The Mandate for Church Membership

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

The Biblical Mandate for Church Membership

Well, today we're kicking off our study, as I mentioned, on the topic of church membership. And we're looking, as our first installment, at something that I'm calling the biblical mandate for church membership.

Or you could say, if you wanted an alternate title, Church Membership 101. As we get started, I want to begin by asking you this question. Just think about it for a second. When you hear the word membership, what is the first image that pops up into your mind?

Membership, or even the word member. If we take a second to think about it, many of us will immediately think of some type of subscription service. At least, most of us will. Something like Amazon Prime, or Netflix, or enrollment.

Membership at a gym, or membership at a country club. For almost any of us who have had any dealings with the world, the word membership evokes this image of a corporate loyalty program, or some kind of exclusive club.

Where you exchange your allegiances, and perhaps your banking information, your direct debit information, for some type of goods and services. Goods or services. And that's neither good nor bad, it's just the way that most of us think, or what most of us think about when we think of this word membership, or this concept of membership.

A transactional relationship. And so it's not surprising, when even many Christians today hear that word, church membership, we immediately think of this consumer, service provider, transactional relationship between one party and another.

And because church membership, and the practice of church membership, or I should say, because the practice of membership in general has become so corporatized in our world, many people treat church membership with some degree of skepticism, or suspicion.

There are a lot of people, I don't know if you've ever been there, where you've thought, I don't see church membership in the Bible. I remember at one time, Nicole and I being part of a church, and I withdrew my membership because I did not see it as a biblical idea, at least at that early stage in my life as a Christian.

And maybe there are people in this room that have that same opinion, who question the legitimacy of church membership. Or perhaps you're here today, you have no idea what it is that church membership is.

When we say we're talking about church membership, and we're preparing for a Reformation Day church membership service, people go, what is that? And even if I know what it is, why would I want to commit myself?

Why would I want to join as a member of the local church? Well, my objective today is very clear, and hopefully it'll answer some of those questions if you have them. What I want to do, unlike the last number of weeks where we've been doing an expository, exegetical study of 1 Corinthians, it's going to be more topical in nature.

Three things that I want us to look at together today are these. Three legitimate questions that I think we need to answer if we're to have a scriptural view of membership in the local church. And three questions that, if we answer them accurately, will help to lay the foundation, the groundwork, for a biblical view of church membership.

So, for today's purposes, we're going to ask three questions, and then we're going to answer them together from the Bible. The first question that we're going to ask is this, is church membership biblical?

So if we're doing church membership, if we're approaching church membership as an assembly, where do we find this practice in the Bible? And I'll be up front, this is where we're going to spend about three-quarters of our time, is exploring that question.

We're going to build on that idea, the biblical basis, like the title of the sermon, The Biblical Basis for Church Membership. And then next we're going to ask the question, if church membership is biblical, what is it?

What does it look like, practically, to be the member of a local church? And then number three, we're going to ask, why should a Christian become a member of a local church? So, is it biblical? If so, what is it?

And if we know what it is, why do we do it? So, we'll get right into it, and we'll jump into that first question. So the first question we're going to look at is this, is church membership biblical? Now, if you talk to someone, if you're out and about talking about church membership, one of the very first objections that you're going to come across is someone that questions the validity of church membership.

They might say, oh, you do membership at your church? I don't do that because I've never seen it in the Bible. Where is it in the Bible, this practice? And if we're going to be honest, one of the very first things that we need to do up front is to acknowledge that there is no place in the Bible where we read those words, church membership.

So, there's nowhere, if we were to look through the pages of Scripture, where we're going to find that chapter heading that says, instructions for church membership. And yet, just like we don't see the words Trinity or penal substitutionary atonement in our Bibles, and even though these are rich theological realities that are clearly and unequivocally taught through the Bible, in the same way, the theology and the practice of church membership is a reality that's taught by implication, not explicitly, but by implication, throughout the 27 books of our New Testament.

So, in the words of one commentator who was speaking on church membership, they said this, they said, the biblical foundation for church membership permeates the entire New Testament. Another writer says this, the idea of church membership is nearly everywhere in Scripture.

Many of the practices and commands given to the New Testament church lose all of their meaning if membership is not practiced, visibly identifiable, and important. So, if this practice permeates the Bible, where do we find it?

I don't know if anyone here, maybe I'll just, we're a small enough group, I'll ask the question, is anyone here questioning the validity of church membership? Am I preaching to the choir? Okay, maybe some.

So, there's some question about it. So, what I'm going to do is we're going to look in the Bible, we're going to dig deep. Like I said, it's good that we have the group that we have together today because we're going to dig into the text and find church membership implicitly taught in the text.

