church membership
April 15, 2010 § 7 Comments
Thinking a lot about church membership these days, and here’s why.
- We’re a very transient church, and need to get to know one another quickly since most people are with us an average of three years. Offering something akin to ‘Membership Class’ gives us the opportunity to know one another quickly, assess where people are at spiritually, and find a place for them to integrate into the church family.
- To increase our ability to disciple people, membership creates a standard that helps us follow up when people are missing, address needs in people’s lives, and facilitate them in finding a place of service.
- Membership creates a sense of belonging, which is important for a multicultural, transient population.
- People need the opportunity to formalize their commitment to a local body of believers.
- Because we come from such diverse backgrounds with different ideas of ‘church,’ it’s important for people to get a sense of what NIC is all about.
But here are the obstacles we face:
- We are a church body that welcomes people at all various stages of spiritual development. We want to continue to be a place where people can struggle with their faith and morality and yet receive guidance and friendship. Membership could create requirements that make the doubters and strugglers feel second class or unwelcome.
- Many people already have membership in other churches since they’re just here for a few years to work or study.
- Membership can easily become a tool for controlling rather than building community, and we definitely don’t want that.
- Membership can easily focus on the institution of church and forget that this is about people who are in real and often difficult spiritual journeys.
So help me out.
Any ideas on how we can be creative in membership? Are there other ways to achieve the same objectives apart from membership?
Here are some more thoughts going through my mind:
Rather than Membership Classes have Welcome Classes where we get to know people and people get to know us.
Rather than a long list of membership requirements in terms of faith and morality, have some basics with some commitments to grow in other areas.
Emphasize that this is more about relating to one another rather than relating to the church organizationally.
I would be interested in what you do in your membership classes.
A friend of mine (a former district superintendent) once lamented that we make it more difficult to get into the Missionary Church than it is to get into the kingdom. We try to keep our membership requirements fairly basic but include expectations for growth. I know of one pastor who was working on a set of membership requirements and then a set of leadership requirements. When I was in Ohio, we lived near Wright Patterson AFB and had numerous military attend the church. They were often there only 2 years. Many of them had membership in a home church they planned to return to. We simply allowed for a dual membership.
Have no idea what we do in our membership classes because we’ve never had one!
But I think the idea of a Welcoming Class is more the direction that we will go. Though there need to be some basic convictions that define our community in regards to doctrine and practice, we’ll be emphasizing more that ‘members’ are moving a common direction with Jesus at the center.
I’d have no problem with dual membership, but some churches don’t allow it. For that reason we’re trying to avoid the ‘membership’ language.
NIC has the necessary structures in place but I think it just needs some firing up. Considering the background of most of the church members who obviously account for new members through word-of-mouth, there is the need to feel very welcomed and that sense of belonging on the first visit. If you know what I mean Pastor Rick. The little leaflet that is currently distributed for vistors information can be complemented by the work of a sort of ushering ministry that has the task of welcoming new members properly and taking say five or ten minutes at the end of service to introduce them to other members. Its sounds intentional but its very okay and it works. People just have to feel the first time that there is a place with lovely people away from their places of work etc……I also think that the most worrying issue is that of loneliness during the entire week. We have been blessed with an E-Age and we have to maximize its use. Will sound like prying but its not.Making few phone calls, sending texts, emails to old and new members once a week at least before Sunday to check on them is not a bad idea at all since not all members make it to mid week meetings. People need more than the Sunday love, smile and encouragement. Mid week storms are the toughest to cruise through
.
Also the more members engage with each other, the better. I think moving bible discussions and prayer meetings around peoples places is one way of doing this. It gives church leaders the chance to get a hands on knowledge of what people are really going through because it isnt all people that are courageous to approach church leaders with their problems. This will work well for student members who can host such meetings as few minutes can be set aside to talk about social issues such as how they are faring with studies and so forth.
