One thing that I have become very strongly convicted about over the past few months is the reality of the universal church.

If I tried to write an entry about what the Bible has to say about specific little congregations, it would be very short indeed.  Yet that’s where it seems like our attention is focused.  Oh, sure, we go on youth retreats with some other area churches (particularly those that are far enough removed geographically to not represent competition), and maybe we do Good Friday services or “church swaps” with one or two like-minded churches–but do we regard those other churches as equally important to our own?

For the vast majority of our married life, Seth and I have not been members of a local church.  The first church we attended in Louisville required agreement with their doctrinal statement, which we could not confer; the second church had required membership classes at a time we could not attend (and we didn’t go there too long before we came to Delaware, anyway).  We joined Bethel once we got here, which was easy and a no-brainer; since we left, we’ve been membershipless once more.

By some theologies, this should be bothersome.  Don’t we have a responsibility to formally put ourselves under the authority of a local elder board?  Shouldn’t we commit our time and resources officially to a single church?  Indeed, there was a time when I was disconcerted myself by our unaffiliated state–but I grow less so with every passing year.

John Piper’s church had a very thought-provoking controversy a little while back: should infant-baptized believers be allowed to join their credo-baptist church?  Piper’s position was yes; the elder board’s position was no.    Piper’s explanation was one that struck me deeply, and with a wider range of implication than his current situation: the “door” for joining the local church should be precisely the same size as the “door” to heaven.  In other words, woe to the church that excludes genuine believers from their fellowship.  I can’t see how you can argue with that logic.  Where in Scripture does it grant a church the authority to exclude anyone who genuinely professes Christ?  Yes, we’re to excommunicate people for unrepentant sin, but how did we take that guideline and extrapolate that we should set ourselves (or our elder boards) up as judges to decide who is and who is not worthy, “Christian” enough, of sufficient doctrinal purity, or adequately “committed” to the church at 123 Church Lane? 

Scripture talks about removing people from fellowship; it never once talks about refusing people from fellowship.  The very idea is contrary to everything the church represents: Christ went out and visited tax collectors and prostitutes; He invited them into His midst.  He didn’t make sure to weed out all the undesirables before He spoke, and He clearly rebuked those who made sinners feel excluded or demeaned.  Yet we alternately preclude people from participating in evangelism, singing in our choirs, or–heaven forbid!–organizing an event until they’ve passed a rigorous set of “tests” to enter the inner circle of specialness called “membership.”  I’ve been membershipless-but-regularly-attending at five different churches now, including some excellent churches, and I can tell you firsthand: even as a believer in that setting, I still feel excluded.  Sometimes it’s very faint; sometimes it’s downright annoying: I find it despicable, frankly, that the leadership at a church can know me and believe that I’m a Christian, but still make us jump through the hoops of formal membership before, say, letting me help out in VBS.

So, to return to the idea of the universal Church: I’m increasingly non-concerned about any given local church.  I love fellowshipping in one, and I love being a part of a consistent group of people, but, in the end, it’s just an abstract construct that we tend to mistake for being something real and finite.  It’s common for us to point out with regard to our U.S. citizenship that “our citizenship is not of this world,” but we should take that concept to the local church and say, “my membership is not of this church.”  If our church burns to the ground, if our congregation scatters, if our pastor runs off with another woman, if the worst thing we can imagine comes to pass–our membership is not of this church.  God hasn’t changed, the real Church hasn’t faltered, the divinely-appointed shepherds still lead the flock, the Gospel is the same, and we have every occasion to rejoice because God is always faithful and Christ always refines and purifies His bride.

This works in reverse, as well.  Christ didn’t say to come alongside and rebuke erring believers [who belong to the same church you do]; Paul didn’t write for us to break fellowship with unrepentant wolves [who formerly belonged to the same church we do].  There are no parenthetical qualifications.  Those cast out by one church should not be readily received in another, and when we sin, any believer has the responsibility and honor of helping us see more clearly.  Yes, the local church clearly should play a role in both of these processes, but if we’re limiting it to the local body, we’re hurting the true Body.  If we send an adulterer or a heretic out of our midst and contently sit by in silence when the church down the street welcomes them in ignorance with open arms–do we really think that’s building up the Church?  If a pastor at a neighboring church is leading his church astray into some serious doctrinal error, do we sit by and say that it’s none of our business instead of pleading with the shepherd and his flock to return to the truth?

I’m very concerned that we don’t have more concern for “our” local body than we do for sister churches.  The idea of putting our local body above the needs of the universal body–or another local body–is wholly unscriptural.  Indeed, verses like 2 Corinthians 8:1-3, 1 Corinthians 16:1-3, and 2 Corinthians 11:8-9, among other passages, clearly show local churches giving to other local churches, even when they have virtually nothing to give.  3 John 1:5-8 makes it equally clear that individuals in one church do well to support those who are ministering elsewhere. And the pervasive pattern of prayer we see throughout the New Testament shows that inter-church support was not limited to merely finances.  If we have enough pew Bibles, and the poorer Bible-believing church down the street doesn’t have any, are we willing to share our own, even though it may mean that we too have ten people huddled around a single Bible?  Do we help our brothers and sisters only out of our abundance, or out of everything we have?  Are regular attendees encouraged to tithe their 10% to our reasonably well-off church before giving to overseas missions or poorer churches that need the funds more desperately?

I’ve often been in churches and gotten the impression that it’s our responsibility to give first and foremost to the local body.  And I understand and agree that basic necessities such as a building and a pastor must be provided.  But I don’t understand and don’t agree that we should devote our resources to an inefficient bureaucratic institution with an inflated VBS budget that would cover a whole year of building and pastoral care for a church in Africa.  And yes, outreach in the States is undoubtedly more expensive than outreach in third-world countries.  But how can we hear a missionary come and tell us of a church that has no pastor, a congregation that meets in sub-zero weather with no heat, or a rural “seminary” that can’t afford Bibles for its students–how can we hear of these things happening within the universal Church and not immediately stop and say, hmm, our VBS budget, our choir budget, or our new-every-year Sunday School materials budget would take the Gospel a lot farther if we shared it with that church.  Are our new flannelgraph figures really that vital?  I wonder what would happen if we stopped basing our budgets off of what we need to meet our yearly “program” expenses, and instead tried to figure out how we could best use our resources to advance the cause of Christ everywhere.  Could we still justify $30,000 for a high school missions trip to pour concrete in the Bahamas, or would we send thirty local Bible-believing pastors in thirty different towns across the island a complete library with commentaries and other resources, instead?

The secular world is catching onto this idea.  Websites like thehungersite.com, kiva.org, and freerice.com exist because certain people realized that the wealth in the Western world is so great that we can make gigantic impacts in third-world countries without changing our own lifestyles at all–we can feed the hungry simply by viewing advertisements!  Christians are called to a much higher standard: we’re called to sacrifice, to put our brothers and sisters above ourselves, whether they’re in the pew next to us or huddled in a dark meeting room on the other side of the world.

Our present lack of membership is an anomaly in some ways.  We’re not rebels.  I’m sure we’ll join another church someday, perhaps sooner rather than later.  But in the meantime, membershiplessness has been thought-provoking, and useful.  Loyalties to a local body can be so easily distracting from our joyful duties and fellowship with the rest of the world church.  It’s been good, in a sense, to be forced to see with broader vision for a time. No matter where our church journey eventually takes us, I hope we never lose the consuming passion for the Church where our membership truly lies, and never settle for being members of just one “church.”

Tags: evangelism fellowship the church