Salvation (and Church Membership)
Though this post is not exactly about whether or not church membership is necessary for salvation, I’ll address it briefly so you know where I stand. I believe that a follower of Jesus should serve and love some community simply because we were designed to be in community with each other, and the Bible frequently speaks to the Church as a community rather than as individuals. So fellowship with believers is required for salvation only in the same sense that “faith without works is dead” - which is to say that one who has been saved will naturally do it out of love for Jesus, but doing it does not ensure salvation. However, I do not believe that formal, card-carrying church membership is required for salvation, though apparently some people do. By itself, formal church membership doesn’t bother me, but tying it to salvation does. Anyway this post is more about how I think this issue is indicative of a larger “over-formalizing” of our religion that we tend to do.
Coast Vineyard has a much more informal approach towards church membership than most churches. The official line given at our Welcome Lunches is that if you can identify your ministry (who and how you serve) and your community (usually a home group, or Bible study) then you are a church member. The members of Coast are the people that serve and are in relationship with the other members of Coast, but there is no membership roster. If for some reason we wanted to enumerate the people who were members at Coast, ministry leaders and home group leaders would simply rattle off the names of their friends.
I began connecting the concepts of formal and informal church membership with salvation when Im Jai House asked us to briefly state our theological beliefs, mentioning (among other things) our doctrine of salvation. I took “doctrine of salvation” to mean “What one must do to be saved.” I had trouble answering this question. The first answer that I thought of was what I was taught as a child: pray to God, confess your sins, ask for forgiveness, and ask Jesus into your heart. But I’ve come to think this is too simplistic because I have known too many people who have prayed this prayer and continue to live their lives the way they want to. There must be more than this.
But at the same time, I don’t think we have to do “stuff” to get into Heaven. So I was left with this dilemma: the saved must do works, but works do not make one saved. And I realized that I do not actually know where to draw the line between who is, and who is not, saved. I cannot simply say “Because this person asked Jesus into their heart, they are saved”, nor could I say “This person does good deeds, so they are saved.”
What does this have to do with church membership, and Coast’s membership specifically? Well, I used to think the requirements for salvation were just as formal and enumerable as the requirements for church membership. They can be listed out, checked off, and by doing so one can see precisely who is and who is not a member of Heaven. But I’m beginning to think that salvation is farther out of our hands than that - maybe it’s more like membership at Coast than it is like formal church membership. Maybe those who are saved know they are saved, and God knows them. They are in relationship with each other, but there’s no formal application or checklist of requirements that we can somehow hold over God’s head. “See, I did everything on this list, so you have to let me into Heaven.”
I’ll probably come back to this over-formalization problem later. I think about it a lot. I think we often tend to ask “What must I do?” in the sense of “What is the minimum that I have to do to get what I want?” rather than the sense of “What is your will, my Lord?”
I’ll conclude this post with part of what I ended up writing for Im Jai, to clarify any ambiguity there might be about what I believe about salvation:
… We believe that His Son, Jesus, became human to teach us and to die so that, if we accept that He has done this for us, we might not have to die and can live eternally with God. We believe that Jesus rose from the dead, thus conquering death and proving that He can do the same for us.
We believe that accepting Jesus’ death for us means believing in Him as God’s Son and as our Lord and Savior - as the ruler of our lives. We believe that accepting Jesus as the Lord of our lives means doing what He asks by loving God and loving others as we would love ourselves. We believe that we are called to live life this way and to teach others to do the same. …
This issue is complicated, and I realize I’m probably not being as clear as I’d like, so let’s talk about this (i.e. leave comments). If you’re worried I’m being heretical, then I’m probably just not saying what I mean clearly and I’d be happy to try again.
Romans 10:9 says “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” If you only look at that verse, salvation is simple. And yet, actually doing this “simple” act can be very difficult. It is hard to confess Jesus is Lord and really mean it. This is something I find that I need to do constantly; living my life with Jesus as my Lord. Not easy to do. In fact, I think this is one reason why so many people have a hard time becoming Christians; it is hard to surrender your all of your will to God and declare him as Lord. I know this is a major reason why my maternal grandmother refuses to become a Christian. She recognizes that God exists, she even recognizes that she needs God, but what she doesn’t want to do is give her will to God and declare Jesus as Lord of her life.
