“So we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” – Romans 12:5
For some people, the idea of church membership seems very foreign to them. They do not see a specific verse in the Bible that directly tells them that should become a formal member of a church, anything beyond just attending. In their minds, attending is membership. However, there are good reasons to think that, although often well intended, this idea of church membership (or lack there of) does not do justice to the full teachings of Scripture on the matter.
This article will look at 10 reasons why church membership (in a formal sense) is the most biblical way to participate within a local body of believers. No single reason may be fully sufficient to convince someone. However, taken together they provide a framework for why membership might be more meaningful and important than first imagined.
1. Jesus Assumes We’ll Be In a Local Church
In Matthew 16, and shortly after in chapter 18, Jesus says that He will build His Church (ekklēsia). He says that it will have the keys to the kingdom and, clearly, He envisions this Church as a gathered group of His people.
As we see in passages like Matthew 18’s famous church discipline process applied by the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 5, we come to see that this is not a loose gathering of random Christians, but rather an orderly (I Cor. 14:40) gathering of a local manifestation of Christ’s body.
Many Protestants rightly understand that the Church in one sense is bigger than any building or group of people. It is the catholic (or universal) Church, and it is a beautiful thing. Nevertheless, we see in Scripture that the although the Church is certainly all God’s people, there is another sense of the Church which is the organized gathering of a local body of believers.
Importantly, this is more than just a group of Christians hanging out together (even in a spiritual sense). We see Jesus begin to shape this vision in Matthew, and then the rest of the New Testament provides a fuller picture. But the image includes things such as elders, deacons, sacraments, preaching, discipline, and more, that are not captured by informal gatherings of Christian friends or family members.
2. Scripture Tells Us To
One thing is also clear, Christians are directly told to “let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do” (Hebrews 10:25). At the very least, this establishes that attending church is to be a habit for a believer. That is the biblical expectation and the context is a formal church gathering. This does not prove membership, but, without a doubt, proves the direct teaching that Christians should not neglect formal church gatherings of public worship.
3. We Are Literally Called Members of One Another
As it relates to actual membership, it may be helpful to at least reflect on this being a biblical word. As many biblical passages such as Romans 12:5 and Ephesians 4:25 state, “we are members of one another.” Therefore, the word “membership” is not just pulled out of thin air, but is rather directly pulled from Scripture. In I Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul even develops an extended analogy of how we are all members of one another and of Christ’s body. The debate should only be in whether its application is proper.
4. How Else Do We Submit to Our Elders?
Scripture is very clear that God has ordained elders to shepherd the Church. Acts 20:28 states that these elders are to, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God.” These are to be qualified and tested men (I Timothy 3:1-7). Indeed, Scripture tells believers to, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account” (Hebrews 13:7).
It difficult to understand how God’s ordained leaders of the Church are to oversee and exercise Godly authority over those who will not clearly enter their fold. To paraphrase what Guy Prentiss Waters rightly states: Passages in the New Testament assume that believers have an acknowledged relationship with leaders in their church.1 The formal aspects of church membership are a functional and biblical application of the God ordained means of shepherding his people.
Critically, this exercise of authority is best understood as ministerial and declarative. As Jon D. Payne clarifies, “In other words, the officers of the church do not make laws, statutes, and promises; they declare and enforce the laws, statutes, and promises of God’s inspired and authoritative Word.”2
All this said, I think modern-day Protestants, more than anyone, need to ask themselves, is there any place in their theology and view of the church that recognizes the church’s authority over their lives?
5. How Else Do We Take the Lord’s Supper?
Once more, I Corinthians is important for understanding the distinction between an informal gathering and a formal church gathering. In chapter 11, particularly verse 20, it appears like the Lord’s Supper is practiced during the weekly gathering of Christians. Once more, it is difficult to read this as just a family gathering or a gathering of Christian friends. Rather, this particular practice of remembrance of the Lord is done in organized Christian worship.
Further, Paul even begins this discussion by making a clear distinction when he says, “when you come together as a church (I Cor. 11:18; emphasis mine). He even contrasts this with them eating and drinking in houses (11:22).
Of course, a church can be in a person’s house (Romans 16:5, Colossians 4:15, Philemon 1:2), but, clearly gathering as a church means more than just gathering some Christians together. The Lord’s Supper is a communal practice and a community event of the church. It is a form of public worship. It should be practiced in the context that Scripture provides, for it is a very holy matter that is not to be taken lightly (I Cor. 11:27-32).
6. Our Christian Friends and Family Aren’t the Same Thing
As should be clear by now, there is a distinction to be made between a believer’s personal network of believers, whether friends, coworkers, and families, and the specific body of believers that make up a functioning local church. Of course, there is significant overlap between the two, but it is a mistake to think that just because these people are part of God’s universal church, they therefore constitute a local church in the New Testament sense.
These social groups do not have elders. There is no church government system. There is no formal and organized gathering. This is not the form of public worship that we see the people of God doing in the New Testament when they gather together as a church.
In our modern context, we need to be aware of the hyper-individualism that permeates the air we breathe. This individualism extends to even our social circles when we believe that they are something as concrete as a New Testament church. While understandable, this misses an essential communal aspect that the vast majority of Christians of the past would simply find unfathomable.
7. Misses the Continuity With the Communal Worship of the Old Testament
One of the most interesting places of biblical study is the continuity and discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament was written for our instruction (I Cor. 10:11) and all Scripture is profitable for teaching (II Timothy 3:16). So, at the very least, all Old Testament scriptures are helpful, even if we have to be careful to understand where their teachings (like food restrictions, for instance) no longer apply.
