Membership as Discipleship

Instead of defining who’s in and who’s out, what if church membership could actually help us grow in our faith?

Transcript

SERIES INTRO

Welcome to the longest-running sermon series in RiverLife’s history. I started talking about membership a year and a half ago, exactly one week before the stay-at-home order in March 2020. And now, we’re finally back to the topic.

Membership. We’ve all had different experiences with it, some positive and some negative. I’ve asked Pastor Kong to briefly share his experience with membership.

Is there more to membership than having your needs cared for? I think so. But we need to rethink membership. We need a new model, a new way of thinking about it. So, that’s what we’re gonna try here at RiverLife. We won’t get everything right. In fact, it’ll probably take us a couple of years to figure all this out.

But I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that together we can develop a model of membership that will accomplish three things:

• Help you grow in your faith by providing clear next steps.

• Honor everybody—no matter where you are on your spiritual journey.

• Provide a unifying system for participating in the mission of the church.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about five big membership themes in the Bible: membership as discipleship, unity, family, mission, and commitment. Later in October, we’ll have official membership forms, a membership class, and mandatory RiverLife tattoos. I’m just kidding… we won’t have a class.

VALUE #1: Membership is about growing spiritually not belonging to a club

Throughout this series, we’re going to be sharing with you some membership mantras. These are foundational ideas that define membership here. Today, we’ll look at two of them.

The first one is this: Membership is about growing spiritually not belonging to a club.

My first experience of church membership was as an adult. Pang Foua and I attended a membership class, signed a piece of paper, and then never heard about it again…except for the annual membership renewal, where we signed the paper again.

That was a club membership. As long as I signed the paper, I received the benefits—I could vote at their meetings; they would pray at my parties or help with my funeral. But it had nothing to do with my spiritual growth. I simply belonged to an organization.

But that’s not how the Bible talks about membership. Belonging to a church body should be integrated with your ongoing growth as a follower of Christ. It should help you along your spiritual journey, not simply define you as in or out.

The author of Hebrews directly connects our ongoing spiritual growth with church involvement. Listen to this. “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds…”

Ok, sounds good—love and good deeds are fundamental to the Christian life. But how do we do it? Listen to the next verse. “…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.”

“All the more” as the day of Jesus’ return gets closer. If you are a Christian, your life should be marked by “more and more”:

• More and more Christlikeness

• More and more loving your neighbor

• More and more serving others

How can we have a “more and more” faith vs. a “meh, good enough” faith? Scripture tells us: “don’t give up meeting together”. Church membership helps you not give up meeting together.

I think one of the great tragedies of church is that you might have attended for years, even decades, and not changed. And that’s not how we’re gonna roll around here.

Membership is about growing spiritually, not belonging to a club.

• It’s a path instead of a status.

• It’s a journey of many steps, not just one.

• Signing up and taking a class is just the beginning, not the ending, of being a church member.

So, how can you tell if you see church membership as belonging to a club rather than growing spiritually? Here are a few questions:

• How much have you grown in your faith since joining RiverLife?

• Are you comfortable just attending? Do you check it off your spiritual to-do list?

• Do you compare yourself to others who might not attend as much, give as much, or volunteer as much?

• Do you ever feel entitled—that your opinion is more correct or should matter more than others?

If you answered YES to any of these, then you might need to rethink how you see membership. Remember, membership is about growing spiritually not belonging to a club.

VALUE #2: We don’t exist for ourselves

That’s the first foundational principle. But there’s a second one: We don’t exist for ourselves.

I’ve got really bad news: RiverLife does not exist to make you happy, meet your needs, or satisfy your desires. If it were, we would become ingrown, even inbred. We’d be a church full of self-absorbed people. And RiverLife will not be that.

So, if we don’t exist for ourselves, then who does RiverLife exist for? There are two answers to that.

First, the church exists for God. Did you know that? The church exists, first and foremost, for the glory of God. Listen to these verses from Ephesians, chapter 1:

He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

God created a family of adopted children, believers in Jesus Christ, for… himself. He didn’t do it for a kingdom or a mission. Those came second. God created the Church “according to the good pleasure of his will,” and “to the praise of his glorious grace” — in other words, for the simple divine splendidness of it. RiverLife exists primarily for God’s pleasure and for his praise.

Have you ever felt a little disappointed after we finish singing? Maybe you’ve thought, “I didn’t get anything out of worship today.” Good! Worship wasn’t for you anyway. Worship is for God’s pleasure and his praise, not your personal feel-good hit.

We exist for God first, not any one of us. But we can’t stop there.

The church also exists for others.

In their book, Designed to Lead, authors Eric Geiger & Kevin Peck put it like this: “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” I want to be a church that exists for the benefit of those outside our church.

• That’s why we’ve helped at funerals of people who’ve never come to the RiverLife. We did it simply because the family needed help.

• That’s why I’ve performed weddings of people unrelated to RiverLife. Because they’ve been turned down by other churches, and they didn’t know who to turn to.

• That’s why we have an entire Community Engagement ministry dedicated to serving people outside our church, while asking for nothing in return.

The Apostle Paul knew this idea was fundamental to the life of the Christian and the mission of the Church. That’s why he wrote these words to the Philippians, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

God’s Word reminds us, “It’s not about me. It’s about other people,” Paul challenges us to think of others as more significant than ourselves because when we do, we model Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t come with selfish ambition. He came with selfless ambition, giving his life away on a cross to save us.

What does this mean for RiverLife? It means…

• We exist for the people outside these walls.

• We exist for the 60,000 2nd and 3rd gen Hmong in the Twin Cities who don’t know Jesus.

• We exist for the 4th generation Hmong who aren’t even born yet.

• We exist for the people hurt by churches and by Christians

• We exist for the prodigal sons and daughters.

• We exist for the 1 sheep who is lost and far from God.

We exist them. We don’t exist for us.

So, how can you tell if you’re really here at church for yourself? Here are a few diagnostic questions:

• Who do you talk to? Do you talk primarily to your own friends or make an effort to meet new people?

• Where do you sit? Do you sit in the same spot with the same people each week? Do you get upset if somebody else is sitting in your spot?

• How often do you make yourself uncomfortable so that somebody else can be comfortable?

• Do you pick and choose church—what you do or when you want to come?

• Have you ever complained because you didn’t like something?

If you answered YES to any of these, then you might need to rethink how you see membership. Remember, RiverLife doesn’t exist for ourselves.

CONCLUSION

There you have it. Two membership mantras—foundational principles of membership at RiverLife.

• Membership is about growing spiritually not belonging to a club.

• We don’t exist for ourselves—we exist first for God and second for others.

If you want to be a member at RiverLife, you start with these two ideas. This is where God invites you into something so much bigger than yourself. This is where we prevent ourselves from becoming an inward-looking church. This is where you leave behind that stagnant, powerless Christian life. And this is where you embrace God’s grand mission for you as a disciple of Christ and a church member.