“Membership
Matters”
Thoughts on the nature and standards of church membership
Designed to provoke my denomination (and others) to think
seriously about membership matters.
By Keith Drury Associate Professor of Religion, Indiana
Wesleyan University Winter, 2005
1.
Lowering Membership Standards
Robert Leonard is worried about declining membership. He’s seen the bottom drop out of his
national figures in the last 50 years—from 4.1 million in 1959 down to 1.6
million this year. That’s a “reverse
growth rate” (as the church growth movement used to call it) of –.013 per
year. While losing less than 2% of
membership a year never seems to be an “emergency,” over 50 years it can pile
up and bite you in the rear [pocket].
Why aren’t they attracting new members? Daniel Wilson from the
So what do you think?
To
get themselves on the map again should these guys lower standards to grow or
leave them high because people value things more when they cost more? What do
you think?
So which denomination are we talking about here? None. The story above is about the
Masons. Their membership has been
dwindling since the 1950’s. They are
desperately trying to reach what they call “the younger generations 21-55”
(55?). They’re shortening the
year-long membership process collapsing the first three (of 33) Masonic steps
(“degrees”) in an attempt to bring in the next generation and keep their local
“lodges” alive. While they are still
unwilling to open up membership to women (the Mason’s version of the church’s
WMS is the “Eastern Star”) they are willing to make other compromises. After 50 years of declining membership they
think its time.
So what is the lesson for us church folk?
Think about these
things. Discuss them with someone else
who cares about the church like you do.
So what do you
think?
2. Church Membership in the Early Church
Recently a
lady told me God had reveled to her that their church should have no membership
since the early church had no membership.
Is she right? Membership is a
hot topic today. Some denominations are
trying to decide if practicing homosexuals can be members of their church. Other denominations have long ago accepted
the idea of “membership as the mission field not the mission force” and thus
accept anybody who wants to join into membership, including practicing gay a
lesbians. These more open denominations
fight about ordaining gays (or elevating then to a bishop) and not about
membership standards. Still other
denominations (like my own the Wesleyans) have strict membership standards
(often with twice as many attendees as members) but we are pondering changes in
our membership standards that still include a ban on gambling, alcohol and
tobacco. Conservative ministers in liberal denominations are aghast that we are
still debating lottery tickets while they are fighting about gay bishops!
In the
ongoing debates people often toss the Bible and early church history around as
arguments for this or that position. So
in the interest of truth this article outlines how the early church actually
practiced membership matters.
1. At the
very beginning of the church all the converts were already members. The first Christians were Jews and
thus already were “members” of the Jewish faith and Christianity was not
considered a separate religion.
“Becoming a Christian” was for them a matter of belief—believing that
Jesus was indeed the promised messiah of Israel. The Jews already had a strict behavioral code and thus
candidates needed little “cleaning up.”
In fact at first there was nothing to “take them in” to. The “church” at first acted like a Jewish
sect that hoped to convince all Jews that Jesus was the messiah. As soon as a Jew believed the gospel they
were baptized and became a part of the house fellowship of other Christian
Jews. They needed no instruction on the
existence of one God or even on how to live a moral life—in some ways the
Jewish lifestyle was stricter than the Christian standard would be. A “convert” at the very beginning had a
short trip to “membership” in the Christian group—believe and be baptized—both
of these could be accomplished in one day.
These converts’ membership induction was more like joining a small group
today and thus Jewish evangelism falls short as a model for today’s membership
standards debates, though it is often used by those interested in liberalizing
denominational positions.
2. As the
church spread to the gentiles “belief” became another matter. When Christianity started spilling
over onto the gentiles10-15 years later, things changed. Christian missionaries to the gentiles like
Paul, Barnabas, Silas and others faced a whole new set of problems. The first
problem was the gentiles were polytheistic—they believed in many gods. They were inclined toward add-a-god
religion—their gods were specialized—one for the sea, another for celebrations,
and another managed pregnancies and still others dealt with healing or
protection. They figured it never hurt
to add a new specialist-god to your collection. Thus gentile evangelists could get people to “pray the prayer”
fairly easily, but they soon discovered gentiles were merely adding Jesus into
their pantheon of other gods. That didn’t satisfy Christian (or Jewish)
theology. When the Apostles worked with Jews they did not have to get them to
abandon their God—just accept Jesus as the Messiah and son of this God. However, when the apostles evangelized the
gentiles they had to get them to both unbelieve and believe. They had to get
the gentiles to both confess unbelief in their present Gods and belief in the
One True God. This, of course, is why
the early Christians were considered atheists in the Gentile world. Making members out of the gentiles took
time—to convince them of the uselessness of their Gods and the exclusivist
claims of Christianity. Fixing their beliefs was hard work.
