Those Who Must Give an Account

A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline

John S. Hammett, Benjamin L Merkle

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781433671197
• eBook ISBN: 9781433676000
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

"Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account." --Hebrews 13: 17aThere is a surprising, even dangerous, gap in the literature on the church in the areas of church membership and church discipline. The former sets the boundaries of a leader's responsibility, and discipline is the last option of a church when members will no longer live in fellowship with their brothers and sisters in the Lord and accept the guidance of their leaders.And so this book is written first to church leaders, offering guidance on how they should receive and minister to those for whom they will have to give an account according to Scripture. But under the view of the church upheld in these chapters, the receiving of members and discipline of members are both acts of the greater church body, and thus all members of the church sharein the accountability for each other. Consequently, Those Who Must Give an Account will be of interest to all believers.Among this volume's nine notable contributors are Mark E. Dever ("The Practical Issues of Church Membership"), Thomas R. Schreiner ("The Biblical Basis for Church Discipline"), and Bruce Riley Ashford and Danny Akin ("The Church as God's Missional People").

Chapter 1

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Church Membership, Church Discipline, and the Nature of the Church

John S. Hammett

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The twin topics of this book, church membership and church discipline, have fallen on hard times in the past hundred years, especially in the North American context. Part of the Western inheritance from the Enlightenment is a strong "individualist impulse," which "promotes such values as personal freedom, self-improvement, privacy, achievement, independence, detachment, and self-interest."1 Enlightenment individualism was also autonomous individualism, and from that has grown a strong antipathy to authority, which has continued or even intensified in postmodern culture.2 Jonathan Leeman suggests, "Perhaps more than any other cultural theme . . . the question of authority is relevant to the discussion of local church membership and discipline, because membership and discipline involve a life of submission."3 The values associated with individualism are antithetical to the type of strong commitment to a group inherent in meaningful church membership and genuine, redemptive church discipline and are contrary to the much more communal or collectivist mind-set of the culture in which the church was born.

In addition to individualism, the church in North America faces the challenge of consumerism, in which individuals "view religion as a commodity that we consume, rather than one in which we invest ourselves."4 In a consumer society consumers are more committed to getting their needs met than they are to a community of people. "If their needs go unmet, they are quick to switch to another church, just as they would doctors, grocery stores or airlines to find better service."5 To consumers, church membership involves little loyalty, and church discipline would have little impact, as those who exercise discipline mean little to those receiving discipline.

Individualism and consumerism are widely recognized as problems for the church in North America and form part of the protest of the wide diversity of groups which fit under the umbrella of "the emerging church." One consistent cry among them has been the importance of community. It is difficult to find any emerging church that does not refer to itself as a community and list community as one of their key values.6 Yet even among some in the emerging church, traditional ideas of church membership are questioned, if not abandoned. Many draw upon the language of bounded sets versus centered sets. Traditional churches are seen as bounded sets, in which churches clearly mark off who's in and who's out. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch say:

Churches thus mark themselves in a variety of ways. Having a church membership roll is an obvious one. . . . The missional-incarnational church, though, is a centered set. This means that rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn't, a centered set is defined by its core values, and people are not seen as in or out, but as closer or further from the center. In that sense, everyone is in and no one is out.7

While it must be noted that this understanding of centered-set thinking is not found in all who use the terminology8 and is certainly not true of all elements of the emerging church, the strong desire to be inclusive can weaken the type of "robust boundaries" necessary for integrity in membership and courage in church discipline.9

Jonathan Leeman sees the hesitancy to draw boundaries as symptomatic of a deeper problem. He says:

[T]he argument for church membership and church discipline is an argument for a clear line between church and world. . . . Yet what stands in the way of our ability—as Christians and churches in the post-modern West—to embrace the biblical call for such a line are our distorted and holy-less, truth-less, wisdom-less conceptions of God and his love.10

Far from being harsh and unloving, the refusal to draw such lines is a failure to love and destructive of the community it seeks to create.

In addition to centered-set thinking, another issue among some in the emerging church raises similar questions for church membership and church discipline. It is the idea that belonging precedes believing. Tim Conder is representative of those who call on the church to recognize that in postmodern culture, "persons will join a community before affirming the beliefs of that community. In other words, emerging culture places belonging before believing."11 But this practice ignores biblical teaching that church membership was predicated on accepting the teaching of the apostles and that church discipline was for doctrinal as well as ethical error (see Acts 2:41; 1 John 2:22–23). Conder, however, may be accurately describing a cultural reality. Missiologists and church planters Ed Stetzer and David Putnam recognize this reality. They write, "It is important to note that more and more in today's context conversion will be part of the journey and will often require years of participation in a local congregation before a person goes public with his or her faith."12 Churches can address this reality without surrendering membership and discipline by distinguishing between a larger, more open community, in which some may be moving toward conversion, and the covenanted community of members, limited to those who are actual followers of Christ. This example, however, shows the need for the type of careful consideration given to the topics discussed in this book.

