NOTE: This post was originally published on my now-mostly-dead personal blog in October of 2007.
In doing some research for a report I am to deliver to the Frisco Baptist Association at next week’s annual meeting, I read through some of the minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association from their meetings in the eighteenth century. My last two posts on the subject of church membership and discipline generated some healthy discussion on the topic, so I thought I would add the view of some of our Baptist forefathers to the mix, in the form of responses the association gave to queries from member churches.
Their regard for the importance of membership in the local church was so great that they didn’t believe it proper for someone to pass another Baptist church on their way to the one of which they were a member. This is from the annual meeting of 1735:
Upon a motion moved by some members of the Association:
Whether a person that is a well-wisher to us, and desires to be admitted a member into a church far distant from the place of his abode; whereas a church of the same order is nearer to him than the church that he proposed to join with; whether it be orderly for the distant church to receive such an one? Yea or nay?
Resolved in the negative, there being substantial reasons to the contrary. Such practice is contrary to the intendent, in instituting particular churches.
They also didn’t think it proper for a person to change their church membership unless it was required by a move, as they asserted in the annual meeting of 1728:
Query from the church at Montgomery: Whether a church is bound to grant a letter of dismission to any member to go to another church, while his residence is not removed?
Answered in the negative, we having neither precept nor precedent for such a practice in Scripture.
Does it bother the pastors in my readership when faithful members are missing from services, and later they can’t wait to tell you about the nearby preacher they went and heard instead of coming to their own church? It bothered our eighteenth-century brethren, if the following answer to a query from the church at Middletown is any indication (from 1734):
Whether it be justifiable for our members to neglect our own appointed meetings, and at their pleasure go to hear those differing in judgment from us?
Answered in the negative. Heb. x. 25
I don’t think anyone would argue against the reality that church membership today doesn’t mean what it used to mean. The questions I have are these: Are the attitudes toward membership reflected in these answers worth reclaiming, and if so, how do we go about reclaiming them?
To what purpose?
What is gained in being able to lock the pen we want to keep the sheep in? Does that benefit the sheep? The undershepherd? The Great Shepherd? The flock?
It is one thing to ask if we can turn the clock back. It is another thing altogether to ask why we would want to and see if our motives are pure.
Rick,
Thanks for your comment.For me, it’s not about “lock[ing] the pen,” it’s about being faithful to the biblical witness regarding church membership. Our individualism has led us to devalue church membership to the point where it’s harder to maintain your membership in the Rotary Club than in the local church.
I’m not suggesting that we mimic the practices of 18th-century Baptists, but I do think we would benefit by a return to the seriousness with which they viewed membership in the local church. It was that seriousness that these quotes were intended to illustrate.
Was it about the “seriousness” of church membership or was it about control?
For instance, look at this:
Query from the church at Montgomery: Whether a church is bound to grant a letter of dismission to any member to go to another church, while his residence is not removed?
Answered in the negative, we having neither precept nor precedent for such a practice in Scripture.
What we have neither precept or precedent for is the “granting of letter of dismission” in Scripture. There is no such animal. There were letters of commendation for traveling members, but there is no such concept of “transfer of a letter” in the Bible.
So what is it about the “seriousness” of church membership that you feel is important? I admit that even as recently as the middle of the last century there were churches that took membership “seriously” and used it to control members. Is that what you are proposing?
Surely, you are not advocating for complete liberty of conscience on the part of individual members to worship wherever they feel led of the Spirit to worship, do you?
If a church is truly serious about being the church, then that church doesn’t “control members,” because the church is it’s members. I believe individual members who are being led by the Spirit will find themselves being led to join with a local congregation, and that they will take seriously their covenant obligations to the other members of that congregation, “discerning the body” as Paul puts it under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration in 1 Cor. 11.
Again, for me, the issue isn’t control, but about seeing us be done with the “church shopper” mentality in favor of a more robust view of the importance of membership in a local congregation.