And what I want to do is we look in the Bible as this. I want us to see that the Bible paints a clear portrait of church membership, and we see that painted at least four different ways in the New Testament.

So, the very first place we're going to go is 1 Corinthians 12, verse 12. So, that's where our brother read earlier.

And it says this,.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.

The very first thing I want us to see in terms of an argument for biblical church membership is this. The imagery that the Apostle Paul uses for the Christian as a member of Christ's body. So, that's the first point of those four portraits I'm going to paint here.

The Christian as a member of Christ's body. So, the very first principle, sorry, the very first and principal reason why many people do not see church membership in the Bible is not because it isn't there, but it's because they're looking for the wrong kind of membership.

So, when Paul introduces the Corinthians to this idea of becoming members of Christ's church, he does not liken it to the world of incentives and user fees like we would see in worldly membership. He doesn't liken it to the world of business or recreation.

If we're looking for that type of membership in the Bible, we won't find it. That's not biblical church membership. But what Paul does is he likens church membership to the world of anatomy. When Paul uses the word member here and elsewhere, he describes the Christian's participation in the church.

He uses the Greek word melos. Melos, and that means limb. It's just a Greek word for limb, like an arm or a leg. No one, Elise, Daryl, you guys have those? Arms and legs? Okay, good. In Greek, you have melos.

You have members to your body. So, in order for us to find church membership in the Bible, the first thing we need to do is get our terminology right. And speaking of terminology, you guys know that I love words.

If you don't know that I love words, you'll know eventually that I love words. And I find it fascinating that if we look at the history of our English word member or our English word membership, this is not something that the church borrowed from the world.

So, it's not like the church saw the effectiveness of membership and decided, we better do that. But this is actually an idea that the world has borrowed from the church. So, in the Bible, it was translated from Greek, or at least our New Testament's from Greek into Latin, in the Latin Vulgate by Jerome in 382 A .D., that Greek word melos that Paul uses here in 1 Corinthians 12, 12.

That word for limb was translated into the Latin word membra. Do you recognize that? You see how that's starting to look a little bit more like English? And centuries later, as the English language came to be, this Latin word membra, or membrum, became the English word member or membership, this concept.

And so, in early parliaments, when they had members of parliament that came from nowhere else other than the Bible, one linguist writes that the English word for member or membership, they said, is reinforced by, if not directly borrowed from, the use of member in Christian theology, specifically a member of the church as the body of Christ.

And so, when we think of membership or members, every time you drive down the road, you see a gym advertising $30 memberships. That idea came from the church, not the $30, but the membership idea, the member idea, to be a limb, to belong to something.

It's not a worldly idea, but a Christian idea. And if we look in the Bible, that's exactly the way we see it being used. The Bible teaches that every individual who becomes a Christian enters into the membership of the invisible and the universal church.

And so, the time of conversion, every single believer, every single one of us, whether we became a member of a local church, became a member of the universal body of Christ across all places and all times, so past, present, and future, members of the body.

And Paul says, if we're in 1 Corinthians 12, 27, he says, now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And this is an awesome, if you've ever thought about it, an awesome spiritual reality that's true of every believer, that we have been grafted in, as it were, into the body of Christ.

And so, the arms and the legs and the hands and the feet and the eyes and the mouth and the ears, that is us. That is the church universal. And yet, would anyone question membership in the universal body of Christ?

Maybe I'll ask. I'll start there. I don't think so. Okay. So, we are all members of the church universal. But, and yet, God has not designed this membership in the body to be only spiritual and ethereal in nature.

So, this membership in the body of Christ is to take on meaning and application in the visible, local church. So, almost every time that Paul uses the word membership, that language of member or membership, it's not in the context of this larger universal church, but it finds its application in the context, sorry, I said larger universal, but it finds its application in the context of the visible, the physical, the local church.

And so, we see that in passages like 1 Corinthians chapter 12, Ephesians chapter 4, again in Romans chapter 12. And we see Paul's usage in Romans 12 verse 4 to 8. He says, For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

That can be members of the church universal. It can be members of the church local. But notice now the local church application here. He says, Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them, if prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.

So this membership, this is membership according to the Bible. It's membership in the church universal, and it's membership that is applied in the church local. So I'm just introducing you now to the idea of membership.

So when we speak of membership, when you hear me talk about membership from this point on the sermon, I'm speaking in these terms, not membership according to the world, but membership according to the word.

So the next thing that we see is this. The next evidence that we find for church membership outside of membership in the church universal and local is the numbering and record-keeping practices of the New Testament church.