3. But
apostles to the gentiles had an even bigger problem—the gentile’s behavior. Evangelists to the Jews had it easy when it
came to behavior—most Jews already behaved, or at least knew how to
behave. The gentile “dogs” were
different. They were called dogs by the
Jews because they had the morals of a wandering dog, especially relating to
sex. The gentiles visited shrine
prostitutes like people go golfing today—they had little remorse or guilt. Lasciviousness was “normal” and telling a
Corinthian he needed to stop visiting the temple prostitutes to be a Christian
would be similar to telling people today they have to give up golfing to become
a Christian. Evangelism among the Jews
was like converting life-long church attendees at youth camp (with the same
problem too—heard-heartedness). On the other
hand, evangelism among the gentiles was like winning prostitutes off the
streets in Las Vegas. So what did the
apostles to do? If they had followed
the pattern of Jewish evangelism they would have simply preached Christ,
invited people to believe in Him as messiah, baptized them that afternoon, then
took them into the fellowship of the Christians that evening for the common
meal. In fact they did do this among the Jews of the Diaspora and
they may have even been hasty in baptizing gentiles at first (perhaps this is
why Paul goes to great lengths to instruct the Corinthian members that they
should quit going to the prostitutes?)
But eventually the apostles and missionaries to the gentiles had to slow
the process down to filter out the easy believism of add-a-god people and to
clean up the lives of the gentile “dogs” before taking them into the
church. So what did they do?
4. The
church delayed baptism among the gentiles and introduced membership
training. Since
baptism was the entry point into the church it was withheld until candidates
got their beliefs and behavior straightened out. Here was the general procedure about the time the final books of
the New Testament were being written:
All of this
was in place before the close of the New Testament. We are not
talking here of what the church did in 200 or after Constantine in 350, but we
are describing what the church did in the first century –while some of the New
testament was still being written.
5. So what
does all this tell us about the current membership debate? I don’t know—that’s up to you. I’ve done my
job: translating the best scholarship into a readable article for ordinary
church leaders. Now it is your turn to
decide if these things matter. And in
the process you’ll have to determine how much authority you give the early
church practices. There are dozens of positions along a continuum but the
clearest ones are:
a.
The Bible primitivist position. This position says there is nothing
whatsoever authoritative in the Didache or any other document from the
early church—only the books in the canon can tell us anything. This position assumes we should pattern our
worship, organization, baptism, Lord’s Supper and membership after only what we
clearly see in the New Testament. The
most radical group goes even further saying that nothing should be done that is
not explicitly reported in the New Testament (which is why some
primitivists reuse to have any musical instruments in worship). The bible primitivists usually believe their
present worship and practice is most close to what the actual New Testaments
church did. So the above description
that uses sources of church history is irrelevant to them—only what they read
in the canon has any authority for them. Hard or “radical restorationists” fit
in this position. To them the above
article is meaningless for membership issues for they do not let authority
extend beyond AD 90 [1]
b.
The “soft restorationist” position. This
position says we should restore as far as possible the practices of the early
church as recorded in the Bible and in the first hundred years or so before
Constantine ruined Christianity. This
group assumes the early church “had it right” or at least had it best. They would say we ought to call our elders
elders and our deacons deacons and baptize people however they see it done in the
New Testament, mostly in Acts. This group is softer than the Bible primitivists
though for they accept the first hundred years of church history as also
guidance for “the best way to do Church.”
c.
The “That was then, this is now” position. This position
says that all we need to keep is the theology of the early church and we are
free to “do church” just about any way we want to “serve this present
age.” This position is interested in
what the early church did but does not give it more than 10% of the votes—our
culture is much too different today to practice what they did. This the That-was-then, this-is-now people
feel membership decisions are up to us now based on the theology of the early
church, not its practices.
Everyone
leans toward one end of this spectrum or the other. Toward which position do you tilt? Challenge: craft a single statement reflecting your own view on
this.
Keith Drury December 20, 2004
3. “Membership Standards” in the Didache
What is the
Didache?
Like the Dead
Sea Scrolls the Didache is an ancient document rediscovered in
modern times (1873). It is a written
record of the oral tradition of the first century Christian house church’s
membership training. It is not
Scripture, though many in the early church treated it as such. Actually it is more like a church discipline
or membership-training program. It is
an old book—older than some of the books in the New Testament, and for several
hundred years was considered inspired and authoritative. It almost made it into the Canon, but (along
with the other almost-but-not book, the epistle of Clement) did not make the
final cut.
Why read
the Didache?
I first
came to study the Didache when searching for Christian evidence against
abortion. Since there is no explicit
condemnation of abortion in the New Testament I thought it seemed like the
early Christians would be against abortion and sought evidence elsewhere. I turned to early church documents and found
the Didache (2:2) listed abortion as one of the you-will-not new member
instructions (along with murder and other commandment-like rules). I again returned to this short book when
researching my book on worship to confirm the early church’s patterns of
baptism and communion (chapters 7-10). I have been studying it again recently
since I am now teaching more Christian Education courses and thus am interested
in how the ancient Christian church did spiritual formation of new members.
I’ve been pondering what the first century church’s “rules” would look like if
they were put into today’s words.
How the
Didache was used.
