A Montana pastor reflects on the importance of church membership
by Steve Van Winkle
Pastor, Fellowship Baptist Church, Bozeman, MT
Dirt (you may remember him from my first article about how I learned the importance of local church) had bolted for flatter, more familiar territory, leaving me behind in Montana among people I hadn’t known more than a month. I was 18 and earning my keep on one of the lowest rungs of the agricultural world’s ladder. The couple I lived with trained cutting horses and offered me room and board in exchange for chores, consisting mainly of feeding horses and cleaning stalls. There was no money involved, ever; which suited me fine.
Around sunrise each day I climbed into the loft of the barn and tossed a few 80-pound bales of hay into the bed of the truck I left idling below. After maneuvering it cautiously through the gate to the pasture, I ghost drove the gnarled dually across this field by putting the six-wheeled truck in granny-low and jumping out from behind the steering-wheel into the bed in one sweeping motion that would put me in traction today. I then tossed the alfalfa out in hasty slabs to the pack of grungy horses meandering behind while the driverless truck bounced irresistibly over the frozen clods in the pasture on its way to nowhere in particular.
My goal was to survive the winter so I could fish in the spring.
On this day, the cab of the truck had three occupants: My “boss” (who was 23), me, and the pastor of our church, who himself hadn’t crossed the threshold of 30. We talked as we were driving across the field that lay beneath a steep slope which marked the boundary of National Forest land. We were on a rescue mission to the mouth of the slim canyon where I managed to hopelessly immobilize my employer’s four-wheel-drive pickup on the narrow trail along Jackson Creek. I left it behind to get some help, and with every step of the long walk back to the barn, I recalled my dad’s iron-clad response to my request that he help me buy a truck with four-wheel-drive: “Four-wheel-drives’ll just get you stuck in places a two-wheel-drive can’t go.”
It was a very, very long walk.
My memory has deleted the exact topic of conversation we were having on our way to the immobile truck, probably because it was mainly mockery for my getting the pickup stuck. I eventually managed to turn the talk to something concerning the Bible, and while even that exchange is fuzzy, I have used time and again a snarky line spoken to me on that occasion.
I now know that Christians have any number of pre-packaged retorts to repel scriptural truths that are inconsistent with their lifestyles. “That’s your interpretation” and “I’ll pray about that” are examples of cheap, evasive clichés deployed as counter-measures in the war against our own growth. You probably have a favorite yourself; I know I do.
In response to one such truth my pastor was showing me in the truck that day, I repeated the tired retort: “Show me chapter and verse …” I said this after he had taken the time to couch his prodding in a number of precepts and conclusions drawn from larger narratives of scripture.
His answer surprised me: “Well, when you’re all grown up and a big-boy Christian and don’t need ‘chapter and verse’ for everything you consider biblical, let me know.”
That shut me up. More importantly, it made me think and understand a point I had never considered. Namely, that not everything that is “biblical” has a specific chapter and verse.
Think about it. Everyone proclaims that reading your Bible every day is important and biblical, yet there is no chapter and verse for it. Churches meet on Sunday without a specific chapter and verse that requires it, and no one raises a fuss about the biblical nature of that routine.
Yet, today there is growing suspicion of, if not outright resistance to, a critical piece of Christianity’s vibrancy: church membership. This situation is driven, at least in part, because the idea of church membership lacks the required chapter and verse many seek.
Before uniting with our church, we require people to attend our New Member Class, which we established about 20 years ago. This has been a great help giving new people a jumpstart and for getting a “feel” for our church by laying out what we believe, what we value, and how we operate. It’s also been a catalyst for some to discover that we aren’t the church for them before they set down ecclesiastical roots.
Lately, I’ve been considering an additional introductory curriculum related to church membership offered to people before attending the New Member Class. I’d call it “The Why-We-Have-A-New-Member-Class Class” and it would explain to everyone that we have a New Member Class because we believe it is actually biblical for every Christian to be a member of a church.
Considering such a thing is purely practical. I have had more people in the last year ask to meet with me BEFORE coming to a new member class, because they are either unacquainted with the concept of membership or just uncomfortable with it because they aren’t sure it’s biblical, than I have in all the previous years combined.
Whatever the reason this disposition has come to roost in the pews and chairs of the contemporary church, it has compelled me to back up one step and reaffirm that church membership is indeed biblical and not just some “denominational” anachronism. To do so, I first needed to demonstrate how something can be biblical without a chapter and verse tagged to it.
It all came together recently in a Sunday school series on Ecclesiology, which turned into Practical Ecclesiology, which simply became The Primacy of the Local Church, the first considerations of which is the biblical nature of church membership.
Which, of course, cannot be covered merely by citing chapter and verse.
On the second Sunday into it, my plan was to start off the hour with a few stories bizarre enough to dislodge anyone from a hardened conclusion that church membership was nothing more than an invention of pastors or churches to consolidate power. I forgot that this was also the morning we were hosting a local Bible college’s choir for our worship service. Because they’re local, I consoled myself with the fact that they usually don’t remain for Sunday school after their sound check.
On this day, for some reason, they stayed.
Perhaps the only thing worse than teaching a group of pastors is trying to teach Bible college students. Even the students in our church from this fine college admit it and have used the fact to kindle my rage for their own entertainment. Usually, it’s done by “confronting” me after a service to let me know they disagree with my take on a passage, or to correct my conclusions by employing their superior understanding of Greek. About the time they see the lava under my skin reach my forehead, they burst out laughing.
This morning’s collection of students was different. They came to sing, but a few had the countenance of anthropologists who were studying a foreign, if not primitive, culture.
