One of the biggest changes we’ve made at Welcome Church is our approach to church membership, or what we now call belonging. This week I will be blogging each day to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. To understand it fully, please start at Part 1 rather than jumping in half way through. This blog is Part 4 …

In part 3 we looked at the barrier that formal church membership, as we’ve been doing it, can present to people from our UK culture.

We finished with a question: 

Is there a way forward that can work?

As a team we have spent hours on this. We have spent days and weeks on it actually. We’ve worked with wiser people than us to consider both the theology and the implications of many possible changes that could potentially be made.

In the end, as a team, we have arrived at a plan we are all excited about, united behind and confident in. We are not claiming that this plan is infallible, or that it’s the right solution for any other church. We are not criticising anyone who takes a different view from us. But this is what we are doing at Welcome Church, and it’s rooted in the journey we are on as a church, looking at our purpose, our identity and our culture. Anyone is free to copy what we do, but they do so at their own peril!

We have a plan that we believe will enable us to move forward, and help make us fit to reach out to Woking in 2019, and it’s built around two things: Belong, Believe, Become and Matthew 28v19-20. It may well be that we will make adjustments to this plan in the months ahead if we find that some aspects of it are not working how we anticipate they will. And any mistakes we make are entirely our own.

Ultimately, it’s all about discipleship

To move forward we are thinking in terms of discipleship and maturity, and not about being ‘in’ or ‘out’. Jesus didn’t call us to make church members, he called us to make disciples, and we need to take that call seriously.

In Matthew 28 v19-20 Jesus gave the church a mandate:

“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you …”

We have an ongoing mandate to make disciples of Jesus from people of all nations. That’s a huge calling!

Recently I visited a different church, and in the ‘notices’ they said this:

“Please come to our church membership course. We would love you to become a Church Member here, and once you join us, we can then start to disciple you”

I absolutely understand what they were saying, and maybe they didn’t mean it quite like they said it … but it’s not what we are saying at Welcome Church now, and it’s also not in line with how we would see the Great Commission.

We need to be a disciple making church!

To do this we need to do much more than just disciple Christians who we think have ‘made the grade’, and have been allowed to join a membership list. Instead we need to be making disciples out of all the different types of people who make up our messed up UK culture, just as Jesus did with the people from his own culture. This discipleship can start well before people come to know Jesus, as someone else said to me recently, “I’m now trying to disciple my next door neighbour”.

As a church we want to disciple anyone God puts within our sphere of influence. If you’re not yet a Christian, “Discipleship 101” is for you to find out about who Jesus is and what He’s done for you, and we would love to help you with that … just ask us.

While we’re on this point, look at the order of the Bible verse again: (1) make disciples … who will (2) go on to get baptised … and after that will (3) learn to obey Jesus. That order seems to me to have something of ‘Belong‘ … ‘Believe’ … ‘Become’ about it. In fact, Jesus’ disciples certainly came to faith via those three steps … they belonged with him for a long time before they believed in who he was, and they really only became who they were meant to be after he had left them.

So with discipleship as our priority, we are making TWO BIG CHANGES to help us move forward together to reach this town with the good news of Jesus:

1. We are going to stop talking about “membership”, and talk instead about “belonging”

That’s the first change. It means that we are no longer going to be running a membership day, or welcoming people into membership. Membership is no longer the goal for new people. We are going to stop thinking and speaking in terms of ‘in’ or ‘out’; instead we’re going to focus on helping all sorts of people to Belong.

We’re not saying that we are getting rid of people’s existing membership; if you’ve been a member with us for 5 years or 50 years, you still belong. This is still your church. You belong as much as you ever have, but we are reframing the concept of membership. We are going to talk instead about “belonging” … and we want lots of people to come and belong to our church; to choose to say, “Welcome Church is my church”

So we are saying that people who are still exploring faith can choose to belong; they can choose to say that Welcome Church is their church, whilst they learn to follow Jesus. They can belong to our community before believing, and they can belong to it after believing. They can belong to it while they are still exploring the Christian faith just as much as after they come to faith.

The emphasis is on moving from membership as the goal, to maturity in Christ as the goal, whatever the starting point.

