Body Language

When a woman visitor heard that the church needed assistance for its crèche, she offered her services and was turned down. The elder to whom her offer was referred said ‘we don’t use non-members for work in the church’ - not the kind of response we might expect. Some would take the view that it was an opportunity missed. The woman could have been drawn into the church and opened up to the gospel. As it happens, when she was thanked for her interest, she received the rejection without question, understanding, it seems, a relationship between entitlement and formal membership. Some churches do not see this and operate (at best) on the basis of a credible profession of faith – not as a precondition of membership but as a qualification for service and privilege. In such fellowships we might find non-members participating in the Lord’s Supper, contributing to aspects of worship, covenant children in their later teens standing outside formal membership assuming responsibility for aspects of ministry and elders effectively ignoring accountability and collective responsibility in order to do their own thing.

It is true that over the years churches have appeared without formal memberships. One evangelical church I know has a duly constituted eldership but by deliberate decision no membership. The Calvary Chapel fellowships have no members, the only formal position being that of pastors accredited through their affiliate programme. The pastors are not accountable to local elders, only to God and an independent board of elders.  This, it is said, makes them resistant to advice and correction.  It is probably true to say that views about formal membership are less uniform and more relaxed than a couple of generations ago.  At the time of the Evangelical Awakening in Wales, the founders of what became the Presbyterian Church of Wales placed great store by examining candidates for membership of the religious societies and exercised zeal in expelling those estimated to be unworthy of the privilege. Times have certainly changed!

A former colleague in a seminary where I used to teach told me that in his opinion formal church membership has no basis in scripture and was only to be preserved as an expedient. Even in churches where formal membership lives on, the importance attached to it can be variable and inconsistent. Sometimes candidates are rushed into membership without due preparation, non-members rise to positions of prominence and official members are made to feel that they are unimportant or taken for granted. Individualism has become institutionalised and is perhaps most damagingly apparent in the activities of leaders whose commitment to collective leadership and responsibility is minimal and whose children, though professors of the faith, are not encouraged to join the church. It seems that ‘co-habitation’ as opposed to ‘marriage with vows’ is becoming the norm.  Of course much of this is justified by reference to the doctrine of the invisible church membership of which the visible church is not competent to judge (Bannerman).  In reality it is little more than a form of  institutional individualism that devalues the membership of those who made the commitment and took the trouble to 'tie the knot'.