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Why bother with membership?

John A. Esau

I had been wondering for some time about writing about church membership, but it took a phone call to stimulate my thinking. A pastor was calling for help in thinking through some revisions being proposed in his congregation regarding church membership.

Nothing in the Bible suggests the need for membership in a congregation. In the beginning, all that was essential to be a part of the Christian community was a commitment to being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Seen from that perspective, church membership feels like joining a club or some other secular organization. It seems formal, legalistic, exclusionary and unnecessary. Why do we need it? We know who is participating, and that is what really matters.


Furthermore, once we create a membership list, we discover a growing number of persons who either have dropped out of participation or have moved to another location without changing their membership – and that causes us another problem.

So why bother with church membership? Can we identify reasons why it still makes sense to have a structured way of being part of a congregation?

Church membership focuses for all of us, old and new members alike, that we have made a commitment – to worship God, to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and to be open to the presence of God the Holy Spirit. We all need that reminder from time to time. After all, being a Christian is about believing something and acting upon that belief.

Church membership clarifies that our faith is always both vertical (relating to God) and horizontal (relating to human beings). Being a Christian is to know ourselves to be part of an all-too-human community, with all its goodness and all its failures, with people of inspiring vision and people of constricting prejudices, with people living a life of grace and forgiveness and people who live in need of grace and forgiveness – all of us sinners saved by grace. One never joins a perfect church. And if you find the perfect church, chances are it will no longer be so once you join it.

Church membership reminds us that commitment comes with expectations and obligations. We are never part of a church simply for what we receive, though some contemporary churches seem to suggest that. Church membership is also a way of giving – giving ourselves to one another; giving out of our resources to support the church and its multiple points of mission; giving ourselves to service in the church and in our communities.

Church membership helps us to define where we belong. It helps us to know where home is. It creates accountability, both the members being accountable to the church and the church being accountable to its members.

Church membership is a useful instrument to help us be the church in a responsible way.

John A. Esau was until recently director of Ministerial Leadership Services for the General Conference Mennonite Church and is author of the book Congregations and Pastors: Reflections on the Work of the Church (Faith and Life Press, 1999). This article is reprinted, with permission, from the Feb. 18, 1999 issue of Mennonite Weekly Review.

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Last modified May 4, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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