Learning to be a Church Member

Spirituality of commitment and stability

The purpose of this guide is to help you understand what membership at Renewal Church means, and to help you discern whether God is calling you to commit your life to this community.

At Renewal, membership is not first about joining an organization. It is about recognizing what God has already done: drawing us into his own life, uniting us to Christ and his people in baptism, and placing us among particular people in a particular place. This guide walks through those three realities, following Hebrews 10:19–25.

As you read, keep three questions before you:

1. What is God already doing in my life?

2. Who has God used to pass the faith on to me?

3. Is God calling me to stay, and to be faithful, here?

Each section ends with questions for reflection. Take your time with them, and bring them to the conversations you have along the way.

Introduction

Membership is a commitment to deepen our whole lives in the Triune God. We live out our baptismal identity where God has placed us, and we keep going in faith together. Local church membership is simply how we live out our membership in the body of Christ. The church is begun and sustained by God, not by us, and we want to pay fresh attention to that reality and take it seriously.

Membership at Renewal Church is, above all, a commitment to listening to God. 

Because of our baptism, we are being shaped as a resurrection people in a particular place. 

Membership is:

• An invitation into the life of the people of God.

• A contemplation: noticing God’s presence in all of life and in the people around us.

• A listening: hearing where God has placed us and who God has placed in our lives.

Together, these move us away from putting ourselves at the centre of faith, and into the life of the God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

We call it a membership process, but it is really about discerning our calling and practising a spirituality of commitment and stability: learning to stay rooted where God has placed us. What, where, and who is he calling you? Live into this deeply and more securely.

Local Membership Is a Living-Out of Spiritual Realities

In the letter to the Hebrews, we find a lofty description of what it means to follow Jesus: a pursuit grounded in the mysterious reality of communion with God. Out of this communion comes mutuality with others, and a call to pay attention and persevere amid persecution.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

- Hebrews 10:19–25

This passage gives our membership its shape. It moves in three steps, and the rest of this guide follows them:

1. Draw near to God — securing our life in the Triune God.

2. Hearts sprinkled, bodies washed — receiving our baptismal identity.

3. Hold fast, spur one another on, keep meeting — becoming a faithful people for the persons around us.

1. Securing Our Life in the Triune God

“Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings…”

Our membership process does not start with the question “How do we join this group?” or “How do I belong?” We frame and prioritize the logic of our activities and life around participating in the life of God. The first question is: What is God doing here? God is the one who acts and speaks first. We embrace this attentiveness in a variety of ways, but what is central is this: if we have faith in Jesus Christ, we participate in the life of the Triune God.

What does this awareness look like? Three voices help us:

• Eugene Peterson reminds us that the goal of all Christian belief and practice—worship, family, work, leisure—is simply the living of what we know of God: “life, life and more life.” A life lived to God’s glory has a well-marked road, the Way Jesus reveals. (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 1)

• Edith Humphrey describes a full-bodied spirituality as continually inviting the Spirit to dwell in us—and doing so together, as the body of Christ. (Ecstasy and Intimacy, 277)

• Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove writes that “the practice of stability is the means by which God’s house becomes our home.” Stability rests on God’s grace and presence, not on our effort; yet it is also a practice, a way of life in which we are transformed into people who know the ways of God.

For reflection

4. Where have you noticed God acting first in your life, before you went looking for him?

5. What would change if your first question about church were “What is God doing here?”

2. Our Baptismal Identity Comes Before Our Local Church Identity

“…having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.”

There is much mystery in how baptism “works,” but the waters of baptism, in a very real and embodied way, unite us to Christ and the Triune God. The World Council of Churches’ ecumenical Lima statement (Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 1982) affirms that the Spirit is at work in our lives before, in, and after baptism, sealing us as God’s sons and daughters and nurturing our faith until its fulfilment. Baptism unites us to Christ, to each other, and to the Church of every time and place; our common baptism is “a basic bond of unity.”

Our real membership

Our real membership, in a sense, is to be baptized into the Body of Christ. So we need to be careful in how we speak of one another, of other congregations, and of other Churches. Membership at Renewal Church should deepen our appreciation for the people of God, and so for the universal Church. We should be drawn more deeply into this reality.

Faith learned through persons

One dimension of our baptismal identity is the mystery and beauty of how faith is learned through living, breathing persons. We come to believe in God through people whom God has woven into our lives. Who did we learn the faith from? As we learn the Triune reality of our baptismal identity, we recognize that our baptismal and conversion stories are knitted together. That story is a source of our Christian identity: we are children of God through these very real events in our lives.

Paul’s journey of faith was marked by an encounter with the living God on the road to Damascus, yet he was also brought to faith through Ananias:

So Ananias left and entered the house. Then he placed his hands on him and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road you were traveling, has sent me so that you can regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” At once something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized. And after taking some food, he regained his strength.