Ephesians 2:8-10 says ” For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” The book of James emphasizes the idea that faith without works is dead. We are not saved by our works, but there is work that is prepared for us to do and we are to do it. So what about people who are saved, but don’t do the work God has called them to do? Look at the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30)…the one who doesn’t do what God charged him to do will live with the following: “For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
I think what is key here is that we are not the ones who judge who is saved and who isn’t. That is in God’s hands. We can only be responsible for our walk with God and for doing what He called us to do.
I’m not sure I’ve made myself any clearer than you, but this is the short version. Thanks for challenging my faith…it is good for me to articulate these things.
Ok Adam, you have opened up a big tutorial as you have hit on a number of considerations. First of all, there is nothing we can do whatsoever to gain any semblance of salvation. God has done it all through Jesus Christ. Remember, Jesus’ last words on the cross were, “It is finished”. It wasn’t His life that was finished, it was that the work of salvation was finished, once and for all. Being a church member or any other “check list item” has nothing to do with our salvation. Adding to what Jesus did on the cross states that that act was insufficient. On the contrary, it is finished.
Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear in Eph 2:8 & 9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” and again in 2 Tim 1:9 “who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity,”.
You are right that once saved we will want to do good works. That should be an outer manifestation of our salvation. This is stated in Eph 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.” In other words, we, through Jesus Christ, are created for good works. You obey your parents because you love them. In similar manner you obey God and serve Him because you love Him.
Now, can you tell whether someone is saved as result of manifestation of good works in their lives? That would be nice. However, only God knows the heart of each of us. It is not ours to judge what is in the heart of someone by their lives. A sad indictment is when someone truly loves God but doesn’t show it. But even there, we cannot and should not judge lest we be judged.
Now when we stand at Heaven’s door and present God with our checklist, there is only one item on your list that He is interested in, “Did you accept My free gift of Salvation?” If the answer is no, it’s tough luck buddy, even if you have a thousand other items you can point to. Isa 64:6 makes it clear, “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”
Now regarding the importance of church membership. You are quite correct when you state that it is for fellowship with other believers. The best example I have heard is a log burning on its own soon burns out but when burning with a number of other logs can burn more profusely. I find that people, even with a formal membership program in a church, can be flakey in their involvement. I would think that with an informal membership people would tend to be even more flakey, except for the real hard core people that you mention. A natural human characteristic is a sense of belonging. A formal membership gives them that. But remember my earlier comment, this does not substitute for true salvation. In my mind an interesting sidelight to a formal membership is when talking to nonbelievers, there is a stronger association with your beliefs when you say “I am a member of such and such church” rather than “I go to such and such a church”. Just as people look for a sense of belonging they also associate with strong commitments, one that formal membership would provide. Now, clearly I never said anything Scriptural except to try to relate to natural human tendencies. However, this can be used to open doors with people. In stating you are a member of a church they are more likely to say, “oh, you are one of those” whereas saying that you go to a church the response might be, “yeah, I do occassionally too”. A matter of semantics maybe but I have found it to be true, again because of natural human behavior. The idea here is to use every opportunity to plant seeds, let Apollos water and God cause the growth - that’s what it is all about.
Hope I didn’t bore anyone with my discourse.
Ok, Lucinda beat my by 20 minutes but I think you will see Eph 2:8 - 10 quoted a lot.
Thanks for giving my post some Biblical backing. I tend to gloss over those things in my laziness, only because nobody has challenged me on the Biblical basis for my ramblings here yet, but rest assured I have a Biblical basis for my opinions.
I think you’d be surprised. There’s potential good and bad in either system (which is to say that neither system is inherently good or bad), though I personally prefer the informal approach.
In formal church membership, you can get a sense of belonging - in the same way you get a sense of belonging when you own a team jersey or a scout badge. At the same time, you can get people who do the minimum - they take the class, sign whatever, go to church - and stop there. They consider themselves members, vote when they’re supposed to, but aren’t really involved in the life of the church because they don’t have to be.
