Why be a church member? Why not just be able to go and participate?
What I mean by "member" is somebody who, whether by a signature or a word of commitment or promise, says, "I'm committed to a people, a people who hear the word of God preached, a people who perform the ordinances that Jesus gave to his church (baptism and the Lord's Supper), and a people who commit to the 'one another' commandments (love one another, exhort one another, admonish one another, hold one another accountable)."
These commitments are what membership is. And I think something is wrong if you resist putting your name on the line for that.
If you want to say, "OK, I believe the New Testament says, 'Be a part of a community, give yourself to ministering there and receiving ministry there, and advancing the cause of the gospel there, and upholding the name of Jesus there, and doing mission there,' and I'm a part of that," then to resist putting your name on the line for that is probably not a biblical conviction. It's probably an American, independent, give-me-elbow-room, don't-get-in-my-face-too-often conviction, which I don't think is biblical.
The reason for even using the word "member" is because of 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, Ephesians 4, , where Paul uses the word "member" in a body analogy. So the body analogy has one global meaning, and it has one local meaning. There's global membership in the body universal (Eph. 1), and there's local membership in the body where I'm a finger or an eye or an ear or a foot (1 Cor. 12). And everybody is a member.
So the word "member" in 1 Corinthians 12 means you're part of a local organism, and the finger belongs, the leg belongs, the eye belongs, the toe belongs...sometimes :-)... Every part of the body should care about what happens to the eye, etc... And it should function in a way that has some organic coherence; the body works together and is committed to the same mission & labors over it in the ways that each member is gifted.
It's very hard to do what the Bible calls a church to do unless it knows who are the members and who aren't. Who are the people that want to be treated as members here? Who want to obey Scriptures and build one another up for the advancement of God’s kingdom and for His glory?
A very simple example of this is the biblical concept of church discipline. In 1 Corinthians 5, for example, Paul says that the man who is sleeping with his mother-in-law (or stepmother) should be put out of the church because he is so proud and arrogant about his sin, and unrepentant and resistant to any kind of exhortation.
But how can you put him out if there are no members? He could just say, "I just go here! They can't put me out of anything. I'm not in anything!"
And I think a lot of people don't want to be “in” anything because they don't even like the idea of being able to be put out of something or think it’s mean or judgmental to put someone out like that.
We all want to lock up those who are breaking laws on the earth, but when we break God’s laws in the church, we get relaxed and mad at people holding other people accountable, but in all actuality, church discipline done right is LOVE!
So for all those reasons, even though there's no sentence in the Bible that says, "There is such a thing as church membership, and thou shalt be a church member," I think it's implied in the nature of the church and of Christian discipleship that everybody should, by a covenant commitment of some kind, put their name on the line saying, "I'm here. While I'm in this place, and until God leads me otherwise, these are my people and I'm committed here in the same way I’d encourage a couple to get married before they started living together.”
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