- Acts 9:17–19

The gift and mystery of baptism

Eugene Peterson notes that we never baptize ourselves; baptism is always done to us, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, within the community. It places our own name in the company of the Trinity, and from that moment “we are no longer merely ourselves by ourselves.” We become ourselves among the community of the baptized. (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 303)

Gordon Smith reminds us that the New Testament knows no such thing as an unbaptized Christian, and freely links baptism with forgiveness (Acts 2:38; 22:16; 1 Pet 3:21). From a sacramental perspective, “to participate in the symbol is to participate in that which is symbolized”: God acts through the waters to bring us into fellowship with himself and his people. Is baptism therefore the direct cause of salvation? Smith answers yes and no. Grace is embodied in us through baptism, yet God is active before and after it, and our experience of regenerating grace may not be tied directly to the moment of baptism. This does not lessen baptism’s power; it reminds us that God’s work is not limited to ours.

For reflection

6. Who are the “Ananiases” in your story - the people through whom God brought you to faith?

7. How might seeing baptism as your real membership change how you speak about other churches?

3. God’s Faithful Love Builds Us into a Faithful People for the Persons Around Us

“Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together…”

Membership is the working-out of our participation in the Triune God, which implicates us in the places where God is also present: in the lives of other believers and in the world. God’s loving-fidelity is central to how he is forming a people. This loving-kindness flows out of the life of God and is for one another. It is not a commitment to an institution.

Christine Pohl helps us see how this loving-fidelity translates. 

God abounds “in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6), and stays faithful even when we fail. A covenant-making, promise-keeping God has formed a people of promise, carried by his own fidelity. We make promises to one another not because we can control the future, but because God’s steadfast love frames our promising. And much of this promise-keeping, Pohl notes, is undramatic: the meetings, the chores, the book-keeping, the welcome. The communities we long for are, in a phrase she borrows, “born of our fidelity to the present.” (Living into Community)

We want to tease out how this fidelity-reflecting love looks and deepens. It is the heart of committing to a place where God has called us together.

“Consider how we may spur one another on”

We need to consider the burdens shared and placed on one another. In the context of fidelity, we are our “brother’s keepers,” taking seriously the commitments and asks of one another. We also cultivate an awareness of the faithfulness shown to us, and respond in genuine gratitude.

Our service (that is, ministry) is always framed in mutuality: our gifts are practised in love to deepen each other in the resurrection life. We are not human resources to be used, nor volunteers to be leveraged. We are a people deepened in the faithful love of God. Practically, local church membership takes this view of one another seriously; perish the thought of “doing more.” Nevertheless, a deepening love for God and each other moves us into readiness to do good.

“Not giving up meeting together”

Fidelity shows itself as consistency. Pohl observes that structures and institutions, though we may be wary of them, are also expressions of fidelity over time. They help us persevere when perseverance is inconvenient or unsatisfying, and they guard us where God’s people are most often tempted: money, sex, and power. Promises may constrain us, but they also anchor us to what we most value. Jean Vanier puts it simply: the essential nourishment of community is “fidelity to the thousand and one small demands of each day.” Promise-keeping is not first of all costly; it is life-giving.

“Let us hold unswervingly”

Commitments take time to grow, and that runs against a culture that demands immediate results. Pohl notes that staying with a community through difficult or uncertain seasons allows progress to be made in spite of the messiness, and slowing down makes room for relationships to be tended.

Some problems cannot be fixed, and some wounds will not fully heal. Patient, grace-filled accompaniment is part of fidelity: being present with our love when we have no solutions to offer. Vanier, after decades in community, concluded that community is less about resolving problems than learning to live with them patiently. Pohl recalls a young friend in a dark season who kept asking, “You won’t give up on me, will you?” We tend to expect people to get better once we have invested in them. Learning to walk alongside those who don’t is an enormous gift.

Stability in community

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove reminds us that being “built together spiritually” (Eph. 2:22) is nothing less concrete than the flesh-and-blood life of Jesus with his disciples. Life in God’s house is life with people every bit as broken as we are. We learn to dwell with God through hospitality, listening, forgiveness, and reconciliation - the daily tasks of life together. In his words, “stability in Christ is always stability in community.” Drawing on Thomas Merton, he notes that monks vow stability to one particular family, and so become signs of what is true for all of us: we are being refashioned into a dwelling place for God, supporting one another like bricks in a wall. (The Wisdom of Stability)

For reflection

8. Who has been faithful to you over time, and how might you thank them?

9. Where are you tempted to measure community by what it produces rather than by faithfulness?

10. What small, daily demand of community life is God asking you to receive as nourishment?

Further Reading

• Edith M. Humphrey, Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit

• Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

• Christine D. Pohl, Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us

• Gordon T. Smith, Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal: Why the Church Should Be All Three

• Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

• World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper No. 111, Lima, 1982)