More people are attending church but they are attending less often.
That was the response of a pastor friend when asked if attendance at the church he serves was growing or declining. The pastor explained that faithful church members used to attend services eight or nine times over a 10-week period. Now faithful members may attend five or six times over a similar time frame.
The result is that a church may have more people involved in worship and ministry and still have the same number of people (or fewer) at any given service than it did a year or two earlier.
This pastor’s experience is not unique. In most churches there is a sizable difference between members and participants.
That not all church members attend church services is a fact Baptists have known for a long time. Alabama Baptists, for example, report 1,135,606 total members of cooperating churches according to statistics provided by the Alabama Baptist State Convention. That number is impressive. It is about 23 percent of the state’s 4,822,023 residents as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Unfortunately, about 30 percent of that number cannot be found. They are “nonresident members” meaning they no longer live in the ministry area of the church they joined. Resident membership of the state’s 3,238 cooperating churches was last reported as 792,630. That is still about one out of every six Alabamians.
Actual worship attendance declines even further. Any given Sunday, the average attendance for cooperating churches will be 380,000–390,000 according to convention records. That is less than half the resident members and about 8 percent of the state’s population.
For Baptists, the discrepancies between the number of people who are members of a local church and the number of people who regularly live out that commitment through worship and service in a local church creates a theological problem. What does church membership mean?
Does membership mean the right to vote in a business meeting? Does it mean the right to hold an office? Does membership mean one can use the church facilities for a wedding without having to pay a maintenance fee? Is church membership a status symbol in the community or a good business decision? Is membership in a church assurance of salvation?
The influence of Baptists and Anabaptists in the Reformation helped change the theological underpinnings of church membership. Formerly churches operated on a parish system where a local church served a geographical community and all who lived in that geographical area were considered members of the parish church.
Baptist emphasis on a Believer’s Church resulted in voluntary membership. Only people who made a personal profession of faith in Christ and asked to be a member of a local church could be a member. Children of Baptist families may be reared in a church but they are not members until they make a personal profession of faith and ask to be members.
Most Baptists understand a personal profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior as the door to membership in the universal body of Christ. But most people experience the body of Christ locally. Christians gather in local communities to worship, praise, pray, study, minister and serve. This is the same pattern found throughout the New Testament (Acts 2:46, 1 Cor. 14:26, Eph. 4:16).
In Ephesians 4:11–12, the apostle Paul writes about equipping believers “so the body of Christ may be built up.” In Hebrews 10:24–25 the apostle urges believers not to give up meeting together in order to “spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”
Membership in the body of Christ and in the local church, then, is to build up the body as a whole and to build up individual parts (members) of that body according to these two scriptures. The obvious observation is that it is impossible to do either if one does not participate with other Christians in the body of Christ.
Equally valid is the observation that when a church calls someone a “member in good standing” who has not participated in the life of the body of Christ for some time, that designation does not benefit the body as a whole or the individual in question.
Members are supposed to be Christian disciples. After all, Jesus called disciples, not members. As one author described it, membership in the body of Christ is an organic relationship, not an organizational relationship. Participation in the body of Christ is intended to help believers reaffirm their faith commitments and grow in the faith in order to become disciples. Believers are to contribute to the body of Christ, not just take from it.
In the early history of the Believer’s Church one finds records of churches expecting members to participate in worship, evidence a growing faith, support the church financially, participate in missions and service and share their faith with others.
More recently churches have shied away from requiring anything of members. Most churches do not even have a class for new members to assimilate them into congregational life.
In some places that is beginning to change. A small but growing number of churches are asking believers and other candidates for membership to demonstrate they want to be Christian disciples before being accepted as church members. This is done through such things as participating in hands-on missions, being involved in some form of ministry and working with others in accountability groups.
Whether this new development will grow into a trend is yet to be known. But in a world where membership of most voluntary organizations is falling, where individual decisions are made for value-added benefits, it will be worth watching to see if local churches can focus on making Christian disciples and not get trapped in growing the organizational roll.
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