To be frank, we wouldn’t want to say to someone who is not yet a Christian, “You’re a church member”. Language matters, and that could be unhelpful and confusing language.

But … we feel perfectly free to say to someone who is not yet a Christian that they belong to our church community – that our church is their church – while they are still exploring faith. Our hope and our belief (and our growing experience) is that they will go on to find a personal faith in Jesus and be born again … at which point they will be, by definition, members of Christ’s worldwide body, his church (see 1 Cor 12v27 …)

Over time we will disciple people. We will encourage them to be baptised, we will pray for them to be filled with the Holy Spirit. As people learn to live for Jesus part of their calling includes being an active part of a local church. These are all steps they can take while they belong to our community, not in order to belong to it.

An inviting garden or an imposing fortress?

We want our church to be more and more like an inviting garden, where people can come in and explore and taste the fruit. They can sit on the bench, enjoy the smell of the flowers, meet the gardeners (we do need gardeners), ask questions and see what’s going on. They can find a safe place to grow. In time we want them to meet the ‘Head Gardener’, come to faith in him, and learn to be gardeners themselves.

We want our church to be less and less like an imposing fortress, where we have sentries at the door who check your credentials to see if you’re allowed to proceed any further and who turn you away if you don’t comply.

So that’s the first change. We are going to stop talking about membership and talk instead about belonging. This is a culture change that will affect our language, our way of thinking and our practice as a church. It will also affect how we view people and how we treat them.

The second change we are making is this:

2. We are launching a new discipleship track built around Belong, Believe, Become

This discipleship track is about helping people learn to follow Jesus, taking them from whatever their starting point is and helping them to grow towards maturity.

How will that work? I’ll tell you in my next blog

One of the biggest changes we’ve made at Welcome Church is our approach to church membership, or what we now call belonging. This week I will be blogging each day to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. To understand it fully, please start at Part 1 rather than jumping in half way through. This blog is Part 3 …

In part 2 we talked about where our approach to Church Membership originally came from, and the challenge it now presents in UK culture.

We ended up with a question:

Should we abandon the idea of membership?

When we look around at the churches near to us, and also at the results of some research we conducted more widely, almost all of the growing movements of churches in the UK, and most of the ‘big’ churches we spoke to (of which we are not yet one) no longer have a formal membership. Not all … but most. Our research also showed that many who do have it are now wrestling with this question.

So should we just stop it? Or is that throwing out the baby with the bath water?

To aid our thinking, let me present the challenge visually:

If you’re a Christian, baptised as a believer and living for Jesus and you come to a church like ours, you find out that there is a thing called Church Membership, and it’s a small step to take. No problem:

If you come from a different church background it can be a bigger step.

Maybe you need to be baptised before you can join, but it’s a step you can take if you want to. Sometimes people don’t want to (“… but then they’re probably better off in another church if they don’t love Jesus properly like we do? Right???” NO!!! WRONG!!! )

So we give people a bit of time, but ultimately they have to choose, and sometimes churches have pressured people unhelpfully.

If you come from a non-Christian background and try to join us, the step is even bigger. There may be some significant things to sort out before you can join, but if you have what some Christians might call “a respectable lifestyle”, you can manage it in the end … although it may take a while to get baptised and to adjust some of your behaviours and relationships, but maybe, in a year or two, you can climb the ladder and join.

Many have made this step … although I know it can take a long time, and I also know that some have not been able to make it. Some have sadly walked away. One person in our church’s recent history took seven years to climb that ‘ladder’. I’m amazed he stuck around so long. But what many Christians would think of as “a respectable lifestyle” is disappearing fast.

If you come from a non-Christian background now, it is increasingly likely that the step will look more like this: 

There is a wall you can hardly begin to climb. There is so much that needs to change and be addressed before you’re ready for membership as we have had it, that you could be looking at years – and I mean years – of work. All the while knowing that you don’t yet belong. And if we hold back on discipleship until someone becomes a member, we are just making the problem worse.

Remember: our culture has pretty much rejected Christian morality.

