Have You Bought This Lie??

Church Membership, Fellowship, and Spiritual Growth

Attending some place where you will not be missed, noticed, seen, or spoken to. I don't blame this all on COVID, but I think a lot of things got enhanced for that, a streaming mentality of discipleship, a self-serving mentality of discipleship.

When we know that biblically, there can be no spiritual growth without confrontation, whether that confrontation is of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit utilizing the fellowship to do that. I've heard from several people that they don't look at church membership any different than a Costco membership.

Forgetting, really, just the point of why God has called the gathering together in part. It is to worship, man. It is to fellowship. It's to break bread. It's to eat together, to get to know each other, to not walk alone together because it's hard alone.

Church Discipline and the Offices of the Church

But man, we do not need to be dismissing that spiritual edification, spiritual discipline along the lines of church discipline as well, comes because of the designation of these.

Offices.

This is God's plan for the body of believers. And so to listen to all of that, to see all of that, it's not just a shout of legalism because I don't believe a lot of these people would even know that they were verging on antinomianism when they say these things like an absolute abuse of God's grace and a dismissal of structure because of 80s, 90s spirit-crushing man-made construct legalism where some deacon told them to take their hat off before they walked in and now they hate the idea of the offices of pastor.

Commitment, Membership, and the Pastoral Office

There are those connections made and we can't escape them. But the millennials and younger have this sort of onward struggle with commitment and membership which leads to a disdain for the pastoral office.

They have bought into the lie that less structure means more spirit. And biblically, that's just not true.