As it relates to corporate worship, the Old Testament is almost entirely structured around it. Of course, there were critical acts of personal faith, but nonetheless, it is impossible to understand the worship practices of the Israelites without recognizing a complex web of interconnected corporate worship practices. Even in Jesus’s day, the Jews used the synagogue system (which Jesus also used), for corporate gathering.
All of this is to say, that when we see all of the emphasis for Christian gatherings and worship structure in the New Testament, and then use the lens we gather from the Old Testament to better understand the New, it becomes undeniable that a key part of the Christian’s worship and faith needs to be of a corporate, public, organized, and local nature.
8. The Primary Context for Spiritual Gifts
The classic chapter on spiritual gifts in the Bible is I Corinthians 12. Although the Apostle Paul is writing of the church in general (12:28), what should not be missed is that he is also writing to the specific local church in Corinth.
Although there is one Spirit, there are a variety of gifts. Although there is one Spirit, each one is given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Once more, the principles are universal, but the manifestation is local.
None of this is to say that a believer’s worship and service to the Lord is restricted to only the local context, but merely that such a local context is rightly the home base for the Christian. Quite frankly, if you are missing from the local church, then the church is missing one of its members. That is not good for our physical bodies, and no less is it good for the body of Christ.
9. We Either Need Strength or Need to Give It
Building off of this principle, your local church either needs you or you need it. Or, more accurately, both are true. You have a manifestation of the Spirit that ought to serve others. They have manifestations of the Spirit that ought to serve you. Remember, these gifts are for the common good of the gathered body of Christ.
As B.B. Warfield reminded us:
No man can withdraw himself from the state of religious services of the community of which he is a member, without serious injury to his personal religious life… Who are these people, who are so vastly strong, so supremely holy, that they do not need the assistance of the common worship for themselves; and who, being so strong and holy, will not give their assistance to the common worship?3
10. Applying Biblical Principles
At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, in our current societal context, how can we best live out the vision of the church as laid down in the New Testament? What is in our control? What is out of our control?
We can’t change the fact that a New Testament letter written to any given city of America would be received in vastly different ways, even within that city! The ideal would be a united church in every city in our nation. The real is that there are localized and distinct bodies within every city.
We do see something like this in the New Testament, with statements such as “the church that meets in their house,” even if those churches were always included as being part of a city’s united church. This is one reason why I find systems of church government that go beyond a single congregation and include a regional relationship between congregations to be more biblical, for instance those found in Presbyterian denominations.
But how do we, especially as Protestants, see the best way to apply all of the principles of the New Testament to our vision of the church in our current moment? Even if it can’t be perfect as a result of the divisions caused by denominations, what gets us closest to the mark?
This is exactly what committing to church membership helps to fix. It binds members together in a very scattered and transient world in such a way as to best replicate and honor the established norms of the New Testament. Of course, I would go further and say that membership was clearly practiced in the New Testament. It is only our modern individualism that misses the clear presentations of a formally recognized group of Christians that make up the local church.
Don Carson, along with Tim Keller, was a founder of the massive parachurch organization The Gospel Coalition. Surely, here is someone who has a reason to argue for the importance of broadly applied Christian practices for the good of the wider body.
However, he does the opposite. In an article arguing why the local church is more important than his own organization he states plainly, “In other words, in the pages of the NT, to be converted, to be baptized, and to join the local community of believers are all part of the same thing.”4
Local church involvement (and membership) is just that basic to discipleship.
Or as John Stott put it:
How can we take lightly what God takes so seriously? How dare we push to the circumference what God has placed at the centre? No, we shall seek to become responsible church members, active in some local manifestation of the universal church.5
Attendance or Membership?
Reading this argument hopefully, at a bare minimum, is sufficient to establish that local church attendance is very important to a Christian’s walk with Christ. Still, someone might get hung up on the idea of subscribing to actual membership.
The key point of reflection for someone in that camp, and where I will end this article, would be to prayerfully ask, what is the best route? What is the best way to honor the most biblical principles?
What is the best way to reflect the accountability, authority, corporate structures, and communal practices we see throughout the New Testament? What gets us closer to the ideal? A group of regular attenders? Or a gathering of committed members?
Notes
- Guy Prentiss Waters, How Jesus Runs the Church (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2011), 18; emphasis mine
- Jon D. Payne, “Ministerial and Declarative Authority,” Tabletalk, April 2020, https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2020/04/ministerial-and-declarative-authority/
- Quoted in: Bradley N. Seeman, “The “Old Princetonians” on Biblical Authority,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D.A. Carson, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 233
- Don Carson, “Editorial: Why the Local Church Is More Important Than TGC, White Horse Inn, 9Marks, and Maybe Even ETS,” Themelios, Volume 40, Issue 1, http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/editorial-why-the-local-church-is-more-important-than-tgc-white-horse
- John Stott, The Message of Ephesians: God’s New Society (Downers Grove,IL: IVP Academic, 1979), 129-130
Further Reading
- On Theological Triage: Division, Unity, and Pride in the Church
- The Legalism Behind the Attractional Church Model
- Can Protestantism Create the Most Unity?
Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash
A well written post that was clearly thought out. The following quote sums it up best for me: “At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, In our current societal context, How can we best live out the vision of the church as laid down in the New Testament?”