In addition, its obvious that some people seem to be seen doing almost everything because they volunteer to do them. Matbe one way of plugging people into ministries is not just announcing the need for volunteers but approaching them and asking them to join ministries that the leaders feel they can contribute to.It has to be done in such a way that members can become open in telling leaders that they will rather prefer joining some other ministry they feel they will do better at. Most people are interested in doing something in the church but they jsut dont know what they are good at. This is necessary because using announcements alone to plug people into ministries and participation just gets the same faces and it undersores the objective.
All these actions work in tandem with each other. All ministries have to be fired up simultaneously to see the network effect.
Thanks for some great insight, Anthony. Our challenge is keeping people connected when we have so many ‘natural’ divisions based on life status, culture, language, etc. Communicating, following up with new visitors, etc. can be very time and energy consuming. Because we’re so transient, we must continually identify and equip people who can help with this, but that in itself takes work.
There’s a constant tension in leadership between balancing the organizational and the organic – the programs and the relationships. Both are needed for the local Christian community to function and grow.
The challenge with developing a membership program is ensuring that it remains primarily relational and organic. If its just organizational and program based then it becomes a burden to both those who lead the membership ministry and the members themselves. We definitely don’t want that.
Here’s what we’ll experiment with:
1. Continue with the Contact Information Cards that people can fill out when they come the first time.
2. Someone in the church will make personal contact with each guest shortly after they visit.
3. Once a month we’ll hold a ‘Welcome Class’ to get to know people a bit better.
4. At that class people will be invited to ‘join’ NIC if they’d like.
5. If they want to formally join, then one of the elders will take them through a ‘Welcome Interview’ that helps us get to know them even better and integrate them into a small group and/or ministry. It will also provide opportunity to hear and meet their needs – spiritual and otherwise.
This is the program side of it. The goal is to keep it simple. But we’ll have to keep emphasizing the importance of love, acceptance, and welcoming those who are new. There are so many in our city that are alone. As we’ll talk about this morning, there are three things that are crucial: believing, belonging, and becoming. The goal of the membership program is to focus on the second one.
Hey, Rick!
I think the discussion regarding membership is an interesting one, particularly given that many churches have taken a far more relaxed attitude regarding it. I think much of the current trend away from clearly-defining membership is being driven by the much larger trend of mobility and transiency in Western culture. Gone is the day when people grow up and old in the communities in which they were born.
Though I understand the dilemmas involved here, I do think we are losing something by loosening our definitions of membership. As I reflect on the early church, it strikes me that they did not have formal membership status. Instead, they understood that accepting the covenant offered in Christ also meant entering covenant with Christ’s family. I think that this is really the heart of what church participation should be – that our adoption by God also means adoption by His family.
Given this emphasis, why not call the class, “Understanding God’s Family at NIC”? Topics could involve the history of NIC and of the Church worldwide, what is expected as a “member” of the family (the early church did have some expectations), the role of God as Father, the role of leadership, etc. Rather than having a simple indication of membership, how much more wonderful it would be to have an adoption ceremony. Throw a party. Give them a symbol of their adoption as a gift.
It strikes me that all believers are family members, but this offers no distinction regarding those who accept the family covenant in a local church. It may be necessary to associate the idea of entering into covenant with the NIC family with the idea of local adoption, as well.
These are some of my initial thoughts, and there may be some, as of yet, unrealized implications of these ideas. However, my hope in them is that we can recapture the sense of family that God intended to create in the Church.
Hey Mike. I like the idea of ‘adoption.’ It retains some biblical significance and recognizes that we’re a surrogate family of sorts for those who are only temporarily in Nicosia. Have you seen this done anywhere else?
We’ve taken the first step of developing a covenant and have had quite a few returned and signed. Now the responsibility is on leadership to follow up with this and make it meaningful and useful in the discipleship of others.
To make the most of this we need more leaders who can own the responsibility of integrating people into the church, discipling them, making them feel welcome and helping them serve. That’s the challenge right now.
Rick