So it seems to me that many people in the modern Western church, I don't know if you guys have ever experienced this, but have over-spiritualized the organization of the church to the point that some view any type of formal structure or any type of record-keeping as anti-Christian, as antithetical to the Christian life or to the Christian church.

But when we read our Bibles carefully, I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this, but when we read our Bibles carefully, we see that this was not the view of the New Testament church. They were not afraid of keeping records, of writing things down, of making lists, of numbering things.

They concerned themselves with the details when we look really carefully. And not only did they do this to demonstrate the power of God, so when mass groups were converted, not only did they number people to say it was a massive group of people, but they numbered people specifically to facilitate the care of the local church.

I'm going to show you where we find that. So one of the first places we find, let's turn to Acts chapter 2. We'll look there together, Acts chapter 2 and verse 41. So Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, at least that's what we think, he writes this in Acts 2, 41, he says, So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about 3 ,000 souls.

Now granted it's general, it's about 3 ,000 souls, but you can see right away, right from the genesis of the church, that they were counting, they were keeping track, they were monitoring. There was a distinction between the world and the church.

3 ,000 souls were added. And these men did not merely profess faith, they didn't just get baptized and then go back into the world. These souls, as they're called, were added to the church. They became part of the church.

They were ministered to, and they ministered to one another. Now someone might look at Acts 2, 41 and say, Shane, where does it say that they were added to the church? Yeah, added souls, but where were they added to the church?

What I would say is, let's look at the next verse, in Acts 2, 42. These same believers, in verse 42, devoted themselves, it says, to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, to the prayers, and that's in the context of the church.

Now if you still doubt it, let's say, let's look at Acts 2, 47. A couple lines down, it says, And the Lord added, not just souls, but added to their number, day by day, those who were being saved. So they recorded as people, as large groups of people, crowds of 3 ,000 were added to the church.

And they also recorded, day by day, the addition of more people. They added to their number, day by day, those who were being saved. And so you can see that the church was monitoring. They were monitoring growth as people became believers and joined in this new covenant community.

Now, the Church of Acts is great for this. I could point to a number of other examples, but we'll look at just one more. When it came time to resolve issues, can anyone think, what was the first major issue in the New Testament, the Acts church?

It involved Hellenistic widows. Acts chapter 6, in Acts chapter 6, the Hellenistic widows, those are Greek-speaking Jews, were being neglected. At least they felt that way in the daily distribution of the food that the church was distributing to these women.

And it says in Acts chapter 6, verse 1, Now in these days, when the disciples were increasing in number, again, they're keeping track, they're increasing, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews.

So you've got the Greek-speaking Jews, Greek-speaking Jewish Christians, and the Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians, because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned, notice this, the full number of the disciples, and said, it is not right that we should give up preaching the word to serve tables.

Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you, from among you, seven men of good repute, full of the spirit of wisdom, and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. And so this whole scenario, if you look at Acts chapter 6, verses 1 to 3, becomes very, very problematic.

If the leaders in the Jerusalem church had no way of knowing who belonged to the church, who did and did not belong to the local church in Jerusalem. So, for instance, how do they know which widows belonged to the church for this distribution?

They had to have an idea. We're going to put a pin in that and come back to that. But how do they know the widows belonged to the church? Second question you might ask is, how did they know that they had summoned the full number of the disciples when they called them together to resolve this issue?

Third question is, how did they know who was able to participate in the selection of these table servers? Could anyone cast a vote? If you were a resident in Jerusalem and you were a Jew, not even a Christian Jew, could you come and participate in the selection of these table servers?

And then, how would they know that these candidates for service were from among them? And so you've got a big issue, and it seems to know, even if it doesn't say that they've written it down, even in the midst of a large congregation, a congregation numbering thousands, they knew who belonged to the church and who had the right to participate.

They were adding numbers. They called the full number of the disciples. They had a select group of widows that were being distributed food. They had a select group of people who could cast their vote.

They had a select group of people who could be chosen from to be the candidate for that table service. And then we see in other parts of the New Testament, the churches had no issue with maintaining a list of people who were in their care.

So, like I said, sometimes we over-spiritualize this and think, you know what, it's biblical up until the point that we write it down or up until the point that we formalize it. But again, the church wasn't afraid of formalizing lists of people that were in their care.

We can see that in 1 Timothy 5. 1 Timothy 5, verse 9. So this is speaking about widows. I said we'll put a pin in that. Speaking about widows, it looks like they had, at least in the Ephesian church, where Timothy was ministering and Paul was writing to, a list of widows that they would serve.

So in 1 Timothy 5, 9, it says, Let a widow be enrolled, if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband. Having been the wife of one husband. And let her be enrolled. Now when Paul says these widows should be enrolled, here you see my love for words again.

