Episode 54: Church Letters

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast.

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Do you ever listen to our intro, Eddie? I do. As a matter of fact, past nine. This is kind of a long story.

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Me and my boys went on a trail ride, and it ended up being way too long. We did not get back till 11 p .m.

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What time did you start? We started at 5 .30 p .m. We rode 20 miles. Wow.

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But anyway, dealing with our intro, I listened to the episode that you did where you guys were teaching.

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It was the recording of the Wednesday morning teaching with FIRM.

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And yeah, it was good. It was good. So, yeah, I mean, I heard the intro. You know, I try to always listen to the episodes

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I'm not on. Yeah. There's been quite a few of them here lately, just because I've been busy with other things.

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So, yeah, I always hear it when I listen to those episodes. It's different listening to English and then

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Spanish, you know. Yeah. It's different. That's how his church, that's how their Sunday morning is.

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Oh, wow. You know, and I know you've been to Mexico now a few times, and I've went to Honduras once, and so we preach that way.

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But it seems it's even more difficult, it seemed like, on the

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Zoom meeting than it is in person. It just seemed that way, listening to it, like it would have been even more difficult, you know, to have been able to.

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I was just thinking, man, from a teaching aspect, I'm sure that was a lot to manage, because you've already got the issues sometimes with Zoom.

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You know, even right now, you and I are recording this on Zoom, and it's not as good as if we were in the room together.

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And then you add in a language barrier and more people, you know.

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But, no, it was good. It was good. Yeah. Very helpful exhortation on evangelism.

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I appreciate that, brother. And we're way past the intro. Episode 54 of the

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Rural Church Podcast. I'm your co -host, Allen Nelson, pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

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And with me is Eddie Ragsdale, First Baptist Church of Marshall, Arkansas. And we're going to talk about letters today.

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Church letters, membership letters. What do you call them? I was thinking… The letter alphabet? C, right.

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Hebrew letters, yeah. No, that's right. I don't know these church letters. We're going to talk about an antiquated practice.

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I would actually defend the practice, though I think it needs some updating. And I want to go through that.

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In the last couple of weeks, I've checked the mail, and I've gotten an actual envelope from another church, from two different churches.

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And you open up the envelope, and in that is a little card, and basically it says, this church is requesting a transfer of letter from your church.

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And so, basically… Maybe somebody listening has no idea what I'm talking about, so let me just say that real quick.

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Let's say Billy Bob is a member of your church.

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This is Baptist's way of doing it. And he wants to go to another church. So, he gets mad, or he moves, or whatever, and he goes to another church.

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It's another Baptist church, and he tries to join that church. And let's say, well, have you been baptized? Well, yeah, I was baptized down there at Church A, Baptist Church.

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Okay, well, that's where your membership… Yeah, okay. Well, we'll request that we transfer your membership from that church to this church.

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And I want to defend that practice, actually, but I also want to talk about ways that I think that we can make this practice better.

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So, anything else I should say about that in the beginning? No, I think that's a good explanation.

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The idea is we understand that Christians do belong to certain local churches.

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We believe in local church membership. Right, right. And that is really the issue.

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I think that you mentioned that this practice is somewhat antiquated, and the antiquated part is that churches used to be more serious about church membership.

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And so they were more serious about making sure that membership was being transferred.

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And it seems to me like what has happened over the years is that both churches and Christians have become less concerned about membership being meaningful.

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And so people just kind of, I go to church over here, and then maybe

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I go to church over here, and nobody ever thinks about, you know, well, what is your church where you are covenanted in a relationship under the leadership of those elders with certain privileges and responsibilities to those brothers and sisters in Christ.

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And because of our low ecclesiology, because of our low view of membership, it causes these issues of transferring membership to be problematic.

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Yeah, so we have a practice that is just kind of hanging around that has really become a formality.

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Right. So let me defend the practice first. So how this practice started, and there's points, like 2

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Corinthians 3, Paul talks about, do I need a letter of recommendation? So if you think about before cell phones, before internet, you know, how do you affirm?

