reMembering

One day I went out to Yum Cha for lunch. Now this restaurant happened to be inside a Leagues Club, and I happened to live inside their membership radius. So in order to get in and have lunch with my friends, I had to pay for membership. Now it wasn't so bad a deal because yearly membership costed $10 and came with a $10 food coupon for restaurants within the club! In any case I filled out the form, had my photo taken and was given my membership card. I was now a card carrying member of my local club. And I haven't been back there since…

Well last time we were talking about Church Membership we considered our definition of membership in both positive and negative terms. Now it's all well and good to know what Church Membership should be, but it's an entire other thing to know how we should go about doing it. So here we're going to consider the good and the bad ways to do membership

Good Ways to be a Member -

• Pray - No Church exists without God. Indeed no Christian exists without God. To pray is to specifically place authority and sovereignty firmly in God's hands. If the Church exists to bring God glory, then the Church needs God's help! Both for power to do his work and for help in responding well to matters of sensitivity.
• Attend - Sometimes mere attendance is enough to encourage our fellow believers. But at the very least, if membership is a sign of commitment, then attendance is vital - not out of obligation but as an outworking of the true reality of our hearts - that we love God, love others, and love meeting together in his name.
• Serve - To be committed to a local community is also to be committed to the work that they do. Even though some are paid to work in a Church, and that some others appear to be especially suited to be serving in the community, it is nonetheless an expectation on all believers that we serve God by serving people.
• Give - Ministry requires money. And God provides that money… through us. To give is one way in which physically express thanks to God for both his free salvation of us, and the fact that he has abundantly provided for our daily needs. To give generously is to overflow with this thankfulness.
• Listen - The needs of every Church is different. And it is informed by in part by the strengths and weaknesses of its people as well as the nature of its environment. As such things like prayer, service and giving needs to be informed by the things that are going on in and around the community. If we do not pay attention to what these things are when they are discussed, we cannot seriously engage in any of them.
• Think - At a certain level, to be a Church member is to be engaged with the decision making of the Church. While there is such a thing as submitting to leadership, this is not license to leave the consideration of Church matters to them and them alone. When things come up in our community, we should all carefully consider them. Sometimes we may not be equipped to do this, but when we can in some way, we should talk about them with each other and indeed with our leaders as well.

Bad Ways to be a Member -

• Presume - Community is by nature plural. It goes against the very nature of Church for an individual to expect their status to entitle them to some kind of special treatment. In short the attitude of one who is a member is not to obtain rights, but to lovingly serve and encourage.
• Oblivion - To be unaware of what is going on in the community and indeed in the lives of other believers essentially makes our membership impotent. As noted before we can't really engage in a community well unless we know what is going on in and around it. Our thoughts and opinions stop being valid simply because we don't really know what we need to be addressing.
• Apathy - To not care about matters that the community cares about raises real questions about where our hearts are. To not care about matters the community cares about is in a way the same as not caring for the community itself. Sometimes perhaps the community cares about something that doesn't seem to be that important, but in that situation our role should be to care about the community enough to work towards a healthier perspective and to preserve its unity in Christ.
• Rubber Stamp - A rubber stamp is someone who says 'yes' to everything just because it is the easiest thing to do. Sometimes it's because we are uninformed and other times it's because we don't care. Either way we aren't functioning in a way that exhibits real commitment or in a way that shows real concern for the Church as God's people.
• Snipe - When we snipe, we stand on the sidelines firing off shots at others and their views. It is not that we are not allowed to have our own opinions or even that it is wrong to analyse and critique what others put forward. It is that to sit on the sidelines in the debate and simply attack the well intentioned efforts of others is discouraging and unhelpful. Better to get involved in the process so that our critique can be taken constructively rather than insultingly. We don't have to have all the answers, we just need to be open to working something out rather than working to closing something down.

Church Membership is a serious thing. It can be tempting to think of it as a bit of a non-issue considering how cheaply we give away our details in subscription to different websites and organisations, but that is because there is no heart attachment to these 'memberships'. This shouldn't be the way we approach our local community. Would I call myself a member of my local Leagues Club? No. And that's despite being in rightful possession of a membership card. Would I call myself a member my local Church? Yes. And that's why it actually means something, why it's actually important, that I might 'carry the card'.

Let's reflect our hearts more genuinely in our actions by engaging in our community better.

Part 3