He uses the Greek word katalego. Katalego. And what this really means, if we were to translate that from Greek to English, is to be put on a list. So let a widow be put on the list, if she is not less than sixty years of age.

Now the word katalego, does that sound like an English word at all?

I'm getting a nod.

What does it sound like?

Catalogue.

Exactly. That's where we get our English word catalogue, is from katalego. And so the church had a catalogue, they had a list, a document, to record the people that were in their care. In my studies I came across one statement, this is from the elders at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, Sun Valley, yes, I think that's what it is, in California.

And it says, in the book of Acts, they wrote, and in the other New Testament books, much of the terminology fits only with the concept of formal church membership. Phrases such as the whole congregation, the church in Jerusalem, the disciples in every church, the whole church, the elders of the church, all suggest recognizable church membership with well-defined boundaries.

And if we look beyond the New Testament, we come to realize that it's not just a New Testament practice to write things down. God, being a God of order, has always had his people keep some form of diligent records.

If you don't believe me, then go home this week and read 1 Chronicles, or read the book of Numbers, or just consider the mere existence of the Bible itself as a written record of God's dealings with his people.

So to review, arguments for church membership, you've got members of the church universal being applied within the church local. You've got lists, records, the addition of people to the church and a distinction between the church and the world, people being added to their number.

The next thing that we see is the exercise of church discipline. And when we read about Christ's first mention of the church in Matthew 16, 18, we're introduced to that word ecclesia. That's the first place we see it in our New Testaments, the assembly of God's called out people.

So individuals who are called out of the world into a holy assembly, a holy assembly of God's redeemed saints. And one of the mechanisms that God has used and does use to preserve and to promote the holiness of his people within his church is the practice of church discipline.

Now, if you guys were reading our church membership book, for those of you who have a copy, if you've gotten to the section on church discipline yet, you'll know that there's mainly two types of church discipline that we see in the Bible.

There's formative discipline, that's discipline through instruction where we seek to see people molded into, to be formed into, what am I trying to say? To be molded into the likeness, that's what I'm trying to say, of Jesus Christ, to be conformed to him in character and conduct.

And then there's corrective discipline, discipline that confronts us and turns us from our error in habitual sin. So we've got church discipline as a mechanism for promoting the purity of the church, formative and corrective.

And the mere existence of church discipline in the Bible requires that there be a real, visible, recognizable distinction between those who are members of the church, those who are members of the church local, those who belong to the church, and those who do not.

So let's consider what Christ says in Matthew 18, verse 15. He says, If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother, but if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. You've got this group, this church. And if he refuses to listen to even the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. So in Christ's teaching on the church, there is a boundary.

There's a line in the sand between the members. Even if you don't like the word member, those who belong to the church, those who are involved in the life of the church. The church is their dwelling place, their abiding place.

There's a clear boundary between those people and non-members. It's believers that belong to the fellowship. It's those believers that live like believers that belong to the church. And it's those who do not believe and who do not act like believers that do not belong to the church.

Now when Paul wrote, we're familiar with this because we've just been there, but when Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 5 to the Corinthian church about the sexual immorality that was in their midst, we again see this delineation between those who are recognized members, participants of the church, and those who were put out of membership.

And so in 1 Corinthians 5 verse 3, you'll remember, we just looked at this not long ago, Paul writes to the Corinthians, he says, Though absent in body, I am present in spirit. And as of present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing.

When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

And then later in chapter 5, in verse 12 and 13, Paul writes this, he says, For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Notice the distinction between judging, to do with judging outsiders, is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?

That's a reference to members, to those who belong. You know, if you're a person that struggles with that word membership still, I at least want you to see the principle at work here, that there are people that belong to the church, they're there, that is where they are, and there are people outside.

And this discipline is to happen within the church. God judges the outside, those outside, Paul writes, purge the evil person from among you. And so people who act like unbelievers are to be put out of the recognized church, and that includes the Lord's Supper.

Paul says in verse 11, Don't even eat with such a one. And like we've talked about, I know we've already worked through this, so I'm not going to rehash it, but this is something that is done for the good of that individual.

Church membership allows for us to put someone out of our fellowship, to not eat with such a one, without shunning them. And so we can say, you are not acting like a believer. You are not acting like someone who has been justified, who is being sanctified, who is on their way to being glorified.

You are bringing disrepute upon the church. And so for your good, and for the good of the church, and for the glory of God, we need to put you out. We're still going to talk to you. We're still going to love you.

We're still going to call you to repentance. But as far as we are concerned, and as far as the church is concerned, you are not a member, as far as we can tell, in the universal body of Christ. And you see where this becomes really important.

