Membership vs. Discipleship

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Acts 11:1-8

    What does it mean to you to be a church member?  Our confirmation classes wrapped up this month; we’ve combined with Good Shepherd Lutheran Church of Plainview now for a few years, and so I asked our whole group, “Is there a difference between being a church member and a Christian?”  Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear pretty much the whole class answer something like, “well, yes, because you can be a church member but not really be a Christian.  Like, you might go to church but not really believe in God.  You can be a Christian without going to church.”  The confirmands’ concern was the heart, the soul, of the matter – don’t be a hypocrite and go to church pretending you believe this stuff but living like you don’t the rest of the week.  Church members SHOULD be Christians, but maybe they’re not!  It’s more important, arguably, to be a Christian than a church member.
    Of course, these are young people who are preparing to officially become adult members of the church through their confirmation – saying “yes” to the faith that their parents and godparents brought them to the baptismal font with.  They are both Christians and church members.  So I talk about why it is important to be both a church member AND a Christian.  Yes, personal faith and practice as a Christian is important!  The pandemic taught us a painful lesson: that living out faith in a community is also important.  It is very difficult to be a Christian on your own.  We need the church, as unpopular and institutional a thing that is to say.  We need the church.
    For awhile now, Americans’ distrust of institutions has made “membership” an unpopular word.  Unless you have a BJs or Costco membership, right?!  I can’t think of many other instances where being a member is considered a positive idea – it requires too much commitment, conformity, and rule-following.  We have lamented that church membership is down, but official membership in any organization is down.  Before the pandemic, there was a Lions Club and Rotary Chapter here in Syosset – not anymore!  The local VFW and American Legions have consolidated and struggled to retain members.  Membership in the two singing groups who use our church weekly, Long Island Harmonizers and Twin County Chorus, is also down.  If you look at our church constitution (and we have to have one because we are at the end of the day a nonprofit corporation in the State of New York), a voting member of our church is someone who is baptized and confirmed who has communed and made a contribution of record in the last year.  And guess what your privileges are for membership?! You get to vote on our annual budget and elect members to the church council.  You could be on the council yourself!  Exciting stuff.  But sadly our definition of membership doesn’t say a whole lot about our mission or faith in Christ.  Membership to something larger than yourself has its downsides, if we think of it only in terms of a commitment to an institution.
Perhaps a better, churchier word is “discipleship.”  Here at Faith, we welcome disciples of Jesus to join us in our mission to openly share the saving grace of Jesus’ love.  We are a diverse and welcoming community. Jesus says in our gospel, “by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  That is what it means to be a member here in this community. That is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus – to show Christ’s love for one another.  We could do a better job describing the benefits of this kind of church membership, where you get to grow deeper in your faith, fellowship and worship with people who are different from you yet share that same faith in Christ, and serve our neighbors in need together.  As a member of a church, as a disciple, we get to see the body of Christ in action; it’s difficult to experience the full body of Christ when you’re sitting on a couch at home on YouTube by yourself.  As a disciple, we get to experience the love of God in Christ in our everyday living, in a nurturing loving community we call the church.
Wrestling with who is a church member or not has been an issue in the church from the beginning.  In our reading from Acts, Peter recounts his baptizing of Cornelius and family, Gentiles, to the Jewish believers in Jerusalem.  Circumcision and keeping kosher dietary laws had always been an expectation of what it meant to be Jewish, and since the first Christians were Jewish, it was assumed that these would be some of the rules for membership in the Christian church.  But as often happens, God’s Holy Spirit gets in the way and throws the early church a curve ball:  Peter witnesses the Holy Spirit falling upon these Gentile men just as it came upon the Jewish Christian believers at Pentecost.  God sends Peter a vision that he can eat with them and baptize them.  This changes the church forever!  Gentiles as well as Jews are full members of the body of Christ through their faith and baptism into Christ, not because they follow these other rules.
So what does it mean to be a church member?  It’s easy to come up with a list of rules to follow like the early Christians do – what kinds of foods to eat or not eat, what people should wear, what ethnicity or language people should speak, rules about gender.  These rules have made it difficult for the church as an institution to get away from this idea that the church is made up of hypocrites or judgmental people.  Instead, God’s Holy Spirit continually points us beyond a list of rules to the work of the Spirit – the love of Christ for us and for all people.  “The Spirit told me not to make a distinction between them and us,” Peter says.  It is our faith in Christ that matters, beyond other distinctions.  It is our faith in Christ that brings different people together, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.  And it is the love that can only come from God that we share that makes us members of the body of Christ.
“Love one another,” Jesus says.  This is really the only rule for church membership that truly matters.  We do not do this perfectly, of course.  Some people we don’t really like or get along with.  We might make snap judgments based on their physical appearance.  But the distinctions we make based on citizenship status, the language someone speaks, their gender, age, ability, and so on does not limit the power of the Holy Spirit to inspire faith and the repentance that leads to life, as Peter tells us today.  Listen to Jesus, “love one another.”  Follow Jesus in the way of love as a disciple.  And may people know that we are Christians by our love.  Amen.