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Here comes this guy walking into town, and he's going to preach. You have no idea who he is.

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You're just supposed to take his word. Well, you could have a church affirm this brother. It's like, we believe that this, and also, by the way, in a time period where there's fewer churches, when a church basically says they're a

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Baptist church, you kind of understand, you know, early in America, for example, most

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Baptist churches, at least when America was a nation, many

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Baptist churches held to either the Philadelphia Confession or some form of the

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Philadelphia Confession, which is just a 1689 with a couple extra, nothing taken away, but a couple extra things added.

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Well, you kind of begin to have an idea. Someone comes into town, I have no idea who they are, but here they're coming with a letter of affirmation, commendation, recommendation from another church.

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Well, similar with membership. So, you know, your family is at this

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Baptist church, and you're going to move. You've got to move out of the city into the country or out of the country into the city, or you're moving, your cousin has written you, and they've struck gold, and so you're moving, you know, whatever.

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Whatever the case may be, you're moving, you're getting out, you're going to a different location.

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And when you get to that location, they're going to ask you, have you been baptized or whatever, you know, and you're like, well, yes, but what proof is there?

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Well, we're members of this church in good standing. We're not trying to, this is another aspect that we, you know, you mentioned membership.

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We're not trying to get out of church discipline. So talk about that for a minute, church discipline.

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Yeah, and here's the issue. So few churches practice church discipline that when a church does practice church discipline, so often people will just leave, and they'll say, well,

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I'll just go to the church down the street. I'll just go to the church in the next town. No ramifications.

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And if that church down the street or in the next town will just receive them into membership, no matter what.

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And that's why in some ways it has become a formality, because honestly, even if a church requests a letter, there are a lot of scenarios where if your church were to say, we can't give a letter for Tim, you know,

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I'm making up the name Tim. But let's say, you know, they send the letter and you say, we can't give a letter for Tim.

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It doesn't matter. They're going to say, oh, well, we'll just receive him on a statement of faith then.

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Yeah. Yeah. And we're not, we're not even gonna. And not that I'm saying that church, we, we oftentimes have received people on a statement because of, but not because they're running from, because what

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I always do is when we do receive someone on a statement, I'll contact the previous pastor and make sure everything's okay.

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That there's not that they're not, you know, trying to get out of church discipline or something like that.

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But, but yeah, I think that we need to recognize that, man, even if we don't agree with the church discipline necessarily, we ought to be thankful that a church is practicing church discipline.

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Yeah. And the individual, I'm not saying they have to go to church there, but they need to go back and make it right.

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They at least need to go back to that church, maybe deal with issues of repentance from sin that they've committed and whether or not they end up long -term in that church, there may be a scenario where they, that that's just not going to work, but we should not just receive them into membership without them going back and proper repentance and restitution being made in that church where they were at.

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If we just keep letting people just move from church to church, you're never going to see the kind of Christian growth in the life of that person.

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And it's going to be detrimental to the growth and health of the local church. So when a

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Baptist church is asked for a letter, normally it's brought up in a business meeting.

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And so a few years ago when I was in Clinton pastoring, there was, we got, you know, this letter.

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And I told this person's name at the business meeting and nobody knew who they were.

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Wow. Except for this one older lady who had like found help found the church.

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She remembered, remembered them from like 25 years ago. Like this is like, this is not just,

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Oh, I'm not just giving a hyperbolic example like this actually happened. Yeah.

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And so I really tried to not like, I like, let's just not grant the letter.

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I mean, let's just like, let them, I mean, let's just, you know, but they so steeped in tradition.

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They're like, no, we have to grant the letter. So like I either called or emailed the pastor and was like, look, we're sending a letter, but like, we have no idea who this person is.

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Or we hadn't seen them because here's the deal. And now thankfully our church now

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Providence, like we're at the point now, like, I mean, we, we're not granting letters.

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Just, I mean, we will grant letters obviously, but, but, but not in situations like that, you know?

