Ours is an anti-institutional age. Many are skeptical of authority structures and long-term commitments. Why, then, would a church foreground the importance of church membership? At Trenton Baptist Church, we believe God has given us the local church for our good and for His glory. Pastor Greg wrote the brief article below to call others to see the beauty - and biblical foundations of - meaningful church membership.

4 Ways the New Testament Teaches Church Membership

Church leaders who are seeking to prioritize meaningful church membership increasingly face the headwinds of a generation deeply skeptical of the category and some evangelical movements undercutting its practice.

“Where is the ‘church membership’ verse?” a pastor might be asked. To make matters worse, the word “membership” has fallen on hard times. It carries negative connotations related to gyms or country clubs.

Yet there is a good and healthy kind of church membership taught in the Scriptures. The New Testament teaches church membership at least 4 ways.

1 – Through A Biblical-Theological View of God’s People

Since the beginning, the Bible has communicated that God has a defined people to call his own. In the Garden, Adam and Eve lived with God. They were named and known by Him. Moreover, their realm had a boundary. Sin upset this pristine reality and a division was introduced between those who were God’s people and those who weren’t. Abel came to be identified with the “seed of the woman” while Cain showed himself to be of the “seed of the serpent.”

Soon, the family of Abraham came to represent God’s people. This family, like the garden and like the resulting division between the woman’s and the serpent’s offspring, had boundaries. To be in Abram’s family was to be God’s people. And God promised to make his family as numerous as the stars in the sky (Gen. 15:5). The New Testament takes up this logic. It clarifies that entrance into Abraham’s family comes only by faith (Gal. 3:7). Again, there is a boundary between who belongs to God and who doesn’t.

But how is this family of faith made visible to the onlooking world now? In the New Testament, the local church represents this new family that identifies who belongs to God. It is a picture on earth of what will be true one day in heaven. Its boundary is its membership. To be a part of the church through a specific local church is to demonstrate that one is a part of God’s people, reaching back all the way to Eden. At every step, God’s people were made visible and known in some way and inside some boundary. In the New Testament, that structure of identity and boundary is called local church membership.

2 – Through The Pastor’s Responsibilities

In a few instances the Bible instructs pastors to care for a defined group of people.

“Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.” - Hebrews 13:17

 “shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight…” 1 Peter 5:2

These examples prompt a question or two: How would a pastor know toward whom he must exercise oversight, if not through some understanding of membership? How, outside of a membership structure, would a pastor know for whom he will one day be judged? Outside of a known, ‘boundaried’ relationship, such responsibilities are impossible, incoherent even. These passages teach church membership without the nomenclature. They signal that a pastor is responsible for a defined group that exists “among” him. Moreover, the church is told that they should obey “your” leaders. A sense of relationship is in place.

3 – Through The Congregation’s Responsibilities

On the other side of the coin, congregations themselves are given responsibilities as well. In Galatians, Paul rebuked not the pastors but the congregation for tolerating false teaching in their midst (Gal. 1:6-9). Clearly, the congregation bears a kind of authority that extends over and above that of their leaders, when doctrinal error is afoot.

Again, an answer is demanded: If no formal congregation exists with real authority to correct the error of their leaders, how would they obey Paul’s instructions in Galatians to root out false teaching? If there is no church membership, there is no congregational authority. If there is no congregational authority, it strains credulity to see how a church would avoid the Galatian error.

Add to this the reality that when the early church in Acts 6 needed to appoint deacons to care for the overlooked widows, there was a clear sense of which widows they were responsible for. Further, there was a clear sense of which pool of men they could pull from to form this group. While the members’ names might not have been written in papyrus (though they could have been!), they were certainly identified and known as living under the authority and care of the church.

4 – Through The Church Discipline Passages

The most emphatic illustrations of boundaries in New Testament church life involve the passages where the church is commanded to remove the unrepentant from their midst, in hopes that the act of discipline will lead to their restoration (Matt 18, see also Heb 12:10-12). 

To use only one illustration, the Corinthian church was commanded to remove a recalcitrant, sexually immoral man from their midst (1 Cor 5). But from what midst? Without an understanding of boundaries and membership, there can be no midst to remove an unrepentant false professor from. Moreover, when the (apparently same) man finally did repent, Paul noted that the “punishment of the majority” (2 Cor 2:6) was sufficient to bring about change! Again, the majority of whom?

Church discipline is even more out of favor today than is church membership. And it makes sense that many of those who shirk the former would also downplay the latter. With no identifiable membership, there’s no clear sense of whom a church is responsible to discipline.

Conclusion

Other passages in the New Testament teach similarly on church discipline, God’s known people, and the need for a ‘boundaried’ membership (Matt 16; Matt 18; Titus 3; Jas 5:20). The upshot is clear: to obey much of the Bible, what most have called “church membership” is unequivocally required. It’s a hard sell in today’s evangelicalism, but church membership is a principal good worth preserving.

This article was originally published in KentuckyToday. You can find it HERE.