The best
scholarship today believes that the Didache was used in a mentoring approach to
membership training (at least the first part: the “two ways”). There is still disagreement over weather the
rituals and church organization sections at the end was a separate book or
not). The Didache was recited
orally in section by a trainer in stages to a candidate for baptism/membership
which could last as long as two years.
While the New Testament gives some details of church life in the church
at Jerusalem the Didache gives a complete description. Anyone interested
in what the early church actually did should be interested in reading it.
How much
authority does the Didache have? There are
plenty of spurious documents the Christian church rejected—including the Gospel
of Mary and the Gospel of Philip used by Dan Brown as sources for The
DaVinci Code. However the Didache
was never rejected by the church who used it regularly and gave it inspired
authority for a time but eventually it slipped to the sort of authority one
might give a denomination’s Discipline or Manual. The Didache is a practical guide for
training new members and includes the actual instructions on the rituals a new
member would take on completion of their preparation—Baptism and their first
communion. (Sorry Baptists—the Didache gives a practical multiple-choice
answer on immersion, though also sorry to the Anglicans—it prefers immersion.
It also prefers cold water to warm and running water to still but we’re getting
off track here—read the text of it to see what you think.) The real question is how much authority does
it have? You will have to make up your
own mind. For me it supplies a glimpse
on what the early church stood for while some parts of the Bible was still
being written. This glimpse is important to me as I try to understand how the
first century “Jesus movement” grew and spread. However, I am not a primivitist or restorationist. I do not
believe “the way they did it then was best and we should copy their ways.” Many of my readers won’t agree with me on
this. I admit that I did not take this position when I knew less about what the
early church actually did—but the more I’ve studied the Bible, first century
culture, and what the first century church actually did in that day the
more I have come to believe that we today much conserve their theology but are
free to invent our own methodology.[2] So why do I read the Didache at all? Because I like to learn. And knowing what the early church did might
lead me to understand their theology (for all theology is found upstream from
our actions). However if you believe
the early church practice is a model for us today you’ll probably give the
Didache more authority than I do.
Either way—it is fun to know what the early church actually did in membership
training. I’m interested in the latest
way the “emerging church” does church, but I’m even a tad bit more interested
in how the first century church did it.
Here is
what I did in this article: The Didache has 16 chapters (though some chapters
have only a few verses). My question
was: What if we adapted the early church’s Didache membership
training for today’s church? What if we
assigned new candidates for baptism to an individual “sponsor” or “Membership
mentor” and they trained the new members using the early church’s training
program. What sort of member would we
be trying to get? OK…you can do this
for yourself—but I’ve done some of the first heavy lifting for you—but I hope
you merely scan my work then read the Didache on your own and decide for
yourself the kind of Christian the early church was trying to make. Don’t get sidelined by trying to decide if
the Didache has any authority or not—just treat this as if it were Bill
Hybel’s or Rick Warren’s membership training program for now and as you’re
looking over it decide what kind of spiritual formation they were trying to do
with their membership candidates. Then
decide for yourself. I hope I’ve
whetted your appetite enough to seduce you to actually go to the text and read
through the Didache once—then decide for yourself.
(Based on the Didache c.
60-100AD)
as a member you should covenant to…
·
Love you enemies
·
Pray for them, fast for
them
·
Turn your other cheek
·
Go the second mile
·
Give generously to
anyone asking of you
·
Murder
·
Commit adultery
·
Corrupt boys
·
Have illicit sex
·
Steal
·
Practice magic
·
Make potions
·
Abort your offspring
·
Kill a newborn
·
Covet your neighbor’s
things
·
Swear falsely
·
Bear false witness
·
Speak badly of anyone
·
Hold grudges
·
Make empty promises
·
Covetousness
·
Greed
·
Hypocracy
·
Bad-manners
·
Arrogance
·
Hating any person
·
Anger
·
Envy
·
Contentiousness
·
Hot-headed
·
Lustful
·
Divining, enchanting,
astrology
·
Lover of money, seeker
of glory
·
Self-pleasing,
evil-minded
·
I will be gentle
·
Be merciful, harmless,
calm & good
·
(Not be self-exalting)
·
Accept all experiences as
from God
·
Remember constantly my
mentor & other saints in the church
·
(Not cause dissention but reconcile those
fighting)
·
Ignore social status in
correcting others
·
Focus on giving more
then getting
·
Cheerfully give without
grumbling to those in need
·
Be active in training my
children
·
Treat my slaves rightly;
(slaves should be subject to masters)
·
Hate hypocrisy
·
I will give to those in
need
·
Keep these rules adding
nothing or taking nothing away
·
Confess my failings in
church
B I WILL AVOID THE “WAY OF DEATH”
I will reject the “Way of death” as represented by the
following (5:1-2)
·
Murders
·
Adulteries
·
Lusts
·
Illicit sex acts
·
Thefts
·
Idolatries
·
Magic
·
Potions
·
Sorceries
·
Perjuries
·
Hypocrisies
·
Double-heartedness
·
Trickery
·
Arrogance
·
Malice
·
Self-pleasing
·
Greed
·
Foul-speech
·
Jealousy
·
Audacity
·
Haughtiness
·
False-pretension
·
Hating truth/loving lies
·
Paying unjust wages
·
Not helping the poor
·
Murdering children
·
Turning away the needy
·
Advocating for the rich
·
Loving frivolous things
·
Insisting on recompense
for everything
C CONCLUSION
After learning the “Two ways” I make these final
commitments. (5:1-6:3)
·
I will be wary of anyone
drawing me away from this teaching.
