Meaning of Church Membership

There are a number of posts up on several blogs I read having to do with the meaning of membership in the church. I'm not sure if this is all coincidental, or whether there is rather some story or event I have missed. At any rate, I have also just finished a column on the meaning of church membership for the United Methodist Reporter. I'll link to that when it comes out.

In the mean time, here is a summary of several posts that are worth checking out:

On his Accountable Discipleship blog, Steve Manskar posts about the way we often treat church membership as membership in a civic club (and how at odds that is with an understanding of the church as the body of Christ).

Amy Forbus posted on the Methoblog on the way that an 'open door' membership attitude allows for easy exiting as well as easy joining.

Also on the Methoblog, Jay Voorhees has posted on membership as it relates to the deep longing for family, as well as the vows of membership as similar to marriage vows (I agree with him strongly on this count).

(Both Amy's and Jay's posts are drawn from still other blogs, to which they link, and those are worth a look as well.)

Matthew Johnson has an excellent post on pastoral responsibility in helping determine readiness for church membership, something that most pastors are probably to intimidated (and too eager for new members) to do.

And Gavin Richardson quotes himself on the nature of the church: "At its best the church is a family, at its worst the church is a family."

My own column, which I'm tentatively calling, "Cheating on your church," focuses on the implied seriousness of our vows of church membership as well as the poverty of contemporary church life today. It is that deep poverty that keeps people from understanding the meaning of membership in Christ's body. The church's failure to truly be the community of Jesus' friends leads to a situation where people treat church as any other consumer choice. And that causes them to make terrible choices both for the church and for their own discipleship. As I argue in the article, leaving your church for reasons of personal preference is nothing more than a form of ecclesial adultery.