titus 2:11–14). In our day, a “per­sonal rela­tion­ship with God” is empha­sized above all else. Cer­tainly, the Gospel is news that indi­vid­u­als must hear, under­stand, and respond to with repen­tance and faith. And Paul him­self affirmed that Christ, “loved me and gave him­self for me” (Gal. 2:20).  But what is clear in Titus 2 and many other pas­sages is that Jesus gave Him­self not just for indi­vid­ual per­sons, but for a peo­ple — His cho­sen peo­ple that He intends to purify for Himself.

From this pas­sage, we can con­clude that our rela­tion­ship with God (that is, all Chris­tians together, or the Uni­ver­sal Church) is at least as impor­tant as my rela­tion­ship with God. But that truth will only influ­ence our lives if we under­stand what God teaches about how the church is sup­posed to func­tion. So let’s now explore the Bible’s teach­ing on how the church should function.

2. We are com­manded to exhort one another daily and to meet together reg­u­larly so that we do not become hard­ened by the deceit­ful­ness of sin (Hebrews 3:12–14, 10:19–25). The writer notes that we need to be care­ful because our ten­dency is to become hard­ened by sin because of the unbe­lief in our hearts. To guard against this ten­dency, God com­mands us to meet together reg­u­larly and even to exhort one another daily. It is not pos­si­ble for me to carry out this com­mand with Chris­tians who live across the world. Truly, it is not pos­si­ble for me to carry out this com­mand with any Chris­tians I do not see on a reg­u­lar basis — even if they live in my city. For us to prac­tice this com­mand, we must meet together and we must exhort one another. In other words, we need to be a part of a local church.

3. We are com­manded to use our spir­i­tual gifts to build up the church; the gifts are not merely — or even mostly — for pri­vate edi­fi­ca­tion (1 Corinthi­ans 12:4–11; Eph­esians 4:11–16). The gen­eral under­stand­ing con­cern­ing the spir­i­tual gifts today is vastly dif­fer­ent than what Scrip­ture actu­ally teaches. If churches teach any­thing about the spir­i­tual gifts at all, they gen­er­ally empha­size the “sign gifts” such as speak­ing in tongues, words of knowl­edge, and oth­ers. These gifts are then pro­moted as great ways to per­son­ally wor­ship God — whether in your  bed­room or in a build­ing with dozens or hun­dreds of other Chris­tians right next to you. But that under­stand­ing is not at all what Paul is teach­ing. He states very clearly that the spir­i­tual gifts are given to indi­vid­u­als by the Spirit in order to build up the church for God’s glory. It’s not that we don’t ben­e­fit from and enjoy using our spir­i­tual gifts; we do. It’s that our gifts are given not pri­mar­ily for us, but for oth­ers. So for us to prac­tice the com­mand to serve oth­ers with our spir­i­tual gifts — and to ben­e­fit from the gifts of oth­ers — we need to be com­mit­ted to a local church.

4. We are com­manded to love one another not in word or talk, but in deed and in truth (1 John). Nearly every Chris­t­ian rec­og­nizes that God calls us to love oth­ers, espe­cially those who are believ­ers. But fewer Chris­tians really think through what this means. Love is not pri­mar­ily a feel­ing; it is a choice to do what is best for some­one else. In other words, love isn’t mea­sured in talk — it is mea­sured in deed and in truth. We can say “I love the church” all day long, but unless we are talk­ing about real peo­ple — peo­ple with sin strug­gles, peo­ple with phys­i­cal needs, peo­ple from dif­fer­ent back­grounds (socially, eco­nom­i­cally, polit­i­cally, eth­ni­cally) who are all joined together by their com­mon con­fes­sion of Christ as Lord and their prox­im­ity to one another — then we are merely lov­ing in talk. While I am called to love all peo­ple gen­er­ally, I must love a spe­cific group of peo­ple par­tic­u­larly not in word or talk but in deed and in truth. So for us to really obey the com­mand to love oth­ers, we have to be com­mit­ted to lov­ing a spe­cific group of peo­ple. I can’t love every Chris­t­ian in the world or even every Chris­t­ian in my city in deed and in truth — but I can do that for those in my local church.