·
As I am able to live all
of this teaching I shall do it; but until I am able to bear some of it I shall
bear whatever load I can for now yet keep my goal of carrying the entire load.
·
I will do my best to
follow the traditions regarding eating food however I understand that eating
anything sacrificed to idols is non-negotiable and I will abstain from it.
This ends
the “Two ways” membership mentoring materials in the Didache though it
continues to describe the means of baptism (7:1-4) fasting and prayers (8:1-3)
the Eucharist (9:1-10:7) and various instructions on church management
(11:1-16:8). There are wonderful
glimpses into the early church practices in these chapters but they do not
outline the core elements of membership instruction like the first six
chapters.
So, what do you think? How would you describe this
“membership training” material if you got it in the mail?
v What did the early church focus on mostly?
v What did they leave out?
v What sort of Christian behavior were they trying to get?
v What were the “hot issues” of the day they addressed?
v What “hot issues” of today are completely absent?
v How much do you think they actually compromised? Where’s the hint?
v What would people today say if you introduced this sort of membership
approach?
v How would a 1-2-1 “membership mentor” training program differ from group
training?
v (Hard one) In what way is this system like other membership systems in
first century culture?
Click here
for a full text of the
Didache … I hope you’ll read it and decide for yourself
By Keith Drury December 24, 2004
4. Do we
get our membership rules
from the
Bible?
Where
do we get our “rules” for membership? The
obvious answer is “The Bible, of course.” In fact most denominations claim they
take their membership standards directly from the Bible. “The Bible says
so” is the church’s equivalent of the parental, “Because I said so.”
Many
churches like to claim, “our membership standards are right from the
Bible—we forbid only what the Bible forbids and require only what the Bible
requires.” It is the common answer. And it works for most folk—people
nod and seem satisfied. “The Bible says it, and that’s good enough
for me.”
The short
and easy answer is good enough for most folk, but not all—especially thinking
people, and people who know their Bible well. (like the people who read
this column.)
So I am
about to expose one of the myths of the church that still works for many
folk. I am about to remind us why
churches who say, “Our membership standards are right from the
Bible—we forbid only what the Bible forbids and require only what the Bible
requires” have more to explain than
their quick answers suggest.
Here is why
churches don’t really simply get their membership rules directly form the
Bible:
1. The
Bible has far too many do’s and don’t’s.
If
we seriously attempted to use the Bible as the basis of membership standards
we’d have a thousand requirements and nobody would keep them all. If
there were only ten commandments it would be easy—we’d have ten standards of
membership. But the Bible is packed with dos and don’ts (in spite of what
we tell seekers on the contrary). Lets say there are a thousand attitudes
and actions the Bible urges or forbids (there are more, but let’s just say
there are only a thousand). What denomination could have a thousand
“membership commitments?” Or even a hundred? And if we did who
would live up to them all?
So
when we claim that our denomination “simply uses the Bible as its source for
membership requirements” we really mean we’ve sifted through a thousand things
and selected some as our standards. Perhaps we might narrow the
thousand down to two (as Jesus did) but most denominations don’t do that
even. Why? Because His two commandments weren’t rules at all but principles
which allow for such broad subjective interpretations that one can drive all
kinds of behaviors through the loopholes. So most denominations pick and choose from the Bible’s many
commands and put some in their membership standards. (The process of selecting some rules as membership expectations
while ignoring others is interesting, but we’ll deal with that in another
essay.) The truth is churches select
only some of the Bible’s many commands for their membership requirements—there
are simply too many rules in the Bible to make them all into membership
commitments.
2. There
are things the Bible allows we want to forbid.
The
second problem with claiming the Bible as the sole source of our membership
standards is there are sins the Bible does not address yet we’re sure
they’re sin. Face it, the Bible did not explicitly address every sin that
would ever come along. Sure, the Bible lays down principles and values that we
can apply to new situations and label things as “new sins.” But if we
limit ourselves to listing in our membership commitments only those things the
Bible explicitly forbids, we’ll be silent on a long list of things most of us
believe need condemning.
Take
abortion for instance. Most all Christians I know—including
liberal ones—think abortion is wrong, many think it is murder. Who
says? Show us a verse. To prove abortion wrong we are required to
go to verses not directly about abortion in order to argue “the fetus is life
or God wouldn’t have plans for it” or, “A fetus couldn’t be filled with the
Spirit if it isn’t a person.” These arguments are only persuasive to the
already-persuaded. They are proof texts for the convinced. The
truth is, abortion was practiced in the ancient world (as was child-exposure—a
kind of post-birth abortion: putting a new baby in a field and “letting its
destiny be up to God”). Yet the Bible
is silent on both of these practices. (However, as pointed out in another
article on membership, the didache does condemn both practices—just not
the Canonized Scriptures.) My point is we in the church have grave
reservations about abortion and most of us believe it is the taking of a human
life. So some churches, like mine, want their members to abstain from
abortion. We want to prohibit it even though the Bible does not
explicitly forbid it. So we’ve added it to our list of sins—and we
consider it a serious one at that—but we’ve done so without explicit verses on
abortion—we interpret verses and values to determine abortion is sin.