People no longer have any pressure to live to a Biblical norm; in fact the opposite is true. Britain today is not a Christian country. Many churches are dying. And this change has come fast … certainly within my lifetime.

I believe that our culture is in a mess (see newspapers for details). I also believe that we need to care. Really we need to pray for revival, but whether God moves in that way or not, the answer is not for us to shout about Christian morality from the spiritual cliff tops, nor is it to have a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality. Instead we need to love and care for the lost, and to let God break our hearts for this nation And we need to get closer to those we want to reach and allow them to get closer to us.

But we can so easily live in a Christian bubble, where all we know are our Christian friends. And we can live in our Christian bubble happily, while the rest of the world goes to hell. Many in the work place will know how different the world is now to how it used to be. Some Christian values that were once cultural norms, are now considered to be abhorrent and hateful. The Christian lifestyle is now abnormal! 

To quote a good friend of mine:

“The nice Christian families are already in the nice Christian churches”

We are no longer going to grow much by transfer growth. Those days are virtually gone. We need to reach into our messy world like never before and, if we are to do that, we need to address the barriers that people coming into the church from our modern UK culture will face.

So I believe we need to find a new approach to church membership that will help the broken people coming out of our broken culture, and not hinder them.

So what do we do? Is there a way forward that can work?

I believe there is, and I’ll talk about it in my future blogs

 

 

One of the biggest changes we’ve made at Welcome Church is our approach to church membership, or what we now call belonging. This week I will be blogging each day to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. To understand it fully, please start at Part 1 rather than jumping in half way through. This blog is Part 2 …

In part 1 we talked about the culture of Belong, Believe Become, which left us with a question:

What about Church Membership?

Membership has been a part of the life and culture of our church for years. Some have been members for longer than I’ve been alive.

Belong, Believe, Become has an impact on this. If belonging is open to all, do we no longer have membership? And if ‘belonging’ is no longer defined as membership, what are we saying? Are we saying that someone who is not yet a Christian is now able to be a church member? Do we have a defined membership anymore? This needs careful thought and first we need to consider:

Where does Church Membership come from?

The first thing to understand is where church membership as we’ve practised it comes from, and the answer surprised me. The first thing to say is that membership as churches like ours often define it doesn’t come from the Bible. The Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 12v27:

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it”

but to apply that to being added to a specific local church’s membership list is to misuse the meaning of the passage. The passage simply means that all Christians everywhere are a part of Jesus’ body on earth, as though we were his physical ‘members’ – meaning the arms, legs, feet, hands etc.

To avoid confusion, some modern translations phrase it like this:

“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it”

They’ve changed that word from ‘member’ to ‘part’ in order to remain true to the original text and avoid confusion!

But what else does the Bible say about this?

The Bible makes it clear that, from the earliest days of the church, there were clearly defined local churches. The people who belonged to them knew that they belonged to them and the church leaders knew who their “flock” was, and knew who they were responsible for.

And people could also be put out of a church fellowship too – the ultimate form of church discipline – so there must have been some sense of them first belonging. But there are many different ways to achieve those aims.

So where did our long standing approach originate from?

It’s no surprise that over the years many different ways of being church have been expressed. I would not claim for a moment to have insight into the practice of all types of church over 2000 years of worldwide history! No doubt someone somewhere will know far more than I do, and good for them.

But as a former Baptist Church (of 139 years standing no less) we have the joy of knowing exactly where what we do came from. We can trace it back very easily. The basis of church membership as we have always applied it started not with the Bible, but with a group of Christians called the Anabaptists, who were founded in the 1500’s in Europe. These people were our forerunners, and we can trace our history back to them

Anabaptists

The Anabaptists were a very zealous, faithful and radical group of Christians, who had rediscovered believer’s baptism: the baptism of believers, after conversion, by full immersion in water, after conversion.  In a culture where Christianity was pretty much the national sport, where almost everyone was christened as a baby (which, with genuine love and respect to our Anglican brothers and sisters, is not what the Bible means by Baptism) and where the state church held huge political power, they began to practice believer’s baptism, by immersion … and they suffered for it.