My stories that morning included the time I came back to the church on a Sunday afternoon to prepare for the evening service to an unexpected conversation. As I walked up to the doors, I heard the familiar sound of our piano. The lone car I had noticed in our parking lot was unfamiliar to me; turns out, so was the person playing the baby grand in our auditorium.
I walked in and asked her the questions you would have if you found a stranger playing your piano in your church, or house, or anywhere. As a church, we had a stringent set of guidelines for our instruments regarding who could play them and when. Among the rules we hadn’t stipulated was that the person playing must not be a stranger who shows up unannounced without permission at times when no staff or member is in the building. Maybe it was an oversight, but we really didn’t think it necessary to codify common sense.
I informed her only members were allowed to play the instruments, unless prior permission had been received. Further, I tried to explain this was so because members of our church were vested in the piano, were the ones who paid for and maintained it, were the ones who sacrificed to play it for the blessing of others, and were the ones who set the rules for it in order to insure it would remain in good condition for as long as possible. I also said it kind of creeped me out she needed all this explained.
She countered saying that she, in fact, attended a larger church in town that had their own piano. Our piano, however, was closer, and theirs was frequently being used by someone else. Additionally, she was actually quite offended by all these rules because if we were a church, and churches were for Christians, why can’t any Christian come and play any church’s piano?
So, I asked the class how many would have asked her to leave because she wasn’t a member and how many would have let her stay and play (and allow anyone to come similarly thereafter). A surprising number of hands were raised in favor of the latter, all of them from the visiting Bible college students.
Ironically, when I turned to the text for the morning, the choir director (whose husband is the dean of students and a good friend) took the lead in sharing observations that demonstrated my point for the lesson, namely that church membership is something that can be seen in scripture, even if there is no chapter and verse.
Which is not to say I wasn’t intent on considering a chapter and verse. As just one example of this “verse-less” imperative of church membership, I asked people to turn to 1 Corinthians 14:23 …
“If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?”
Typically, people are so immersed in the tongues issue by the time they reach this, that any number of things that allude to church membership contained here are overlooked. In what became a like-minded exchange between the choir director and myself, we began with the significance of the term “whole church.” Check any version you want and you’ll find the adjective “whole” attached to “church.” Equally important is that Paul says this “whole church” is gathered “… into one place …”
My point was simple: If Paul says this church can gather into one place, we know he is not referring to anything here that can be dismissed as “universal” or “invisible” in nature. Seeing it must be speaking about a particular church in a particular city, how would anyone know if that “whole church” had “come together into one place” except there was some way to identify the exact people who comprise the whole church?
In short, anything that can be “whole” has an identifiable quantity of parts.
To illustrate, I asked the people what they would say if I told them my whole family was in the building that morning. Those who knew me raised their hand and noted I would be mistaken, because my oldest, Madison, was in college in Chicago. My family has identifiable parts; therefore when I make statements about my “whole family” being in “one place,” people can easily determine that’s true.
What Paul presupposes in this verse is that these people could actually know when all the identifiable parts of the local church in Corinth had come together in one place. Having some sort of list of people who comprised the whole was the only way this could be true: They evidently had what we call a membership.
Furthermore, Paul is contemplating coming into this “whole church” those whom he calls “unlearned or unbelievers.” There are a couple things so obvious about this that they’re easily missed. First is that “unlearned” can’t be “unbelievers,” why would Paul separate the two if they were?
“Unbelievers” are easy to identify. It’s the “unlearned” who are intriguing. Many conclude these are Christians unfamiliar with the issue and practice of spiritual gifts under consideration here. If that is the case, it demonstrates that individual believers can attend a meeting of the whole church and yet not be included in its identifiable quantity of parts. Simply, it shows that Christians can come to church and not be members of that church.
I don’t want to overstate the issue of that morning. Many of our guests understood and even appreciated the point; however, there were some who seemed to receive it as a sales pitch from someone whose face they had just seen on a post office flyer.
It’s an odd world where annual membership fees are given over to Costco for the privilege to spend money in its warehouses without so much as a second thought, while “free” church membership is scrutinized by the very people whom it is designed to grow. Health clubs are an accepted part of life today, and when they ask for a one-time membership fee and the first month’s dues after requiring people to sign a twelve-month contract, the money is handed over, and another elliptical machine is spinning furiously before the ink is dry on the signature.
Ducks Unlimited, Rush Limbaugh, Pheasants Forever, sports websites, AARP, AAA, YMCA, NRA, and countless other niche or alphabetic organizations receive the allegiance and payments required for membership from throngs of people every month. Why is it, then, that many Christians today believe the institution Paul labeled the “pillar and ground of the truth” is not only not deserving of the same, but has actually strayed from its scriptural charter in doing so?
Evangelistic services, Sunday school, children’s ministries, Christmas, “quiet times,” and missions are all staples of Christian culture considered biblical without having an unambiguous, cut-and-dried “chapter and verse” to legitimize any of them. No such precision exists to explain a singular, step-by-step way to personally appropriate salvation, but we invite people to be saved anyway. These are only a smattering of the things most would concede as biblical despite lacking chapter and verse, because they are nonetheless derived from scriptural narrative or biblical precept.
Back to the pickup recovery story, we eventually reached and liberated it from winter’s jealous grip. Along the way, a snarky comment had liberated me from a one-dimensional biblical perspective that kept me as stuck in my understanding of biblical imperatives as that old Ford up Jackson Creek.
I admit it: There is no specific chapter and verse for church membership. But, some truths can only be discerned by those willing to add “precept upon precept” to their chapters and verses.
I think there’s a chapter and verse for that.