I
used abortion above as an example but I could just as easily picked other
“sins” we condemn that are not explicitly forbidden by the Bible. What
about slavery? In the early 1800s Southern slave-holding
Methodists used the Bible to point out that slave-holding was at least tacitly
approved by Scripture. Abolitionists (including the founders of my own
denomination) took the same Bible and said the whole tenor of Scripture implied
freedom for all men making slavery sin
even though there were verses that seemed to approve it. The Southern
slave-holders were of course right—the Bible does not forbid slave-holding for
Christians, in fact advises them on proper treatment of their slaves. Yet
1900 years later almost every Christian in the world has come to believe
slavery needed to be added to the Bible’ list of sins. My denomination
refused to let slave-holders join the church: it was a “membership requirement.”
But we didn’t get it from the Bible
explicitly. We added it.
How
about pornography? The Bible nowhere explicitly forbids
pornography—it is not even mentioned. Yet what sensible Christian today
would not say that pornography is clearly a “sin” and not merely a matter of
“private convictions?” So we’ve added this to our list of sins.
How
about drugs? The Bible nowhere explicitly condemns drugs (other
than mentioning alcohol and that is even with tacit approval like the Bible
deals with slavery). Most American denominations born near the
prohibition/women’s rights movement of the 19th century has a
heritage of “total abstinence” that condemned alcohol as sin. While the
final holdouts on total abstinence are still holding onto their position, it is
eroding among evangelicals. Yet most
denominations continue to condemn as sin all other drugs, even marijuana (which
might be considerably less serious than alcohol is used moderately). To condemn
drugs we say something like, “the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit…” as
our Biblical argument but that’s an interpretation of verses about
something totally different—it is an implicit interpretation.) So some of us
consider alcohol use sin, and most all evangelicals consider using drugs a
sin. Need I mention gambling, pre-marital
oral sex, or a dozen other social and individual evils that all
thinking Christians now consider “sin” though they can’t quote a verse that
explicitly condemns these things?
So,
we may claim “we get our membership rules from Scripture” but we are really interpreting
Scripture when we label “sin” some things that the Bible does not explicitly
condemn. I think denominations should do this (even if the Bible
isn’t absolutely clear on the matter) but when we do it we need to be honest
and not claim the Bible “as our only source for church rules.”
I realize that I am announcing the king is clothesless. Some
denominational leaders and pastors will cover their ears and mutter loudly to
cover up the message of this article. Some leaders like the easy
authority of the Bible to subdue their member’s resistance to rule—they like
the, “It’s in the Bible stupid” power. They’d have a harder time convincing
people using reason, tradition, or experience. So they keep pretending
their church’s rule “are derived from
clear Bible teaching.” And it works—at least for most of the people
most of time. But there are some thinking Christians (like you and me)
who know better. They know there are
sins that the Bible never mentions explicitly and they believe that we should
be honest and seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance in finding and exposing even sins
the Bible fails to mention explicitly—or even sins the Bible seems to allow
for!
3.
There are things the Bible forbids we want to allow.
Even
if you came with me this far, some of you will get off the bus at this
point. You won’t like this. It is the hardest truth of all.
Conservatives will reject this thought at every sentence of the following
paragraphs. No matter how convincing and lucid I write I expect conservatives
will remain unconvinced. But it is
still true, even if you reject it.
Most
conservatives believe, “once a sin always a sin.” They believe that
whatever the Bible calls sin will always be sin forever—that’s that. They
reject the notion that something can be condemned or required in the Bible and
later become acceptable. Again, I admire their high esteem for the Bible,
I have such an esteem too but disagree with their conclusions. But they will only be able to convince “most
of the people most of the time” —the rest of us know it simply isn’t true—the
Bible condemns things we now allow.
Lets
start with the easy ones—the codes in Leviticus. Isn’t it obvious
that we no longer are required to observe the Bible’s eating codes? We
practice good “hermeneutics” and pronounce these sections no longer applying
(though most of us try to preserve in some way the sections regarding
homosexual acts from this code). Most of us accept the fact that parts of
the Bible’s sins no longer apply. For
some it is ONLY the codes in Leviticus, but they have already accepted the
principle—the Bible commands do not all apply to today.
