Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline

Preface

This book is a collaborative effort with some contributors obvious and others behind the scenes. The editors want to express their thanks to them all. Perhaps most obvious are the authors of the various chapters. They are colleagues, mentors, and friends whose works have helped shape our thinking and motivated us in the writing of this book. We thank them for lending the weight of their experience and expertise to this work.

We are also grateful for the partnership we have had with various churches. Through these churches we have seen the importance of the topics of this book in real-life situations. We have seen godly pastors and congregations wrestle with how faithfully to discharge the duties for which they will give an account.

Both editors are blessed with families who have been supportive of and interested in this project. We especially thank our wives, Marian Merkle and Linda Hammett, for being consistent encouragers and enablers of all we do. We are also both blessed to serve on the faculty of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where we are surrounded by helpful colleagues and thoughtful students. Interaction with them in conversations and in the classroom has sharpened our thinking and confirmed the need for this book. We express our appreciation to the administration of Southeastern Seminary in providing us with all the human and material support necessary to complete this project. In particular, we want to express our appreciation to faculty secretaries Carol Thompson and Billie Goodenough for their services in the preparation of the manuscript.

Finally, the staff at B&H Academic has been consistently efficient and helpful in moving this manuscript through the publication process. We particularly thank Chris Cowan for shepherding us through each step.

Most of all, we are deeply grateful to the Lord of the church, for His mercy in granting us the privilege of being a part of the church He is building. Paul exhorts those involved in this labor: Each one must be careful how he builds (1 Cor 3:10). May this book help Christ's coworkers build carefully in the areas of church membership and discipline.

Introduction

This book is designed to address a surprising and even dangerous gap in the literature on the church. While there has been a welcome resurgence of interest in a variety of topics associated with ecclesiology in recent years, church membership and church discipline have not attracted much attention. ¹ The few books that have addressed church membership and discipline have not seen them as issues of Christian accountability, as this book does. The title of this book is taken from Heb 13:17, where church leaders are characterized as those who must give an account (NIV). Church membership sets the boundaries of a leader's responsibility, and discipline is the last option of a church when members are no longer willing to live in fellowship with their brothers and sisters and accept the guidance of their leaders. While the hope of the church is that discipline will lead to repentance and restoration, until and unless that happens, discipline is the church's recognition that former members are no longer willing to live as part of the church, and thus the church can no longer be responsible for these persons. They are no longer among those for whom leaders must give an account.

Clearly, then, this book is addressed to church leaders, seeking to give them guidance on how they should receive and minister to those for whom they will have to give an account. But under the view of the church adopted in these chapters, receiving members and discipline of members are both acts of the church body, and thus all the members of the church share in the accountability for one another. Thus, the topics of this book should be of interest to all believers.

The format of the book is straightforward. The opening chapter, by coeditor John Hammett, argues that church membership and church discipline are far from secondary or optional aspects of the church's life. Rather, they are inherent in the nature of the church, and a sound understanding of the nature of the church must ground our view of church membership and discipline.

The bulk of the book consists of two parts. In each part, one of the two topics is examined by a biblical scholar, a church historian, and a pastor-theologian. Church membership is addressed first. In chapter 2, coeditor Ben Merkle gives the biblical basis for church membership. He shows that while no single verse explicitly states the necessity of church membership, it is inescapably implied in biblical teaching on accountability, discipline, the use of spiritual gifts, and the advance of God's kingdom. Chapter 3, contributed by Nathan Finn, then turns to a historical analysis of church membership. Finn traces the movement from the high standards and lengthy preparation for church membership in the patristic period, to the changes introduced by the emphasis on infant baptism which persisted through the medieval and Reformation eras, to the rise of voluntary membership, initially among the Anabaptists but spreading to Baptists and others. To his chapter he appends three church covenants from different periods of Baptist history that reflect historic Baptist understandings of church membership. Mark Dever addresses the practical issues of church membership as both a theologian and pastor. He sees biblical teaching on church membership as shaping a triangle of relationships between the individual Christian, the members of that Christian's local church, and that congregation's pastors. He discusses how he teaches church membership as a manifestation of love in his church and gives 12 specific and practical steps for pastors to implement and practice meaningful church membership in their churches.

Part 2 turns to the topic of church discipline and again includes biblical, historical, and practical chapters. Tom Schreiner examines biblical teaching on church discipline, specifically on the final stage of church discipline where expulsion and public rebuke may be necessary. He first traces the process of discipline given by Jesus in Matt 18:15–20 and then devotes the bulk of the chapter to a careful exegetical study of Paul's teaching in 1 Cor 5:1–13, integrating a number of other texts into his exposition along the way, including texts relating to the discipline of leaders. He concludes that the necessity of corrective discipline is clearly taught by Jesus and Paul but emphasizes throughout that the motivation is love and the goal is restoration. In chapter 6, Greg Wills gives vivid examples of the practice of discipline throughout church history, with special attention given to the prominence of discipline among Baptists in North America through the latter part of the nineteenth century and the subsequent decline. He acknowledges that Christians have always found discipline difficult and irksome but have maintained it for one principal reason—Jesus commanded it. Part 2 concludes with a practical presentation by Andrew Davis. He gives steps by which a pastor can lead a church that has abandoned church discipline to a recovery of the practice, including a description of the full toolbox the New Testament gives pastors for skillfully shepherding their members.

