What the Hell Is Church Membership?

I’m taking a break from the Monday/Thursday format to spend a week exploring a very important and confusing issue: church membership. This series may make some people uncomfortable, but as always, I hope this can start a conversation. The term “membership” is frequently thrown around in modern Protestant churches, but the reasons for it feel anachronistic:

Church membership made sense in the Church’s first centuries. With our dogma still taking shape, church leaders needed the ability to say who was in and who was out. They needed tools to define who was orthodox and who was heretical, and a doctrine of membership gave them that authority.
But the dogma has crystalized.
Church membership made sense in the Middle Ages. In a time where religious authority and legislative authority often bled together, churches were important local record keepers, so church membership was as much a civic matter as a spiritual one. When a baby was born in a community, the church kept that record.
But the Middle Ages are behind us.
Church membership made sense before Protestants opened the table. For churches with restrictions on who can receive sacraments like communion, membership is an important demarcation.
But the majority of Protestant churches observe no such restrictions, and the majority of American Christians are some variety of Protestant.

So why is church membership still a thing?

I worked in churches for seven years, and during that time, I never heard a satisfying explanation of membership. Usually, ministers would tell me some variation of “Membership represents a deeper commitment to this church,” but the longer I worked in churches, the more I saw that this was not the case.

I knew members who hadn’t attended in decades,
and I knew non-members who never missed a Sunday.
I knew members who didn’t give a cent,
and I knew non-members who gave far beyond their means.
I knew members who barely opened a Bible,
and I knew non-members who could recite the thing.
Because I never heard any answer other than “It represents a deeper commitment,”
I ultimately arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion:

Church membership is a legal necessity because the United States tax code requires 501(c)(3) organizations to have a president, a treasurer, a secretary, and a roster of members. Other than this, membership has no defined meaning.

I had to live in this tension for years: encouraging people to become church members but secretly believing that it didn’t matter. When I left my church staff position six months ago to pursue community chaplaincy, I maintained my membership at my old church as a gesture of good will and continued community. I didn’t think I’d ever feel the need to move that membership since, at that point in the journey, membership didn’t hold any meaning to me.

That changed.

Over the next four days, I’ll cover the biblical basis of church membership, my own journey of church membership, a few new frameworks for thinking about membership, and a personal rubric for finding a church.
As always, thanks for taking this journey with me.

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