Thus, church membership and church discipline are problematic for many churches, both existing and emerging. Other chapters in this book will examine our twin topics from biblical, historical, and practical perspectives. They will seek to give the biblical basis for these practices, examine historical precedents, and suggest practical ways to help churches recover healthy practices in these vital areas. This chapter will open the book with a theological consideration of the nature of the church. The goal is to show the mutual relationship between church membership and church discipline, on the one hand, and the nature of the church, on the other. More specifically, it will argue that church membership and church discipline are inherent in the nature of the church and that the nature of the church in turn must shape our understanding of church membership and church discipline. It will do so by looking first at the implications for the nature of the church in the biblical word for church (ekklēsia), especially the pattern of usage of that word in the New Testament. Then it will examine four major images or metaphors for the church. In each case illumination of the nature of the church will shed light on both the necessity and the nature of church membership and church discipline.

Ekklēsia and the Nature of the Church

Nothing inherent in the word ekklēsia itself clearly points to the meaning of the nature of the church. In the New Testament context it could be simply an ordinary word used for an assembly, as in Acts 19:32, where a riotous crowd gathered in opposition to Paul and is called an ekklēsia. However, as Gary Badcock observes, "Precedent for a more distinctive, sacred use of the word was available to New Testament writers from a different source: Jewish Greek."13 Thus we look to the use of ekklēsia in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

Two primary Hebrew terms are used for the assembly of God's people in the Old Testament: 'ēdâh and qahal. The translators of the Septuagint used ekklēsia to translate qahal nearly a hundred times but never used it to translate 'ēdâh. For 'ēdâh they usually used the Greek term sunagogē, which is used only once in the New Testament to refer to the church (Jas 2:2). What does this association of ekklēsia with qahal, but not 'ēdâh, say about the meaning of ekklēsia and the nature of the church?

While both terms can be used in a variety of senses (secular as well as religious), the most important distinction seems to be that qahal "embraces only those who have heard the call and are following it. 'ēdâh, on the other hand, is the permanent community into which one was born."14 In designating themselves ekklēsia, early Christians were taking a word already in use by Greek-speaking Jews to refer to the people of God. This specific word particularly implied that the church is not a group into which one is born (ekklēsia is never used to translate 'ēdâh) but a group to which one makes a personal commitment (the scores of times ekklēsia translates qahal). Such a term fits well with the ideas of meaningful, covenanted church membership and the type of accountability reflected in redemptive church discipline.

Actual New Testament usage of ekklēsia seems to confirm at least one element of the Old Testament background. K. L. Schmidt sees the idea of response to God's call as central to the New Testament meaning of ekklēsia: "Ekklēsia is in fact the group of men called out of the world by God."15 The term "called" (klētos) is found several times as a virtual synonym for ekklēsia. Paul describes the church in Rome as those who are "Jesus Christ's by calling" and "called as saints" (Rom 1:6–7). The church in Corinth is said to be those who are "called as saints" (1 Cor 1:2). On the day of Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit is promised to all those entering the church, "as many as the Lord our God will call" (Acts 2:39). The church comes into being in response to a divine call. Those who respond to that call separate themselves from the world. Such an action seems intrinsically connected to the idea of membership. Moreover, those who claimed to respond to the call but did not live as separated from the world would seem to be subjects for discipline, lest membership be emptied of meaning. Thus, the meaning of the term ekklēsia, seen in light of the septuagintal and New Testament usage, seems inextricably to link the nature of the group denoted by ekklēsia (the church) to a group with a distinct membership. The distinct and separated nature of its members is maintained by discipline.

One further aspect of New Testament usage of ekklēsia deepens and clarifies the link between the nature of the church and church membership and discipline. The term is found 114 times in the New Testament. Of these, three refer to a secular assembly, and two appear in quotations from the Old Testament, referring to the Old Testament people of God. The remaining 109 verses refer to the New Testament church but in two different senses. At least 13 references seem to refer clearly to the church in a universal sense, as encompassing all the redeemed of all the ages.16 These passages contain some of the most exalted language concerning the church in all of Scripture, and those who think of the church primarily in this universal sense may not see any clear connection between the nature of the church and mundane things like membership and discipline. But the New Testament pattern of usage indicates that we should think of the church primarily in terms of a local, visible assembly, for that is how the word is overwhelmingly used. More than 90 times ekklēsia refers to local, identifiable assemblies. They may be small enough to meet in a house (Rom 16:5; Col 4:15) or number in the thousands (Acts 2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Introduction: Church Identity
• Chapter 1
• Part 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Part 2
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Conclusion
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Select Bibliography on Church Membership and Church Discipline