I grew up in a Disciples church. I went to Sunday School. I went to Vacation Bible School. I was an acolyte!
And when I graduated from third grade, the church gave me my very own Bible, signed by the minister. And I really did read it each night before I went to bed.
And then, a year or two later, I got invited to attend the Pastor's Class, which would prepare me for baptism.
For six weeks, I and a few others my age spent one hour with the pastor each Wednesday after school, to learn about the Bible, the church, and the Christian faith. We even got prizes, like pencils and rulers and stickers, for memorizing the books of the Bible.
And then, on a spring day like today, during the morning worship service, we stood up and made our confession of faith. The minister asked us if we believed that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, the Lord and Savior of the world.
And we said YES!
And then, the following week, we were baptized.
I was told that making the confession of faith and being baptized meant that I was a member of the church.
And being a member meant several things...
Being a member meant that I could take communion. Back in the day, many congregations didn't want you to take communion until you were baptized. The thinking was that you shouldn't take communion until you understood something about it, until you understood that it was more than just a snack.
Being a member meant that I could vote at congregational meetings. Every year we elected new deacons, elders, and board officers. In the pastor's class I had learned what each of those positions entailed. Now I could vote for them.
But not only could I vote; being a member also meant that I myself was eligible to be nominated for one of these positions. I could be a deacon! That is, if I had a suit to wear. Deacons always wore suits. And deacons were always male. Only males could be deacons or elders. Females could be deaconesses.
So it wasn't long before my parents got me a suit and I became a deacon!
Things have changed a lot since then!
Even before I left home to go to college, my home church began allowing women to be elders and deacons. And they also began allowing people who didn't have a suit to wear serve communion. Incredible, right?
Things continued changing. Eventually I went to seminary, and one day my professor who taught the theology of worship went so far as to question why children couldn't receive communion.
Of course, I had my answer to that: children should wait until they are old enough to understand. But my professor said communion is a meal of great thanksgiving, not too different from that feast we celebrate on the fourth Thursday of every November. Yet we don't forbid children from participating in our family Thanksgiving meals, do we? We allow them to participate, to eat, and over time they learn the significance of the meal through their participation.
They learn by participating.
Why should communion be any different?
I had to admit, he had a good point.
So I agreed that anyone could take communion. Even unbaptized children.
At the time, it was a stretch for me; but today, I can't imagine NOT welcoming ANYONE to the Lord's table, for any reason.
If I invite you into my house on Thanksgiving, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t have any turkey. And if I invite you to church on Sunday morning, there’s no way I’m going to tell you that you can’t receive communion.
But because I had originally learned that taking communion was tied to being a member, I did start wondering just what it actually means to be a member of the church. What does it mean? I had learned as a child that being a member meant that you could receive communion, but now that definition was changing.
So I started asking people: what does it mean to be a member?
I acted like I was engaging in the socratic method of teaching - teaching by asking questions, like Jesus did when he said, “Who do people say that I am? Who do YOU say that I am?” But really, I just didn’t want to admit that I myself - a pastor - wasn’t sure what it meant to be a member.
What does it mean? Is being allowed to vote the only reason to become a member? Is being allowed to vote for deacons and elders and board officers ...the only reason to get baptized?
If that’s all it means, then no wonder we’re not very good at evangelism. No wonder we’re not very good at getting people to join the church.
I’ve heard that some churches have stopped keeping track of membership altogether. Membership doesn’t really matter, they say. There are members who never participate, and there are nonmembers who are very active, and who’s to say that just because you have an asterisk next to your name in the church directory that you are any better of a Christian than anyone else?
More and more, this way of thinking made sense to me. Why do we even need to keep track of membership?
On the other hand, I knew that the denomination wants us to keep track of members, and I eventually learned that the government wants us to keep track of members as well. For legal reasons, we need to know who is a member and who isn’t; who has a say in the business of the church, and who doesn’t.
In other words: who gets to vote, and who doesn’t.
That is important.
But it’s not why people join the church.
Isn’t there something more to being a church member? Isn’t there something more to baptism than that? Did John the Baptist summon people to be baptized just so they could vote on board officers? Is that why Jesus told his followers to baptize people?
Of course not.
We do need to keep track of members. But more important than membership is what today’s scripture talks about.
Discipleship.
Jesus told his followers, those he had already called to be disciples, to go into all the world, and make disciples of people from every nation… and he told them to baptize them as a sign of their discipleship.
Applied to the church today, a disciple is a member… but that’s not all a disciple is. A disciple is a member, but a disciple is so much more.
A member gets to vote, but a disciple is present. A disciple is passionate. A disciple is committed.
Committed to the way of Jesus.
A disciple is someone who is constantly learning. An apprentice.
A disciple is someone who wants to grow in faith.
A disciple is someone who wants to love and serve others, as Jesus loved and served.
A disciple is someone who is being transformed, and who invites others to transformation.
In some organizations, members expect to receive. You join a fitness club, you expect to receive the benefits. You join a wine club, you expect to receive the benefits. You join the petroleum club, you expect to receive the benefits.
And that’s fine… except when it comes to church membership. Church membership isn’t like that.
So it makes sense that, in the New Beginnings program, we were presented with a chart that showed the differences between being a member and being a disciple. A lot of people think of church membership the same way they think of membership in any other organization.
But it’s not. Church membership is different. Church membership is based on discipleship.
In our New Beginnings material that chart shows the difference between a membership model and a discipleship model. I’m not ready to completely throw out the idea of membership, but we definitely do need to think of membership in a different way. We need to think of membership in terms of discipleship.
In the church, the two are linked.
Every member of the church should think of themself as a disciple.
A disciple is a person who has been transformed. A member may or may not have had their life transformed.
It is quite easy to be a member of a church yet keep living as if Jesus is nothing more than a curiosity.
It is quite easy to attend church as a member, but disciples don't just attend church. Disciples know that they ARE the church.
A disciple is someone who has been transformed.
And the church needs to have people who have been transformed. The church needs to have people whose lives have been radically changed by the teachings of Jesus; people who have surrendered themselves to Christ; people who have read the Sermon on the Mount and have found a radically new way of living calling to them... people who have been born again.
The goal of our new beginnings program is to transform our church, to make our church born again, but a transformed church starts with transformed people.
Making disciples of all nations - is about transforming the world.
But only a transformed church can transform the world.
And only transformed people can transform the church.
Aye you ready to be transformed?
The church will not be transformed unless the people who make up the church are transformed. The church will not be able to make disciples of all nations unless the people in the church are themselves disciples, people whose lives have been radically altered by the life-changing message of Jesus Christ.
This whole New Beginnings program is about the transformation of the church. In 2000, the Disciples of Christ set a goal of establishing 1,000 new congregations and transforming 1,000 existing congregations by the year 2020. We are working to be one of the 1,000 transformed congregations.
But what I’ve realized this week is that our congregation will not be transformed unless each of us takes it upon ourselves to be transformed, to invite the Spirit of God to come into our lives and make us new. We will not be making any new disciples unless we recommit ourselves to being better disciples.
Every day, we need to invite the Spirit to enter into our lives and reshape us. The Spirit is already here: The Spirit is in you. The Spirit is as close to you as your own breath. You don’t have to go looking for the Spirit.
You just need to acknowledge the Spirit. Welcome the Spirit. Receive the Spirit.
And let the Spirit's transforming power flow through you.
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