Is Church Membership Biblical?

Is Church Membership Biblical?

Welcome to Three Minutes in Theology of Perryville Second Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas. Today we're going to talk about is church membership biblical, formal and covenantal church membership?

Is it biblical?

The answer is yes, it's biblical. Consider, for example, how the New Testament calls the church the household of God. Ephesians 2 .19, 1 Timothy 3 .15, Galatians 6 .10, household of faith in Galatians.

Household implies a formal understanding of who is in and who is out of the household. Consider modern ideas, for example, with adoption or marriage. Those are covenantal formal declarations of who's in, who's out of the house.

Shepherding the Flock of God

But furthermore, consider 1 Peter chapter 5 and verse 2. Peter told the elders, the pastors, to shepherd the flock of God that is among you. There's a lot that we could unpack here, but think about one observation.

Formal church membership there is absolutely necessary because how can you understand who's in the flock, who's not in the flock? How can pastors obey this command if they don't know what constitutes a flock?

Does Peter mean that we're just to shepherd every person they come across? If so, why does he say specifically among you? But you might say, well, the flock is just everybody who shows up on Sunday morning, right?

Well, no, because it's the flock of God. That is, those who've repented of their sins and trusted Christ as their only suitable and all-sufficient savior. So since Peter says that we're to pastor, pastors are to pastor the flock of God that is among you and not simply the entire flock of God, he must mean that pastors have a particular responsibility to those in their care.

Pastoral Accountability and the Need for Defined Membership

In fact, Hebrews 13, 17 says that pastors will give an account for the souls that they're entrusted, the souls that they're overseeing. In other words, not an account for all the souls in the world, but specifically a specific group of souls they'll have to give an account to God for.

Well, how do they know who those souls are without formal covenantal membership? Well, maybe again, someone would say, it's just whoever shows up on that day, you're to shepherd. But the problem is that would make the word flock an amorphous group of people and it would actually misunderstand the analogy that Peter is using altogether.

And additionally, it downplays the role of shepherding because true shepherding cannot be done merely on Sundays. It's impossible for a pastor to fulfill a verse like 1 Peter 5, 2 if the idea of church is you just come on Sundays and you're not worried about formal commitment.

Christians Must Unite Formally with a Local Church

So all of this to say, Christians must unite formally and covenantally with a local church in order to be faithful to Christ. Now that's going to look different in different places. We don't necessarily have a one-size-fits-all process, but the fact that a formal covenantal relationship with the church is necessary is really undeniable.