Chapter 8 relates the ecclesiological topics of membership and discipline to the practice of missiology. In that chapter Bruce Ashford and Daniel Akin connect the missional nature of the church to church membership and discipline by arguing that churches are designed to make the gospel visible but can only provide a clear window to the gospel if they practice meaningful membership and careful discipline. They believe that a proper practice of church membership and discipline foster a God-centered view of salvation and produce gospel-shaped disciples in a gospel-shaped community giving a clear gospel testimony.

The book concludes with a poignant pastoral reflection on what it means to live as those who must give an account. This second contribution by Andrew Davis mentions briefly the universal accountability all Christians share but emphasizes with a personal tone the specific accountability of pastors. He enumerates specifically the issues that he as a pastor will have to account for on the day of judgment and gives a vivid sense of the weightiness of that responsibility, one that would be crushing were it not for the sustaining and immeasurable grace of God.

We would like to thank all the authors for their excellent contributions and B&H for their willingness to publish this volume. Our hope is that readers will be challenged, edified, and refreshed by this book and consequently will live as those who must give an account. The ultimate result, we hope, will be churches that are closer to the goal of being radiant churches, without spot or wrinkle or blemish, churches that will bring glory to God.

1 Among the topics attracting attention have been church polity, the ordinances, and a variety of issues raised by the emerging church. Church discipline has received scant attention, and even less has been given to church membership. See the Select Bibliography at the end of this book for some of these books.

Chapter 1

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

John S. Hammett

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 2:41; 4:4), but the dominant New Testament idea of the church is a concrete assembly, one with a recognizable membership, marked out by a distinctive, disciplined lifestyle.

Thus, we may see in the septuagintal background to the word ekklēsia an implication that it will consist of those who respond to a divine call rather than a group into which one is born, and in New Testament usage we find an overwhelmingly dominant use for concrete, visible assemblies. The first association suggests that a distinctive idea of membership is involved in those groups called churches; the second association raises the question of how churches will maintain their distinctive idea of membership in their concrete, visible assemblies, a question that was eventually answered by church discipline. The link between the nature of the church and the issues of membership and discipline is strengthened by consideration of major New Testament images for the church.

Images for the Church and the Nature of the Church

A proper understanding of the nature of the church is not limited to a consideration of the word ekklēsia. Indeed, it could be argued that the nature of the church is more clearly reflected in the numerous images or metaphors for the church in the New Testament. A classic work by Paul Minear lists 96 possible images for the church in the New Testament, but a much smaller number seems to be central.¹⁷ For example, Millard Erickson, in his widely used theology text, highlights the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit as the key images for the church in his chapter on the nature of the church.¹⁸ To those three we will add the image of the family. All four images add to our understanding of the nature of the church and how that nature must shape our understanding of church membership and discipline.

The Church as the People of God

Typically discussions of the church as the people of God begin with consideration of the relationship of the church to Israel. Since the phrase people of God is applied to Israel in the Old Testament and the church in the New Testament, should the church be regarded as new Israel or spiritual Israel, or is the church properly regarded as distinct from Israel, a new creation?¹⁹ While this is a fascinating and important question, it is not directly related to the concern of this chapter. Our question is rather, What does this image add to our understanding of the nature of the church?

Perhaps the first aspect that should be noted is the theocentric nature of the church. As the people of God, the church is God called, God owned, God related, and shaped in every way by its relationship with God. This means that church membership cannot be a purely human arrangement, with humans at liberty to shape it as they desire. Membership in God's people can only be by God's standard. Thus, churches—in establishing standards, requirements, or criteria for church membership—must carefully consider what God requires. Above, it was argued that the word ekklēsia, as used in the Septuagint and New Testament, designated those who had responded to God's call. That would seem to indicate that at least one requirement for membership in God's people is that which is established by a response to God's call—that is, a faith relationship to God. In other words, because the church is the people of God, the church should be composed of those alive to God through faith in Christ. As Jonathan Leeman says: Membership and discipline are not artificially erected structures. They are not legalistic impositions upon new-covenant grace. They are an organic and inevitable outgrowth of Christ's redemptive work and the gospel call to repentance and faith.²⁰

Moreover, as the people of God, the church must be shaped by the character of God. The God of the Bible is a holy God, and thus His people must be holy. Nearly 60 times in the New Testament, God's people are called saints, or holy ones (hagioi). This in no way means they had attained a state of sinless perfection; to be holy means first of all to be set apart for God's purposes. But it does indicate that being part of God's people meant living a disciplined life. This is why church discipline is inherent in the nature of the church. Formative discipline shapes the members of the church in holiness, and corrective discipline is exercised when a member wanders from holy living.

But the holiness of the God of Scripture is matched by His love. Timothy George calls holiness and love the two primal attributes of God.²² Dale Moody calls holiness the starting point and love the high point in biblical teaching on the nature of God.²² This love must be reflected in the lives of the people of God. Seventeen times in the New Testament, church members are commanded to love one another. Jesus commanded His disciples to love one another and promised that this would identify them to the world (John 13:34–35).

How does the love of God impact our understanding of the nature of the church, especially in the areas of church membership and church discipline? Clearly, the commitment church members must make