Leviticus
is an easy one; let’s try another. What of Christ’s clear teaching forbidding “piling
up treasure on earth.” There is no need to “interpret” anything
here—this teaching is explicit… as John Wesley said, “The same God who said do
not steal, and do not commit adultery said do not pile up treasures on
earth.” Yet who would not agree that we now believe increasing one’s net
worth is not really disobedience to God’s commands. In fact, most
American Christians versed in modern economics might actually say that gaining
wealth is good for the economy and maybe even good for the poor. Most
modern Christians believe that the self-enforced poverty of Jesus, the
Disciples and people like John Wesley might have been OK for them, but
certainly is not required of everyone. What once was a clear commandment
of Christ we’ve made optional. We have “interpreted” Scripture, changing
its meaning from “do not pile up” to now mean “Do not be attached to material
things as you pile them up.” The point here is that we have decided to allow
increasing one’s possessions against the original command of Christ—we have
“loosed” this former commandment.
Let’s
do one more—divorce. Is there much doubt about the explicit
teaching of Jesus on divorce? His command was clear. Yet in our
modern world most denominations have come to reluctantly allow divorce on some
grounds beyond the narrow list of Jesus. We have not come to approve
divorce or treat it lightly, but we have come to allow it—among church members,
even board members and ministers. We have “loosed” the extremely high
standard of marriage taught by Jesus. Tell me—which denomination expels
members “going through a divorce” for extra-biblical reasons? There are
some that will put a minister in a penalty box for such a divorce, but
“one man + one woman for one life” is an “ideal” for most evangelicals, not a
“entry requirement.”
The truth
is this: membership rules aren’t directly from the Bible—they are “Bible based.”
We might
claim, “Our denomination’s membership rules simply come directly from the
Bible” but actually we should say they
are “bible based.” We’ve used the Bible in deciding what the minimum
entry requirements are. We haven’t use
the whole Bible, we picked and chose and selected some things. Then we added some sins –we “bound”—sins not
explicitly condemned in the Bible but we believe they are sin.
Finally we dropped some things the Bible clearly commands, “loosing” our people
from their obligation. Finally, we
sifted all these and decided which should be in the list as the “minimum entry
requirements” and assigned the rest to be an ideal to pursue not a minimum
used to exclude.
This is how
we have made our “Membership standards,” “General Rules,” “Membership
commitments” or whatever your church calls them. (Actually we didn’t do
this at all—preceding generations did it for us, but that is another topic for
later treatment.) Every denomination has such “rules” in one form or
another. Some have “high standards” for membership (like Bill Hybels’
Willow Creek Church where membership is essentially leadership). Others
have a two-tier system, making entry into membership easy but a higher standard
for leadership. Still other churches have practically no membership
standards at all[3]
So here is
my question to you:
Who gave
the church the right to decide which sins we will “bind” and which we will
“loose” from what Jesus and the Bible originally taught?
This is the
subject of my next essay.
January,
2005 Keith Drury
5. Who gave the church the right
to decide which sins we will “bind” and which we will “loose” from what Jesus
and the Bible originally taught?
There
is no doubt we have added to the Bible’s list of sins. No denomination can honestly say they simply
“use the clear teaching of the Bible to decide what is sin or not.” We all have added sins not explicitly
condemned in the Bible—things like abortion, pornography, slave-holding, or
using drugs. In a sense you could say
we have “bound them” on our people though the Bible does not explicitly mention
them. But we also have dismissed some
of the Bible’s explicit teaching on sin—for example the codes in Leviticus, or
Jesus’ teaching on piling up treasure on earth, or even on divorce—you might
say we have “loosed” these requirements of the Bible. The title of this section is my question: Who gave the church
the right to decide which sins we will “bind” and which we will “loose” from
what Jesus and the Bible originally taught?
The answer is simple: Jesus
did. That’s it. Pure and simple. Jesus gave the church the power to decide what to bind and loose
on earth. We Protestants hate to hear this.
We scream, NO NO NO, go away, I won’t listen …that’s too Catholic to be
true—I reject it out of hand. But it is
true. Let’s just do a bit of Bible
study. (Can you do this on the explicit
teaching of the Bible and not read preferred “interpretations” into the clear
words Jesus spoke?)
Matthew 16:19
And I will give unto
thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth
shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be
loosed in heaven.
Peter had just confessed
Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus said “I
will give you the keys to the kingdom.” So ask yourself—who got the keys? Who is “you” in this passage? Is it Peter personally? (If you say this then you might consider a
transfer to the Catholic Church and get in under the line of Peter) OK most
Protestants say it wasn’t Peter personally who got the keys—then who was it? Was it the collective group of apostles
present? (If you say yes then you
might also consider a transfer to the Catholic Church and get under the
apostolic umbrella). If not Peter
personally, or the apostles, then who got the keys? I say Jesus gave the church the keys—the collective body
of Christ on earth through the ages got the keys to the koingdom form Jesus.
The body of Christ is the heir to the keys of Jesus.
So what are the keys for? Gee we can go all kinds of esoteric places here if we just use
our imagination. But why go anywhere
except where Jesus went in the second half of the verse? "..whatever you bind on earth shall
be bound on heaven." Bind and
loose were rabbinical terms for ruling certain actions as either forbidden or
permitted. So the terms were spoken in
context suggest determining what is forbidden and what is permitted. It implies the church has the keys to
determine what will be bound on people and what will be loosed. Whoa! Help!
