[I first posted this at Fuller’s The Burner blog]
We live in a culture of notorious non-joiners, and I am one of them. Way back when, while thinking about what the hypothetical church I might someday start would look like, I was dead set against having “church membership.” What could be more useless? I knew I was committed, God knew I was committed, and even if I wasn’t, what good would attending a class and signing on the dotted line do? It just seemed to me a waste of time and effort.
This began to change for me, though, the more I saw how fickle our generation is about church. Even those of us with modest means grew up as the most privileged consumers the world has ever known, essentially able to acquire what we wanted when and how we wanted it. And if a particular store, restaurant, or brand let us down we thought nothing of moving our allegiance to a new one that better met our needs. As I came into the church as a young adult, I brought this same mindset there as well. Church was something I consumed, something which served me. As long as my needs were being met I would continue to consume. If they weren’t being met (or perhaps if a fellow consumer did something to upset me) then I began wondering if the place down the street might serve me better. I took the idea of changing churches about as seriously as I took the idea of switching my grocery shopping from Vons to Ralphs.
But the New Testament began to screw this up for me. In the biblical view, a person doesn’t belong only to an abstract, invisible body called the church (think of this as the “Von’s Club” view of membership). Nor does belonging to a church mean being an anonymous part of an impersonal organization that doesn’t know or care about your comings and goings, so long as you pay your dues (the “gym membership” view).
In the New Testament, the church is people, and being part of a church means belonging to those people. In Scripture the church always consists of an identifiable group, often described as a family, or as the parts which make up a body, or as the bricks which together make a house. It is a set of relationships shared with those who, like you, have been baptized into Jesus, died with him, and now share his risen life. And this family – made up of real, messy, screwed-up, difficult-at-times people – becomes the context in which one’s life in Christ is lived out, the place where one learns to love their neighbor as them self, and the missional community with which one participates in seeing God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven.
So as we wrestled through what this might look like at Life, some questions began to emerge. “What if ‘church membership’ can actually become part of our spiritual formation? What if we can use it as a tool to call people out of me-centered, consumer-driven spirituality, and to challenge them into the counter-cultural act of committing to live deeply with one another as they follow Christ? And what if, rather than asking nothing of people (so we get more to sign up), we set the bar high and utilize membership as a means of calling people to take seriously living as a disciple of Jesus, and actually doing the things Jesus calls us to do?”
That was five years ago, and having membership has ended up being one of the best things we’ve done. In seeking membership at Life, a person is saying that they believe God is calling them to live out their apprenticeship to Jesus in this particular time and place, in the midst of and with the help of this particular family of people. They commit to a “rule of life” (to borrow a term from the monastics) – a set of practices, relationships, and experiences that we see as essential to our growth in Christ. And believing this to be the case, they are willing to do the hard and joyous work of living as a committed member of a community.