5. We are com­manded to obey our lead­ers and sub­mit to them because they are the ones God has appointed to keep watch over us for our spir­i­tual good and because they will answer to God for their lead­er­ship (Hebrews 13:17). Our gen­er­a­tion is very sus­pi­cious of author­ity. We have seen many abuses of power in gov­ern­ment, busi­ness, and even the church for years. But just because some­thing has been abused doesn’t mean that it isn’t good when used prop­erly. Wine, when used prop­erly, “glad­dens life” (Eccl. 10:19). Wine, when abused, leads to a mul­ti­tude of sins (cf. Eph. 5:18). That doesn’t mean that we out­law wine; it means that we agree with God that wine is good when used prop­erly and bad when abused. The same is true of author­ity in the church. Set­ting up lead­ers in local churches is God’s com­mand in Scrip­ture, not an idea taken from the busi­ness world (Acts 14:23, Tit. 1:5, et.al.). And lead­ers are given to the church by God to equip the saints for the work of the min­istry (Eph. 4:11–16), to set an exam­ple for the church to fol­low (1 Pet. 5:1–4), and to lead the church to ful­fill the com­mands of God, espe­cially the Great Com­mis­sion (Matt. 28:18–20). When we under­stand that God has pro­vided church lead­ers for our spir­i­tual good and that they will be held account­able by God for how they lead (Heb. 13:17), we will desire to both obey and sub­mit to them. But for us to really live out this com­mand, we have to sub­mit to a par­tic­u­lar set of godly lead­ers in a par­tic­u­lar local church.

Today we’ve explored just a few of the bib­li­cal argu­ments which demon­strate that every Chris­t­ian should be a mem­ber of a local church. Hope­fully you have been both encour­aged and chal­lenged by these thoughts and pas­sages of Scrip­ture. If you have, let me encour­age you to join the local church you’ve been attend­ing, or sign-up for our mem­ber­ship classes if you’ve been vis­it­ing with us. We need you and you need us.

To many peo­ple in our day, church mem­ber­ship seems like an out­dated prin­ci­ple. Fed a steady diet of Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism, many pro­fess­ing Chris­tians are hes­i­tant to com­mit to a local church. Joshua Har­ris cap­tures this sen­ti­ment in the first chap­ter of his book, Stop Dat­ing the Church:

When I grad­u­ated from my church’s high school youth group, I started vis­it­ing around. I loved God and had big dreams for how I wanted to serve Him, but I didn’t see any rea­son to get too involved in one church. By then, I thought I knew all there was to know about church, and I wasn’t impressed. Most churches struck me as out-of-date and out-of-touch. There had to be bet­ter, more effi­cient ways for me to accom­plish great things for God. (13)

In my expe­ri­ence as a pas­tor, Harris’s hon­est account of his own feel­ings regard­ing the church at that point in his life accu­rately reflect the feel­ings of most young fam­i­lies and col­lege stu­dents. They might be inter­ested in serv­ing God, but they view the church as a hin­drance rather than a help toward that end. So they join city-wide Bible stud­ies, para­church orga­ni­za­tions, cam­pus groups, and many other orga­ni­za­tions who do much of what the church is called to do. That is not to say that these orga­ni­za­tions can’t also be used by God to achieve good pur­poses; they can and are. But it is to say that the local church is unique. Again, Har­ris cap­tures this truth in his book:

A friend sent me a set of ser­mons on tape called “Pas­sion for the Church” by a pas­tor in Mary­land. I’m still not sure why I lis­tened to those tapes. For a con­firmed church-dater like me, the title alone was baf­fling. “Pas­sion for the church?” The words pas­sion and church absolutely did not con­nect in my mind! The series might as well have been called “Pas­sion for the Gro­cery Store.” But for some rea­son, as I drove around my home­town of Gre­sham, Ore­gon, I popped those tapes into the cas­sette player and began to listen.

The preacher taught from the book of Eph­esians. He showed that the church was actu­ally God’s idea — not some plan or pro­gram invented by humans. In fact, the church is the only insti­tu­tion God promised to sus­tain forever.

This is where pas­sion came in. To be a part of the uni­ver­sal church isn’t enough, the preacher said. Every Chris­t­ian is called to be pas­sion­ately com­mit­ted to a spe­cific local church. Why? Because the local church is the key to spir­i­tual health and growth for a Chris­t­ian. And because as the vis­i­ble “body of Christ” in the world, the local church is cen­tral to God’s plan for every generation…For the first time I real­ized that a whole­hearted rela­tion­ship with a local church is God’s lov­ing plan for me and for every other fol­lower of Christ. (14–15)

Can you relate to Har­ris? Have you ever felt the same way about the local church…or do you still? Do you want to learn more about what God says in His Word con­cern­ing the local church?

If so, I’ll encour­age you to do two things:

First, com­mit to read­ing the next two posts in this series. My next post will focus on the bib­li­cal foun­da­tion for mem­ber­ship in the local church. In the third post,  I’ll make the case that you need the local church and the local church needs you.

Sec­ond, sign-up for our Spring 2012 Mem­ber­ship Classes. Even if you are on the fence about join­ing any local church or New Life specif­i­cally, I think our two classes will really help you think through church mem­ber­ship more thor­oughly. You aren’t com­mit­ting to any­thing by sign­ing up and com­ing to our classes. But this is sim­ply too impor­tant of an issue to assume what the Bible says about it.

Have ques­tions about mem­ber­ship at New Life? Con­tact Cody Groves, our Church Admin­is­tra­tor. Want to join the dis­cus­sion? Visit our Face­book Page or fol­low us on Twit­ter @NewLifeBC.