We must be interpreting this wrongly, right? How can the church have the power to decide what things
are now sin that used to be OK and what things used to be sin that are now
OK? We admit we actually do this (as
the previous section outlined) but did Jesus actually authorize it? Lets’ go study some other passage of
Scripture—this Matthew 16 passage is too much to bear!
2. Matthew 18:18
Verily I say unto you,
Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye
shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Whoops… Matthew 16:19 isn’t
just an isolated verse. Matthew repeats
the phrase several chapters later as Jesus taught us how to deal with a brother
who has refused to reconcile even after the three-step process. Jesus said such
a brother is to be shunned or "treated as a publican." Then he added,
"whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven."
What in the dickens does this mean?
Does God somehow recognize in heaven our own shunning or our
excommunication of people on earth?
Does Jesus actually delegate His power to decide matters that heaven
“follows?” Delegate it to the church? NO!
Never! It cannot be! Sure, we act like He did, but we don’t want
to confess we actually believe we have this authority do we? OK maybe there is an out here. Perhaps Matthew had some sort of hang-up or
spin that is his alone and we can dismiss it.
A couple of verses in Matthew does not a theology make. Lets’ look somewhere else in our Bible
study.
3. John 20:22-23
And when he had said
this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye
retain, they are retained.
Oh boy—this doesn’t
help! It only gets worse in John! It is more explicit not less. John places Jesus' words at the post
resurrection appearance in the upper room following their receiving the Holy
Spirit (the time before Acts 2) Jesus told His church gathered there "If
you loose the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you bind the sins of any, they
are retained." HOLY SMOKE!
Help! We must interpret our way
out of this mess! It can’t mean what it
says can it? We need to make these
verses mean something besides what they clearly say! Jesus’ words are clearly about sins here, not just binding or
loosing the regulations of the Old Testament as we Protestants might be able to
interpret the Jewish Matthew passages.
John has Jesus saying that we have His delegated authority to forgive
sins ore to retain them. WOAH! How in the dickens do we do this? Remit sins?
How do we forgive sins? How (as
a church) do we make sins “stick” to people?
Does God actually recognize this authority and make it so in heaven
because we’ve done it here? Can the
church have such power? We can’t take
it!
Here’s what these verses seem to be saying to me:
1.
Jesus
gave the church “keys to the kingdom.”
2.
These
keys are about “binding and loosing” on earth.
3.
Whatever
the church binds on earth gets bound in heaven.
4.
Whatever
the church looses on earth, gets loosed in heaven
5.
When
the church remits sins on earth they are remitted in heaven
6.
When
the church retains sins on earth they are retained in heaven
Can it be? Can God be such a delegator? If so the church must be far more important
than we all think it is. We prefer a powerful individual and a weak church but
the church may be far more important than we think it is.
So, what does this all have to do with Church
Membership?
As to membership I think all
this says the church has Christ’s delegated power to make membership decisions
for sure since it already has far more power than this small power. We can bind people with things the Bible
never mentions and we can loose things the Bible once commanded. Is this a dangerous position? You better believe it is! It seems to make the church “trump” the
bible. But curiously, it is the
biblical position!
But we must remember it was the church who decided on
the Bible
Where did we get the Bible
from? The church. Why aren’t the DaVinci Cod’s favorites, the Gospel of Mary and
the Gospel of Philip in our canon?
How did Revelation, Hebrews and some of the Pastoral
epistles get into the Canon even though some in the church thought they
shouldn’t get in? Who decided what
would make the cut and become canonized? Who decided what would be considered
spurious? Easy answer—we all know but
try to forget this truth. The
church decided what our Bible would be. So, even when we say “the Bible
alone” we are actually trusting the church.
Over several hundred years the church decided which of the hundred plus
“books” would go into the New Testament and which would be denied. Talk about binding and loosing! How do we know the church made the
right decisions? Do you think they made
any mistakes? Should Clement I or the Didache have gotten into
the canon and they goofed? Did they
make a mistake by eliminating the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of
Mary? The answer most of us give
is, “No.” How can we say this? Because we believe the Holy Spirit
actively guided the collective group of Christians to figure it out. We believe the Holy Spirit guided the debate
and when the actual eventual church conference made their decision the Holy
Spirit actively “guarded and guided” and they made the right decision.
So
why would we think the Holy Spirit stopped working this way after a few hundred
years? We don’t. At least not
when we think about it. Of course the
Holy Spirit still works in His church to “guard and guide” the church. That’s why we pray for His guidance at
conferences and conventions where important decisions are made. Indeed all decision making by the church is
what we call “seeking God’s will.”
I
think all this applies to decisions about membership requirements. Not that these matters are as important as the
canonization of Scripture. They aren’t.
In fact they are far less important than retaining or forgiving sins which is
what these verses talk about. Few of us would say that denying church
membership to an individual damns that person.
Membership standards are little matters next to Canonization and
sin-retention matters. Yet it is our
job as a church to decide membership matters.
