A Display of God's Glory/Membership

From Gospel Translations

Let’s begin by admitting that the whole idea of church membership seems counter-productive to many today. Isn’t it unfriendly, and maybe even elitist to say that some are in and others out? Can we go so far as to say that it is even unbiblical, and maybe even unChristian? The end of Acts 2 simply says that “the Lord added to their number” (that is, to the church) those who were being saved. Isn’t that all there is to it? Also, in Acts 8, an official of the Ethiopian government had been traveling in Palestine and was returning home on his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah. Philip was led by the Holy Spirit to intercept him and talk to him; the man believed and was baptized. In that case, wasn’t the Ethiopian automatically a member of the church?

I. Commitment-phobia membership

All of this is more important than many people today think it is. In fact, I’m convinced that getting this right is a key step toward revitalizing our churches, evangelizing our nation, furthering the cause of Christ around the world, and so bringing glory to God!

American evangelicals are in pretty desperate need of rethinking and reconsidering this topic, especially our own fellowship of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention. According to one Southern Baptist study a few years ago, the typical Southern Baptist church has 233 members with 70 present at the Sunday morning worship service. My question is this: where are the other 163 members? Are they all at home sick, in a rest home, at college, on vacation, or in the military? Maybe some are, but all 163 of them? What does this convey about Christianity to the world around us? What do we understand this to mean about the importance of Christianity in our lives? And what is the spiritual state of those people, if they’ve not been at church for months, or even longer? Is their non-attendance really any of our business? To understand this, we need to first ask the question, “What really is a church?'

II.What Really is a Church?

The “Church” is Not a Building

By the word “church” we refer not to an organizational unit of a religion. We don’t refer to Buddhist churches or Jewish churches. By “church,” we don’t fundamentally mean a building; only in a secondary sense is it that. The building is simply where the church meets, thus the New England puritan name for the church building, “meeting house.” The earliest New England churches looked like large houses from the outside. It was just the house where the church met.

The Church is a Clearly Defined Community

According to the New Testament, the church is primarily a regular assembly of people who profess and give evidence that they have been saved by God’s grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. This is what a New Testament church is; it is not a building. The early Christians didn’t have any buildings for almost three hundred years after the church began. From the earliest of times, though, local Christian churches were clearly congregations of specific people. Certain people would have been known to make up this assembly, and others clearly known as outside of it. Thus the censures taught by Jesus in Matthew 18 and Paul in I Corinthians 5 envision an individual being excluded, not from a political community, but from a distinct social one. While we don’t know for sure that physical lists of members existed in the earliest Christian churches, they may have. The idea was not unheard-of. We know that the early church kept lists of widows; we know that God Himself is presented as having