Katherine, I will agree with you in a technical sense, but in a practical sense, I wouldn’t state it as you have. Put another way, I would never be a part of a church that did not have some form of church membership, for while technically church membership is not “taught” or “commanded” in Scripture per se, I think that the principles that make it necessary today are all there. To be sure, we are members of the body of Christ at our salvation. That said, when we think of the church, there are two clear, Biblical senses, the church universal and the church local (which ought, of course, to be a perfect subset of the former, but while no unregenerate person can be a member of the church universal, there are those who “slip through the cracks”, as it were, in the local church).

The issue for me is that Scripture, while not teaching per se “this is what local church membership is, and this is how you ‘define’ local church membership”, nonetheless paints a clear picture of the believer being a part of a local church, a functioning part of a tangible, visible organic being. We know that in the “early church”, there was generally one church in town, hence “the church at Jerusalem”, “the church at Antioch”, and so on. Now, we have a different situation entirely; most every member of Grace drives past plenty of other expressions of the body of Christ to worship at 770 Kennesaw Ave.!

And this practical reality, and some others, changes the game immensely (but not in an unbiblical sense, I don’t think, at least not necessarily). What this means is that I as a believer will identify with a particular local church body as opposed to all others (like marriage, in a sense–and that’s not a bad Biblical analogy, of course!). Here’s the rub: if there are elements of being an obedient Christian, and/or a church being a faithful church, that cannot be performed absent church membership, then that is about all the reason I need to advocate strongly for it.

And that is the case. Absent a defined church membership, “church discipline” becomes not only difficult, but potentially a legal Pandora’s box. It has happened that people disciplined by churches of which they were not formal members have filed successful lawsuits, the reasoning being that without having specifically placed oneself under the authority of a local church body, that church has no business “removing” a person for unrepentant sin; indeed, how can a person who is not “in” be “cast out”? The biblical practice of church discipline, then, and the necessity of formal membership for its effective accomplishment in our present-day context, is enough for me to argue that faithful Christ-followers need to commit themselves to membership in order to be faithful to the commands of Christ, even if such conditions aren’t spelled out in Scripture in a clear, unambiguous way.

If, then, we take church membership as I think we should, while we ought not necessarily seek to extrapolate an unchangeable list of qualifications for every church (some require baptism; others do not. Some require the signing of a “church covenant”; others do not. I have my preferences but will label them as such), we nonetheless can say that it must be insisted, at a bare minimum, that every member profess faith in Christ, and would seek to model a Christlike walk. This, of course, is where I’d deny Ms. Czubernat membership: she and hers would be welcome to attend, but if by definition I would understand homosexual practice to be incompatible with Biblical teaching, and if she/hers were not only exemplifying but commending such, then membership could not be extended to them as an option.