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And I'll give you some examples here in a minute. But if you grant a letter like that, you're lying.

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You're saying this person is a member in good standing. No, they're not.

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And that comes back to what we were saying about meaningful membership. That's right. If, if, if, if we're treating membership like it's meaningful and we're not allowing people to just stay on the church role, you know, for forever, but we're actually seeking them out and removing people that aren't, aren't actually members of the church.

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I mean, there are people who if, if they sent us a letter, we would just have to say, they're not a member of this church.

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Yeah. They think they're, I mean, they, I mean, they, they shouldn't think it because we, we always try to contact people if we remove them.

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But if they sent a letter, we'd have to say, well, that person's not a member of the church. Yeah. They've not been here in many years and they've been removed from membership, you know, because they're, they're not in fellowship with this local church.

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That's right. A couple of things about that. So we've received letters. So I've been here over seven years now.

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And one of the letters we received recently, this particular,

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I know who they are, but this particular husband and wife, they, they haven't been to our church since I've been pastor here.

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Now I've reached out to them, you know, I've talked to them, I've seen them in the community, but they haven't been here since I've been pastor.

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And so, you know, we had removed them off the roll. Another one hadn't been here since COVID, like, so like three and a half years and they had been removed off the roll.

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These were two different churches. And in both cases, like I'm grateful they're, they're trying to get back in church.

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I'm grateful, but they need to deal upfront. You know, like if someone comes to our church and hasn't been to church and a meaningful member of a church in seven years or whatever, like we need to chat about that, you know, and, and, and meet and talk and discuss.

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And it doesn't automatically mean they're not a Christian. No, I'm not saying that at all, but it does mean that they at least at the very least have a misunderstanding of the importance of meaningful membership.

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Meaningful membership means that your, your, your church role is not like hotel,

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California where people can check out anytime they like, you know, but they can't ever leave, you know, like they're just stuck on your role perpetually.

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That's not the purpose pastors. We have to give an account for the, for the membership of the flock.

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And so we ought to take seriously people who are, are, are, are, are covenanted members of the local church.

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And, and when they leave, they ought to be contacted. They're not coming. They ought to be contacted if necessary.

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You have to put them under church discipline until, and if they don't come back, you have to remove them.

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But we have to stop this practice of just, well, this is just how we've always done it.

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First of all, it's not how we've always done it. Right. And second, it is bearing false witness.

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And it's a disregard for the purity of Christ church.

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Right. So let me just give you an example. What if I, this is a, this is a, it's a weighty illustration,

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Eddie. So not, not something to joke around here, but what if I disregarded the purity of Laura, your wife?

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Like, how's that going to sit with me and you? Right. Yeah. We're going to have problems. We're going to have problems.

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Okay. Christ is a better husband than you, Eddie. I'm just saying, and, and, and he's more righteous and he's holy.

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And he's like, what do you think the Lord Jesus thinks about those who disregard the purity of his bride?

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Yeah. And along that same, that same note, I would say to pastors that may be listening, brothers,

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I would urge you don't think, well, membership's not a big deal.

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We're responsible. Like we're going to have to give an account. Right. I mean, it says in Hebrews 13, 17, obey your leaders and submit to them for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will give an account, let them do this with joy and not with groaning for that would be of no advantage to you.

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And so I think oftentimes the problem in the church begins in the pulpit. It begins with pastors who, one, they're not taking seriously the fact that they're going to have to give an account for the people who are the members of their local church.

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And that's not just whoever shows up on Sunday morning. And then also understanding that, that there, therefore since that's the case, we need to be keeping a close watch on the flock.

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I mean, could you imagine a farmer who goes out to check his cows and it's like, oh,

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I don't know. I don't know how many I have. We'll just see what cows are out there today.

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Yeah. Well, you would say you're not a good farmer. You're not good at taking care of the herd or the flock of sheep.

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And so I think that a lot of these issues with the letter come back to, it comes back to us not taking seriously what it means to have a local church covenanted together.

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And it's much better to deal with these things on the front end.

