Thinking about Choosing a Church? Part 2

Two more considerations when it comes to choosing a church.

3. Does the church practice a meaningful Church Membership? Sometimes I feel like I've heard every argument in the book concerning the archaic nature of Church Membership but in 1 Peter 5, Christian people are commanded to "be subject to the elders." I have been wracking my brain for 7 years attempting to figure out how a church of more than 20 people could oversee their people without church membership. In other words, you and I can't be subject to elders if we don't have a process to tell the elders that we are subject to them. The Apostle Paul tells the believers in Corinth to expel a man from amongst their number (1 Cor 5). A person can't go out, if they were never in. We need church membership because our hearts desire to go their own way and we are prone towards spiritual infidelity. The humility of the believer is honed under Godly authority. "Be subject to elders.... God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God."
For more on Church Membership, click on my blog from 2010 and check out a two part series entitled "Why I must be committed to my local Church in membership?"

4. Does the church practice meaningful Church Discipline? The Bible unquestionably speaks about the Elders of churches providing teaching, care, and discipline to their flock. But many churches do not know who is in their flock. A trend of more traditional churches is to maintain a membership that is not reflective of who is attending the church and a trend amongst many churches, planted in the past decades, is to practice no church membership at all. Neither is faithful to the Scriptures. The testimony of the New Testament is of a leadership and a congregation that knows, who is part of the church and who is not part of the church. Jesus speaks of a congregation that levies the final blow of discipline on an unrepentant sinner and informs the congregation to treat the offender as "a Gentile and tax collector (Matt 18:17)." Paul exhorts the Corinthian church that when it comes to unrepentant sexually immoral, who call themselves believers, to "not even eat with such a one (1 Cor 5:11)." Paul tells Timothy that if an elder persists in sin that he should be "rebuke(d) in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear (1 Tim 5:20)." James tells the church to go after those who appear to be believers and who have wandered away from the truth and that "whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins (James 5:20)". Our souls are on the line when we distance ourselves from Christ's church and practice lawlessness. God has enacted church discipline so that erring people might be restored to Him. God wants restoration but many times the American church wants comfort.

I hope these blogs have been helpful. If you'd like to read more about choosing a healthy church I would encourage you to read the book Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever.