Membership: Living Out The One-Anothers Series

Good morning, church! I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians 3. I have been looking forward to this day for months. We’re beginning a sermon series on the church today. We believe the church is a body, not a building. You are this church. This is a building where the church meets, but a church isn’t bricks and church is people.

The Puritans of New England didn’t call their buildings churches. They called them meeting houses, which I love. This is the house where the church meets, but this isn’t the church.

Your relationship to your church is unlike any other relationship to any group of people in your life. It’s crucial to understand what role the local church plays in your life and what role you play in the local church if you’re going to lead a life that glorifies God.

Here’s where we’re headed over the next four weeks. Today, we’ll look at church membership and answer the question ‘Is church membership Biblical?’ Next week, we’ll examine our membership covenant and see the Biblical basis for the commitments we have made to one another.

Then, we’ll look at our church’s distinctive beliefs. We’ve covenanted together, now what do we believe and how do those beliefs shape the way we live and the way we worship?

Finally, we’ll put the ideas of local church membership, shared covenant promises and beliefs together and see how they drive our Great Commission work of evangelism and discipleship.

We have a lot to cover this morning, so we’re going to dive in. I do want to warn you, this will flow differently than our typical sermons. Ephesians 3 is the centerpiece of our time together today, but we’re going to absolutely be all over the Bible.

I encourage you to take notes (that’s a good idea every Sunday, but particularly today). We’ll get as much of the Scripture on the screens as we can, but it’ll be easy to miss something.

We’ll start with Ephesians 3:8-12, we’ll pray, and then we’ll try our best to see exactly what the Bible has to say about church membership.

Read

8 This grace was given to me—the least of all the saints—to proclaim to the Gentiles the incalculable riches of Christ, 9 and to shed light for all about the administration of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. 10 This is so that God’s multi-faceted wisdom may now be made known through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavens. 11 This is according to his eternal purpose accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. 12 In him we have boldness and confident access through faith in him

Pray

On November 5, 1955 a teenager named Marty walked into Hill Valley for the first time. What he saw amazed and confused him. The marquee at the Essex theatre trumpeted a showing of The Cattle Queen of Montana starring Barbara Stanwyck alongside a handsome 40-something who had been in several pictures but starred in few named Ronald Reagan.

Outside the record store a sign proclaimed the arrival of The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The “Welcome to Hill Valley” sign dubbed the town “A Nice Place to Live” and affixed to the sign were the crests of a number of service organizations—Rotary, Jaycees, the Lions, and the Kiwanis. This was all very confusing to young Marty, but not to anyone else. Everyone else on the town square that afternoon went about business as normal. It was confusing to Marty because he had just driven a DeLorean back in time 30 years from 1985. If you hadn’t already guessed, I’m talking about Michael J. Fox’s character in Back to the Future.

That’s one of those movies that I never intend to watch but can never seem to turn if off if I catch it on TV. And the first scene when McFly stumbles into idyllic 1955 Hill Valley has always fascinated me. Culture shifts so rapidly now that the shock of going back 30 years would likely be even greater today. Can you imagine dropping a 16-year old into 1990? The era before cellphones, tablets, and the internet? They wouldn’t even know how to make a phone call!

Here's why I wanted to shift our minds to another era as we open God’s Word together this morning. We can be prone to think that church membership is more at-home in 1955 or 1990 than it is today.

I know that’s true because many churches no longer emphasize membership and many Christians have spent little time thinking about what church membership truly means.

It’s not just a problem that’s out there in the world or present in other denominations. Membership in Southern Baptist Churches dropped by over 287,000 members last year according to LifeWay Research.

(https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-continues-downward-slide-in-membership-attendance-and-baptisms/#.X7B1bNt7nUo)

That decline signals that within our denomination (and perhaps within our own church) we fail to fully understand the importance the Bible places on membership in a local church.