Some were martyred for their beliefs, including in this country. We burned people at the stake over this issue in the UK just 400 years ago. If you search for ‘Anabaptists’ on line, you will find this image comes up, showing persecution of this group by both Catholics and Protestants alike:

The problem was, these people had broken with the state church. They were no longer under the authority of the Bishops, or of the Pope or the King as the head of the church. They believed in the priesthood of all believers, so they made many decisions by voting to discern God’s will together. And worst of all they were re-baptising people who had been christened as babies. Anabaptists means ‘again baptists’.

In the midst of this persecution they needed to protect themselves, because the members of their churches could vote to change their  church practice, their theology and their leadership. Also outsiders might spy on them and report them to the authorities.

So if you wanted to belong to an Anabaptist church, they wanted to know certain things about you first:

1. That you were a Christian
2. That your lifestyle matched up
3. That you had been, or would be, baptised, after coming to faith in Jesus, by full immersion in water.  If not you could not join them, because this sort of Baptism defined them and they were suffering for it.

The other members then had a chance to approve of you … in case someone knew something about you that others didn’t

So to be a member you had to be a Christian, to prove your faith through life change, to have been baptised as a believer by full immersion, and to have been interviewed and approved of by the other members. And that helped protect the church from persecution. 

To quote a good friend of mine who is a top quality theologian and far more qualified than I shall ever be:

“The Anabaptists put this in place and no one has reviewed it since”

Although that type of persecution has ended for us in the UK, and although this is no longer a Christian nation where everyone is in the state church, the system of membership they began has remained largely unchanged.

It has been replicated in new churches of all sorts ever since, including ours, with perhaps one small change: eldership ‘approval’ replaced congregational ‘approval’ as we ‘rediscovered’ Biblical teaching on eldership, and congregational voting ceased.

Some real benefits

Of course, this sort of membership does bring some real benefits, such as:

• A clarity about who is ‘in’ and who is not
• A moment to really encourage baptism
• A moment to challenge ‘lifestyle issues’
• A route to good discipleship
• A call to a deeper level of commitment
• An ownership of a shared church vision
• A protection in terms of who can lead or serve in certain ministries or roles

Sadly sometimes it’s also used (or misused) by leaders as a handy lever to motivate people to behave how they want them to … the ultimate threat being expulsion!

But in UK culture today it presents a growing challenge:

Increasingly this can make us seem closed. It can make us seem exclusive. It can make us seem heavy and controlling. It can make us seem like a cult. And it can prevent people from feeling that they are able to belong with us while they explore faith.

In fact many churches are finding that this is becoming an increasingly significant barrier to new people, and therefore an obstacle to people meeting Jesus through us.

So what are we to do? How do we respond to this without throwing out the baby with the bath water? Should we just abandon the idea of membership?

I will address this in my future blogs.

One of the biggest changes we’ve made at Welcome Church is our approach to church membership, or what we now call belonging. This week I will be blogging each day to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it. To understand it fully, please start at Part 1 rather than jumping in half way through. This blog is Part 1 …

Belong, Believe, Become

Over the last year we’ve talked a lot about our church culture and the impact it can have on how we reach out with the good news of Jesus. By now you may be very familiar with the words: Belong, Believe, Become (after all, we did preach a whole series on it – click here for details!)

Here is the background to these three powerful words:

As churches we want people to do three things:

1. Believe in Jesus – to be born again
2. Belong to a local church – to be an active part of God’s family
3. Become – to be all God has called them to be (sometimes people say ‘Behave’ rather than ‘Become’)

The order that we put these three things in matters immensely; it has a huge impact on how we do things as a church!

Looking back, I can see that the church I grew up in ordered them like this:

1. Behave (and it was behave, not become)
2. Believe
3. Belong

So, if you were the right sort of person you got invited. Over time you might hear about Jesus and, if you then came to faith and got baptised, and your life was at a good enough standard, you might be allowed to belong as a church member – we even got to vote on whether you were allowed to join. Belonging was defined by a formal membership list. 