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Yes. And I know, because I've been there, we've all been there. You get excited. You're like, someone wants to join our church, you know?

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And I would, I would still encourage this practice of sending for letter and all that.

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But because of the state of churches today, you know, you need to deal with this person.

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I'm a member of such and such church. Okay. You've been actively going there. And if they say no, then you need to deal with membership.

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And different churches do different things. I think it's, I think some sort of membership interview at the least, that's what we do.

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Membership interviews are necessary, but also at sometimes doing classes and those sorts of things are also helpful.

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But the point is, if this person is like, yeah, my, my letter's there, but I haven't been like, you need to deal with that.

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And it, and it actually, the encouragement, no matter what the other churches, other church, they may just, they may be dumbfounded that you would even do this, but you need to say,

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Hey, the very least, you need to call that pastor or, or perhaps send a letter to the church or perhaps go to the church if it's feasible and say, you know what?

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I repent. I, I, my membership was here, but I didn't take membership seriously.

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That's right. You know, and, and, but we have to just stop even, even,

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I'm not talking about pastors who don't get this. If you don't get this, you need to repent. You need to seek, you know, figure this out.

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I'm talking about pastors who get this, who understand membership. We're kind of guilty sometimes of perpetuating this broken system, which

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I defend the system, but it's become an antiquated formality instead of what it's meant.

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You know, so we need to recover doing this the biblical way. So with, with the changes in technology, you mentioned earlier that this practice of sending a letter kind of came about back when, you know, that's what you did.

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You sent a letter, but now with email and social media and you've got a phone, you can make a phone call or send a text.

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Well, what would you say to someone that said, well, what if we as pastors took on more of the responsibility of contacting other pastors, the pastor of the church are coming from and in doing more of that connection that way outside of the, the formality of the letter, but, but still making sure that, that there's a clear understanding of the person's fidelity to the church and the transfer of the person from, from that, from that congregation and those pastors to this other congregation and these pastors.

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Yeah. I think record keeping is, is biblical and important, but I mean,

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I don't think I, I'm not saying you have to send an actual physical letter.

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We've had two examples of families in the last year. One was some email exchanges, you know, cause this family was several hundred miles away.

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So we just did some email exchanges and you know, we, we got the recommendation and then other actually was a close pastor friend and it was just several towns away and we just, we were texting back and forth and they gave, okay, so what you're, so, so what is it you're trying to accomplish with this?

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You're trying to make sure that the people joining your church are not under church discipline.

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Right. And that they have had a history of understanding church membership, rightly.

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Cause they're under church discipline. You can't accept them, which by the way, churches can be wrong.

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Okay. Churches are not infallible. Someone may wrongly be under church discipline, but you should not take them into membership without doing your work.

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Right. Right. But if they are under church discipline and it's legitimate, like you can't bring them into.

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That's right. Membership. And then the other thing is if they're, if they have a history of not being committed, then you need to deal with that.

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You know, you need to deal with that on the front. It doesn't mean like, oh, you know, it's like they're not stuck and like can never be a church member again, but it's something you need to deal with repentance and teaching and, and all of those things.

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And unfortunately, if a person has a history of not being committed, committed to local church membership, even if they come and they want to join, oftentimes that won't mean that they're going to be faithful members in your church.

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You're actually not helping them or the church. If, if you, if you just say, okay, well, a few years ago here in our church, and I, and I love this guy.

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And I believe, you know, that he loves the Lord, but I preached a sermon from first Corinthians 12.

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He and his family had been attending here, but, but they weren't like, you knew they were going to be here.

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They weren't that regular. It wasn't like every Sunday you knew they were going to be here. It was like we show up on Sunday and if they were here, we're like,

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Hey, great. Look, they're here. It was that kind of deal. And then I preached a sermon from first Corinthians 12, just talking about membership, right.

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Talking about the members of the body and how working together and all those things.

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And he came to me, the father of this family. Oh man, you're right.

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He said, I've never understood the, you know, how important church membership is. And they joined and we were glad to receive them into membership.