With informal church membership, you can also get a sense of belonging. It’s not the same sense as getting a team jersey, but it can be just as strong. It’s more like the sense of belonging as in a family (especially in the sense of the Heine Extended Family, where good friends are frequently adopted as one of us) - there’s no badge or application, but once you’re in you know it, and you’re involved because you want to be. At the same time, there’s the potential for people who drift in and out and never feel any commitment to the church because there’s no formal application.
Though in my experience, most people who stick around Coast for more than a few weeks get involved - that is, I don’t know of many long-term drifters. The members of Coast aren’t just the “hard core”, but rather the majority. By which I mean to say that informal church membership works in practice.
I think this is an underlying question that is often being asked when we ask “What must I do to be saved?” Follow-up questions from me would be: were they ever saved at all? And does it matter from our point of view, since we are called to do the work and to teach others to do the same regardless?
I am definitely going to talk about this again soon. There’s a lot of junk here.
This sounds a lot like what Dallas Willard talked about in The Divine Conspiracy - specifically, talking about salvation as “bar-code Christianity”. There must be more than a mental assent to a doctrine in order to define salvation. There has to be Jesus’ life in that person. To be sure, it’s not something we can decide - only God knows for sure. But I think with some people Jesus’ life is more evident than with other people.
-M@
The way I see it, we’re all saved personally and individually, but we’re saved into a community. When we’re saved, we’re inducted into a family, and we’re given a job. One can be saved and give up all the earthly benefits of the transaction, but who’d want to?
I believe that there are people who are ’saved’ who aren’t in fellowship, in the same sense that there are people who are ’saved’ who are in all sorts of sinful behaviors that remove themselves from the fullest experience of God’s blessing.
As a good 4-and-a-half point Calvinist, I believe that it’s God who chooses and starts the work of regeneration in each believer, which subsequently — often immediately — produces faith, an acceptance of both the doctrine of (to some extent) and the life of (to some extent) Christ.
In short, it’s possible to be a ’saved’ and not possess ‘membership’ in a church in the traditional sense. But it’s not possible to be saved without being inducted into Church membership in a larger sense.
To Heine Patriarch…I may have beat you by 20 minutes, but you were much more eloquent….
Heine Patriarch stated that, “Now when we stand at Heaven’s door and present God with our checklist, there is only one item on your list that He is interested in, “Did you accept My free gift of Salvation?” ”
I would say that there is no checklist whatsoever in heaven, because that acceptance is a work. That is one of the points of Christ’s coming in order to remove the checklist completely (although we were always saved by grace through faith as Hebrews points out). I am also Calvinist so this is where I am coming from.
That said, there *is* sort of a checklist when we get to heaven because our good works will be judged. But we are saved by grace through faith UNTO good works. That is to say, the good works are the evidence of our salvation.
Ultimately church membership doesn’t save you, you don’t even save yourself… God saves you.
BTW, Adam you probably already know this, but the stuff you are pondering (although not related to Church membership) is ’soteriology’. You might be able to Google that for varying perspectives.
Brian - I stand corrected. The checklist really is blank if the implication of having the one I indicated on there is “work” on our part. It is only through what GOd has done - absolutely nothing I have done. As the song “Who Am I?” says: “Not because of who I am, but because of what you’ve done, not because of what I’ve done, but because of Who You are”. I was simply trying to make that point, God is only interested where we stand in our relationship to God.
Adam, I shouldn’t have gone from Scripture to personal opinion on membership. Informal or formal membership in any church is, as Isa 64:6 says, “as filthy rags” if it is considered as something on our part to get into heaven. Jesus said it very specifically, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, NO MAN comes to the Father but by Me.” - period. I have always found it to be the case that when we wander from Scripture to personal opinion the focus goes from God to a personal level. By using Scripture, any arguing has do be with God and His Word and not at a personal level. Guess Who wins.
Hi Adam. I have much to say about this in addition to all that’s been said, but I have finals to study for sooooooooooooo maybe we can talk if it comes up in random conversation. :D