Won’t the Holy Spirit guide us in this process? Certainly!
If we ask for guidance. At
least it is not as important a task as it used to be. After all, when there was only one worldwide church—not meeting
“membership requirements” meant you were outside of any and all churches. Today you can go down the road and get into
a church even if you don’t meet our membership standards. And most evangelicals
believe a person might even go to heaven if he or she belonged to no church
whatsoever if individually they had
saving faith. So the decision about
church membership is a lower-risk decision.
But we must make it. And re-make
it in every generation.
So
if the church has the power to determine these matters what is the key insight
we’re often missing? Is it not about the “presenting symptoms”
–alcohol, tobacco, gambling, drugs, divorce, homosexual acts in my
opinion. We will have enough “spiritual
sense” to make these decisions rightly.
But we won’t be able to do it if our categories aren’t
clear. I think (at least in my own
denomination) we must examine the categories before we move on to talk about
specific Beliefs and behaviors.”
So,
this will be the subject of my next writing on membership.
January 11,
2005
Keith
Drury
Membership
standards:
I don’t know about your denomination but when it comes to
membership requirements my own denomination is confuses its categories. Many denominations lump everything from
promising to fast all the way to avoiding committing adultery into one big
bucket of membership standards and expect people to sort between the actually
required ones and the optional ones. At least my denomination has “two
buckets”—one that full of required stuff and the other that are “admonitions”
to its members. That’s a start but there
are more than two categories when it comes to membership rules. Most of these other categories are unwritten
ones. Here are some I’ve noted:
There are probably other categories of rules I’m missing but
I think I’ve made my point. The church’s
rule bucket often does not distinguish between the categories. This creates confusion among the candidates
for membership and the churches. They
don’t know which ones fit in which category If one pastor can wink-wink her way
past the gambling/lottery tickets why can’t another pastor wink-wink past
homosexual behavior? Who guides us in
know what these unwritten categories are?
To make it more confusing, these rules are moving targets. No denomination has a fixed and firm set of
rules. Rules are always a moving
target. The masses of people and pastors
are always making informal interpretations of these rules. A few stay firm but most are loosed
informally while new rules are added (like my denomination’s stance on abortion
or against spouse and child abuse).
“Trafficking in alcohol” in my denomination used to mean a member wasn’t
supposed to be a check-out clerk at Wal-Mart if ringing up wine was involved,
or to drive a beer-delivery truck. Now
it might mean to not start your own brewery for profit, if anything at
all. The point is these rules are
moving targets and that make it all even more confusing.
Take my denomination for instance. My denomination has 36 rules for its
full members. One of those “rules” has
to do with observing the Lord’s day.
That used to mean not going to a restaurant or playing ball or even
buying a newspaper on Sunday. Over the
years that meaning has gravitated by popular interpretation to mean “honor
Sunday in whatever way you personally feel honors Sunday.” That is, the rule no longer means what it
meant; or means anything at all actually. It is a useless rule. But try to get rid of it and see what the
people say. They’ll rend their garments
and toss dust into the air for your desire to defile a day of rest and worship. Yet these folk are like those people in your
church who insist on a Sunday evening service yet never come themselves. It is all breast-beating posturing. Useless rules are confusing. My denomination has a half-bucketful of such
rules in all kinds of categories.
Which is why denominations ought to re-mint their membership
commitments every few decades. Maybe even more often. I wish my denomination would. Here’s what I think my denomination ought to
do every 20 years:
So, don’t I worry about opening up our rules to
reconsideration? Not at
all. I think the Holy Spirit will guide
the church in binding and loosing things just like he did in guiding the church
in the first few hundred years of Christian history to select which books would
go into the Bible and which would get left out. But of course there’s a hitch.
We must seriously try to find God’s will when we make these
decisions. I don’t believe “God always
gets his way” in church decisions—I’m a free-will Wesleyan, remember. But I do believe that when the church
gathers to make decisions the Holy Spirit will guide and direct that church if
they seek it—and generally speaking God will guide is through the Holy Spirit
to make the right decisions so that even in our membership standards we can
“serve this present age.”
Keith Drury
January 15, 2005
Appendix: Membership Ideas
I have been doing a series on church membership and
getting lots of great ideas from my readers.
I am impressed with the depth of insight my mail shows—there are some
significant thing here that should be considered by anyone who cares about
membership matters. If you need an
“agenda of ideas” to consider—let’s make one together—add your ideas here by
emailing Keith Drury to get your ideas added
here. Just give thoughts and ideas for
denominational leaders and pastors to consider—to widen the circle of thought about
this subject.
[1] Well this is not totally accurate—they must grant a one-time authority later for the canonization process that extended several hundred years.
[2] I’m not saying that method does not shape theology, or that some methods are incompatible with good theology here—but that’s another article.
[3] Many of my United Methodist readers have been sending me
chuckling emails during at this entire series on membership: they are carrying
on a debate about ordaining practicing homosexuals while my denomination
debates membership issues! Most of my
UM readers claim they know of no church—including their own—that would exclude
a practicing homosexual from membership!