Loving fellow Christians is biblical. The recent invention of "local church membership" is not. (Part 1)

Why does this topic ruffle feathers ?

The American church has become very corporatized, even the Reformed church in America. By corporatized I mean that instead of seeing Christians as Christ's sheep to love and care for whoever they are, wherever they are, and however long they’ll be in front of you, so often they are thought of as customers that organizations need to win over to keep coming back to their particular organization. They need them to come back for many reasons. They have big staffs; people’s financial livelihoods, whether or not they can pay their mortgages, are dependent on the financial giving reaching a certain level. If a certain number of the Christians in the church left, many of the pastors and those on staff might not be able to pay their mortgages, go on their upcoming planned vacations, etc…so there is pressure to sustain the numbers and the income.

This is also true regarding paying for the mortgages of the big buildings. If people stop coming and stop giving, then how will the mortgage be paid? So there is an incentive to keep people in particular organizations. The primary way this is done is through the very recently invented modern-day unbiblical practice of “local church membership”.

There are also big programs that these organizations run; lots of different "ministries." If people leave, who will help to sustain those programs? Then, there’s a desire for power and influence; we live in a culture that counts “subscribers” and “followers”. It can make church leaders feel good and important when they meet with other church leaders and tell them how many “members” they have at their organizations.

There are many overall great Bible teachers that teach modern-day local church membership, much of the time because they have been swept up by the new movement and have not spent much time examining it. It is often looked down upon to question those in authority, especially those who have so many wonderful Christ-centered things to say, so Christians get uncomfortable questioning this practice publicly because it can seem like the entire ministries of those who hold to “local church membership” are being thrown out. That is not the case with me, or with this article series. I acknowledge that there are many who teach local church membership who are excellent Bible teachers overall, who genuinely love Christ and God's people. Just because they are incorrect in this topic does not mean that it means they have horrible ministries and are horrible people necessarily, by any means.

Why is this topic necessary to discuss?

The church throughout the world, and especially in America, is fractured. Jesus wanted his church to be united. He prayed for this explicitly in John 17:20-23. It does not glorify Christ when Christians have very little to do with one another unless they are a part of the same independent, autonomous church organization. Many churches do not even allow other true Christians to come to the Lord’s Supper at their fellowship. Others say they have some special relationship to live out the one another commands in the Bible with one group of Christians, while they have little to nothing to do with other Christians they rub shoulders with every day in their neighborhoods, workplaces, gyms, and other activities. This shouldn’t be. Peter Leithart explains:

The church’s unity is a fact, rooted in Christ himself, the work of the one Spirit who animates the many members of the body, and the promise of God the Father to gather the nations in Abraham’s seed…It is essential to correctly understand the factuality of the church’s unity. It is common to say the church is spiritually one, even when it is institutionally divided…The true church, it is said, is an invisible reality that can coexist with visible conflict, division, estrangement, and mutual hatred. That was certainly not Paul’s perspective…When the Corinthians divided their loyalties among their preferred apostles, Paul did not excuse them by saying that, despite it all, the church is still one. He was outraged that the Corinthians had divided Christ…Paul expected – demanded – that the church’s unity be visible in table fellowship, in loyalties and allegiances, in the names Christians adopt for themselves…the disunity of the church is a disease in Christ’s body, a shattering of the Spirit’s temple. We must utterly reject ecclesiologies that imply indifference to visible division.[1]

There is so much competition in God’s one true church, vying for people to come and join, eerily similar to how businesses vie for customers to patronize their shop. This is very ugly and it leads to an “us vs. them” mentality within Christ's bride, when really Christians should recognize that God is concerned with the entirety of his church. John Frame explains that this type of denominationalism or local churchism creates

unhealthy competition among denominational groups. Typically we seek to enlarge our own denomination and decrease others by our efforts at church planting and church growth. Often we find ourselves in direct competition: an Orthodox Presbyterian Church competing with a Christian Reformed Church to see who can get the greatest number of local Calvinists; a Baptist church and an Independent Bible Church competing for the local dispensational population… A more scriptural outlook, however, is that we desire to plant churches and to see church growth, not so we can get a larger share of the population for our own denomination at the expense of another, but so that we may reach more non-Christians for Jesus. In view of our Lord's Great Commission, our concern should be, not merely with that portion of the community which belongs to our tradition, but with the community at large, Christian and non-Christian. With that outlook, we can see that there really need be no competition at all. For no denomination can possibly do the whole job. When we see the dimensions of the evangelistic task before us, we will be thankful that there are denominations besides our own to help out.[2]

Frame also calls out the

Party spirit (1 Cor 1-3): The partisan mentality, ignoring our responsibility to love all in the body, prefers to give allegiance only to its own particular faction, which may be united by respect for a particular leader or leadership style, or by preference for some doctrinal or practical emphasis.[3]

Christ sets Christians free in the gospel. He sets them free from the commandments of men, and free to joyfully submit to his Word. The Word of God is beautiful. Christ kept it all on behalf of Christians, saving us from our sin and bringing us to God. And he sets us free from unbiblical ways of living so that we can experience the deepest possible joy in Christ and spread his glory in the world. Please, check everything that is written in this article series by Scripture. Do not ultimately submit to any fallible human being.

In part two, I will explore what the church is, and how it functioned before the recent invention of local church membership.

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[1] The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), 19-20.

[2] John Frame, “Evangelical Reunion,” The Works of John Frame & Vern Poythress , accessed September 14, 2023, https://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/FrameJohnEvangelicalreunion1991.pdf.

[3] Ibid.