Then I found a Newfrontiers church, and we ordered it more like this:

1. Believe
2. Behave/Become (it was a mix of the two)
3. Belong

So we reached out and invited anyone and everyone, and if you came to faith we would begin to disciple you. If you then got baptised and sorted your life out to an acceptable standard of Christian living (whatever we perceive that to be!) you were allowed to become a member. Again, belonging was defined as membership.

This approach has been my default position for as long as I have been leading churches … until now.

In the past I sometimes used the phrase, “Membership before ministry” (Perhaps I just like alliteration).  But if you wanted to do something in church, whether it was lead worship or put out a chair, you almost always had to be a member first because we wanted people who would “do things for the glory of God”.

This worked okay most of the time, and in fact it even encouraged some people towards baptism; they wanted to belong and get involved so they took this step. And as I look back now I question both the phrase and the motivation it gave people.

Is it right to get baptised with “getting involved in serving” as the main motivation? Is that Biblical?

UK culture has changed a lot in recent years

As UK culture changed, this approach began to work less and less effectively. At my previous church we changed from having a long membership course over several evenings to having a one day course on a Saturday. Then we reduced it to half a day.

We did that because many new people went from being keen to join, to actually seeing membership as irrelevant, unhelpful, unnecessary and even exclusive. What a change! And dropping the length of the course didn’t help to motivate people.

So people would start to follow Jesus, get baptised, love the church and make friends, but the question of membership got harder and harder. It was like it simply “did not compute”.

What should we do with the many Christians who were clearly part of us but had not officially joined … and who were often more committed than others who had officially joined but almost never attended?

I was very resistant to changing anything, but the reality was it wasn’t working like it used to. And asking around this was and is a growing issue for a lot of churches.

I personally believe the reason is down to cultural issues: UK culture has changed, the questions people are asking about life have changed, the felt needs of people have changed, the views of people towards the church have changed.

The gospel hasn’t changed, but the culture we live in has changed, so how we reach out needs to change as well – or we run a huge risk.

Climbing a mountain

It was during my Sabbatical break, while I was climbing Ben Nevis, that God spoke to me about this issue.

At the top of Ben Nevis are the ruins of an old hotel.It was once a thriving business, but it’s now a ruin. People still climb the mountains and people still use hotels – but this business died. And as I stood there I believe God spoke to me:

“If you don’t change the culture within your church, you could go the same way as these ruins”

That brought me up short and set me on a journey towards a different way of thinking about and ordering these words, so we now order them like this: Belong, Believe, Become.

1. Belong

First if all, we want to invite people, Christians and not yet Christians alike, to choose to belong with us; to find a family and a place of acceptance within our church community. Our message is, “Come as you are”.

We don’t want to be forcing life change onto people who don’t have a personal faith in Jesus (or onto those who do for that matter!) and we’re not looking to correct the externals in someone’s life so that God will somehow accept them and we can accept them too; that’s not the gospel.

Don’t forget, we preached a whole series on this, so do listen to that again

2. Believe

Secondly, we want people to believe in Jesus; to find a personal faith in him and be born again. Once people find a place to belong, we are able to model the love and the life of Jesus to them; we can tell them more about him; we can help them understand more about what he did for them; we can help them know both how lost and how loved they are.

We want to see people genuinely and powerfully born again, which of course leads on to life transformation, and things like baptism in water and the Holy Spirit.

3. Become

From that place of faith and new life, we want to help people to become who God created them to be. Once people come to faith in Jesus, they change; once they have a relationship with God, the Holy Spirit brings about transformation.

“Come as you are” … but once you encounter Jesus you won’t stay as you are.

When God is at work in someone they change; inside and out. Sometimes people even look different once they get saved!

And we have a huge part to play in this too; our discipleship of people is crucial.

A year of change

Over the last year lots of Welcome Church people have spoken to me about how their understanding has changed, their attitudes have changed, their expectations have changed and the way they view people has changed. This is good news, and I have changed in these areas as well.

We are becoming Welcome Church in nature as well as in name, and we are seeing a lot more people who are not yet Christians attending our meetings and becoming part of us in various ways – that’s a good part of how we’re now growing.

But what about membership?

Well … I’ll come to that in the following blog posts.