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But you know, over the years they, they never, they never became any more committed than they already were.

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And then over the years they kind of drifted away. And a couple of years ago we had to remove them from membership.

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And they're going to another church, but I would assume they're about as committed there as they ever were here, you know?

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And so I just want to, I want to urge churches and pastors to realize if you think, well, well, we just, we don't want to cause any problem and they want to join.

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Yeah. But you, you actually may not be benefiting them or the church if you don't go ahead and deal with these issues up front.

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That's exactly what I was going to say. A lot of souls involved here. So number one, you have the individual or the family involved.

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Two, you have the receiving church involved through in all the members, all the members.

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And then thirdly, you have the sending church involved. So if all these souls before God involved in this transfer from church

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A to church B and to handle that haphazardly or flippantly, or, you know, you don't, you're not concerned.

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That is an indictment on you for lack of concern for all these souls involved.

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So you, you, you affect the sending church because you don't treat church membership seriously. You affect the receiving church because you don't treat church members.

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And then you affect, affect the ones you're receiving. So you're not trying to make it. It's not that you're trying to make it harder, but in a way you are trying to make it harder than it currently is because it should be like, it's a weighty thing.

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It's a serious thing. This is not, you know, it's not just like in a marriage, for example, you don't just say, well, oh, you two want to get married.

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All right, let's do it. Let's get married. Let's, I'll marry you right now. Like, no, you talk through these things, you know, even

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Jesus before following him, you know, like he, he, he tells count the cost. Well, in a similar way, when we think through church membership, we need to think through these things rightly.

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And we're really disparaging the body of Christ and not guarding the purity. The local church,

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Dustin Benj, Dr. Benj, I believe he's on faculty at Southern in Louisville, wrote a great book called the most beautiful place on earth.

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And it's about the local church and the local church is the most beautiful place on earth.

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Why would we not do our due diligence? Even when it's hard, even when it's counter -cultural,

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I'm ultimately not going to answer to other churches or other individuals. We will stand though, before our head,

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Christ our King. And so why would we not seek to do all we can to guard the purity and beauty and loveliness of the local church and be serious about membership?

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I think that's all I got brother. What about you? Well, one more thing I want to throw out there for us. And I know,

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I know we're, we're running a little long and we're getting, we got to get done here in a minute, but one more thing I want to throw out there.

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And we've kind of talked about this just a little bit already, but we, we have to take into account the fact that we have all different kinds of churches that have different attitudes toward membership, not just, and I'm not just talking about our other

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Baptist churches that may not take it as seriously as we do, but like where we're at here in Marshall, there are a lot of churches around us that are non -denominational or they're independent.

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And honestly, a lot of this comes back to dealing with how do they even, do they even have members there?

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So we've got some people who have left our church and they've been gone for a while.

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And I know where they're attending, but they've not moved their membership and we're fixing to have to deal with the issue.

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But honestly, I don't know that the church that they're attending even does membership. Yeah. You know what

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I mean? So I don't know if they will ever request a letter and because I don't even know that that's a, that's a thing for them, but it is a thing for us.

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And so we're going to have to, we're going to have to talk to those people and, and help them understand you'll have to deal with that church over, over however you're going to deal with.

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But if you're not going to be here, you're not going to be committed. You're not going to be a part of this fellowship, then you're not going to be a member here, you know?

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And so I think that we just have to take into account that it's, we would love it if there was just perfectly pristine, clean way that this worked, all the churches did it the same way, but that's not the case.

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And it's going to be messy because different people in different churches are going to do things different ways.

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And I just want to mention the messiness of it. But it's okay. It's worth, it's worth the effort.

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It is worth it. That's right. That's good, brother. That's good. All right. Well, thank you guys for joining us on this episode of the rural church podcast.

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Hope to see you or have you listen next week. Right? That's right.

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That's right. All right. Take us out, Eddie. See you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house.

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The church is what God's doing. This, this is his work. If we really believe what

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Ephesians says, we are the masterpiece of God. How are you going to respond?