Stop Sending Church Membership Letters

I wanted to do a video real quick this afternoon about an old practice, a good practice, but an old practice that I think needs some updating. And that practice is moving your membership letter from one church to another.

So what used to happen before the age of the internet, before the age of cell phones, you would have a letter, you were a member of one church, and you moved cities, or you moved out of the city, or whatever, and that church would give you a letter and say, this brother or this brother and sister, this family, they're members here in good standing.

We love them, we commend them to you as brothers and sisters in Christ. And so you would take that and you would be able to go to another church and they would receive you warmly in good fellowship. And what that did was it prevented people from sort of just church hopping.

It also prevented people, this is another practice we need to recover, but it prevented people from skirting around church discipline, so when they were under discipline in a church they couldn't just get away from that and go to another church.

Of course, without ways to communicate other than actual letters, it made sense that your church membership was on file with one church and the way that you'd move it from one church to another is by letter.

The Problem of Letters for Absent Members

And so what happens now, this is just centuries later or whatever, we now have a system where when you go and join another church, and this may even be within the same community, you will say, I'm going to join this church by letter from such and such church.

So church A, Baptist Church, and now I want to go to church B, Baptist Church, and my letter's at church A, Baptist Church, and so we're going to send a letter and request.

For a letter.

A lot of times that can be good and that can be helpful, but here's where the problem is and here's where we need to push back and here's where we need pastors to lead their congregations in repentance and to make this a more healthy practice.

And that is, when you try to move your letter from one church to another, when you haven't been to that one church in months or even years, I've had experiences in my own ministry where we've received a letter from a church to ask for a member, and I didn't even know that person, but apparently they're tucked away somewhere on our roll.

And I've tried to lead churches to understand, we can't just send a letter and tell another church that this person is a member in good standing in our church when we hadn't even.

Seen them.

You understand, that would be lying. We hadn't seen them in years. We hadn't seen them in months. They've forsaken the assembling of the saints at this local church. We can't tell you that they're a member here in good standing.

That would be breaking the ninth commandment. That would be a lie and it's really a disregard for the purity of the church. It's a disregard of taking seriously biblical ecclesiology, that is, the doctrine of the.

Church.

Church Membership, Discipline, and the Purity of the Bride of Christ

It really takes away from what the local church is supposed to be. It's supposed to be made up of committed members. And so this is an antiquated practice.

It's good.

I'm not saying we should do away with it, but I'm saying we should think about, for example, we have a couple members in the last year who we didn't have to get an actual letter. One, we got a text message from the pastors.

Another, we did some email exchanges with the pastors.

Why?

Because all you're doing when you move from one church to another, one was from several hundred miles away, another was from several cities away, but the idea is you're just trying to affirm that these people are good brothers and sisters in good standing with the church, not trying to get out of discipline, and they're faithful members.

And so you receive them as a faithful member now in your local church. But when you don't know somebody or when you haven't seen somebody in a long period of time and you tell another church, no, no, these people, they're members here in good standing, then you're saying that local church attendance, the attendance of worship, the purity of the church, serious commitment to the ordinances of Christ, to worship, to preaching, to the actual ordinances of Lord's Supper, you're saying these things don't matter.

They can be treated flippantly. And so pastors, I encourage you, you need to lead your churches away from this practice of sending letters of people who don't actually come to your church. Another thing you need to do is actually discipline those.

You need to remove them from your church role. If they're not coming to church, well, they're not really a part of your church. They need to be contacted if that's possible. I've been in situations it's not possible.

And then they need to be removed. And then if you receive a letter from another church that says, hey, such and such is wanting to move their letter, you say, well, they're not on our role anymore. We're glad they're in church now, but they're not on our role here.

And then that puts it on that other church to deal with the ramifications of that person's lack of attendance. Churches don't want to deal with that. Pastors don't want to deal with that because it's hard.

It's messy. It's complicated. It's like, well, we just want them to join. We just want more members, right? We just want more members. We don't want to make it harder. But what you end up doing is really disregarding Christ's bride.

You don't want to be guilty of that. You don't want to be guilty of disregarding the bride of Christ. You treat the bride of Christ shamefully. And you have to answer to her husband. So these are just some things to think about.

We need to have better membership practices. We need to have more healthy ecclesiology. And we need to honor Christ in this way much better than we currently are. God bless.