When we have someone who comes, maybe once a month, and sits in the back row, and then one day, they do something completely outrageous, completely heinous, completely evil. And as the media does, they do their background searches on this individual.

They say, oh, well, he was a member at Grace Fellowship Church. We can say, for the repute of the church, and for the glory of God, we can say, while he was an attender, he was not a member. He did not belong to us.

He did not come under the leadership of the church, under the accountability of the church. There was not this mutual arrangement between us, where we loved him, and he loved us, and we committed ourselves to him, and he committed ourselves to us.

And if someone who is a member does something evil like that, well, we say, as far as we can tell, he is not behaving as a member of the universal body of Christ. He's not behaving as a Christian. And so, church membership, not only does it preserve the unity and the purity of the church, but it promotes and it preserves the reputation of the church.

Christ will one day present his bride, the church, to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. And biblical membership, belonging to, being inside the church and cared for by that church, is one of the mechanisms that God has designed to promote that purity.

So those are the first three. Last one, last argument for church membership is this. The responsibility. Church membership is implied when we consider the responsibility of church leadership. The responsibility of church leadership.

Now let me tell you guys, I don't know if you can think of the most terrifying verse in the Bible when you think about a verse that concerns you, but for anybody in a position of church leadership, one of the most terrifying texts in all of the Bible is Hebrews 13, 17.

Hebrews 13, 17. There the inspired author says this. He says, Obey your leaders and submit to them. If you're a leader, that sounds pretty good, right? Obey and submit, for they are keeping watch over your souls.

Okay, that's getting a little bit.

More heated.

I have to give watch for the souls of those in the church and then the author says, as those who will have to give an account. Frankly, as someone in a position of teaching and leadership in the church, that is a fearful thought to have to give an account for the welfare of other people's souls.

Noah, if I gave you the job of looking after our house for a week, would you find that nerve-wracking? A little bit, right? If I were to give you the responsibility of looking after your sister for the week, one of my children, would that be a fearful responsibility?

Yeah, probably. More than the house, right? It's a fearful responsibility to look after someone's house. It's an even more fearful responsibility to look after someone's child. But how much more to have to look after and to give an account for someone's soul?

Someone's soul. And perhaps, if you're not with me yet, this is one of, if not the most compelling arguments for organized, for detailed church membership. Whose soul am I responsible to give an account for?

Whose soul am I responsible to watch over? Am I responsible for all of the souls in the world? Am I responsible for all of the souls in Canada or even Alberta? That would be hardly reasonable. Or just Edmonton alone.

Or just southeast Edmonton alone. Or just the Christians in southeast Edmonton. Thankfully not. I'm not even responsible for the souls that meet down the hall in the same building as us. I am responsible for the souls of all the believers who belong to Grace Fellowship Church.

Who come here and say, I am a member. I am a limb. I am a membrum of this small body. I have committed myself to this church. I've submitted myself to the life and to the leadership of this church. I'm not even responsible for the souls of the unbelievers that come into this room.

But to only those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who have been baptized, and who are, to use the biblical language of Paul in 1 Corinthians 5, who are inside this church. Inside this church. Peter exhorted his fellow elders in 1 Peter 5, 2 and 3.

He said, shepherd the flock of God that is among you. There's a flock. One flock and it's among you. Exercising oversight. Not under compulsion, but willingly as God would have you. Not for shameful gain, but eagerly.

Not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. Paul uses very similar language when he speaks to the Ephesian elders in Acts chapter 20. He says, 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.

So pay careful attention to yourselves and all the flock which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God which he obtained with his own blood. What a fearful responsibility these elders in the dispersion that Peter is writing to had.

What a fearful responsibility these elders in Ephesus that Paul is speaking to had. But note that their responsibility was limited. It wasn't limited to their geographical area. It wasn't limited to their city.

It wasn't limited to their neighborhood. It wasn't limited to the people they knew. It was limited to their flock. The flock that the Holy Spirit had entrusted to them. Just as the Holy Spirit joins us into the membership of the body of Christ universally, he joins us into the membership of the body of Christ.

Locally.

So hopefully we can acknowledge that church membership is biblical. I'm not sure if I'm preaching to the choir and if I am, I'm sorry. But if you're taking notes, the imagery of the membership of the body, the numbering and record-keeping of the church, the discipline of the church, the leadership of the church.

Those are four what I believe compelling cases for formal church membership. So now that we've established that, let's briefly concern ourselves with the next question. What is biblical church membership?

And I want you guys to know these points are short. So like I said, we spent most of our time on that first point. So I could have asked that question. I wrestled with whether I should have asked that question at the beginning.