One of the most important applications that we can make of Paul’s teaching here about church leaders is to realize that it presents a mandate for church membership. If the Lord has placed leaders over his disciples and has called those leaders to this triple function of labouring, ruling, and admonishing, it necessarily follows that the people are to be organized under this leadership. The church is to be gathered under the kind of spiritual leadership ordained and called for and governed by the Lord.
People ask the question, Why should I join the church? Particularly post-COVID: Why should I enter into bonds of obligation? Well, there are a number of good answers. One is because God has organized all of human society in covenant relationships, and Christians are bound together as a covenant people in the Lord. That points to the analogy of the church as a family—with the family associations of affection and loyalty and commitment. The family bond, the natural family bond, is a relationship based on blood unity. Well, the church family expresses our unity in the Spirit of Christ. Many Christians who enter the church should find here the kind of acceptance and honesty and loving ministry that they have never known in their natural families. I think that will increasingly be the case as our society is more and more broken. And in the church, we all gain the opportunity to provide warm and affectionate family love to others.
Another reason why church membership is important is because of our calling together to the work of the Lord. Jesus’ Great Commission calls us not merely to personal evangelism—and certainly not to the making of casual believers or spiritual consumers. Instead, the Great Commission gives instructions to the people of God that can only be fulfilled in the context of a faithful church. Listen again to these familiar words—I think not often considered clearly. Jesus said,
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.That Great Commission can only be fulfilled in the context of the church.Now, a third mandate for church membership flows from Paul’s teaching in 1 Thessalonians 5:12: believers, young and old, need to be placed under spiritual authority that is exercised on Christ’s behalf. We are not to be free agents with respect to our faith and Christian service, but we are sheep who are to be under the careful oversight of Christ-appointed shepherds. I will occasionally interact with Christians who lament very significant personal and moral and relational problems, and I will ask them,
Well, are you a member in a church where you trust the elders, and those elders will exercise faithful Christian oversight and discipline over you?And often I am told,Well, no, I don’t believe in that.Just as often I am told,No, I chose my church based on the kind of music and the worship style that I like.And that attitude—that approach—may work well enough when all is going well. But when sin and temptation enter into their lives and relationships, where is the spiritual authority that is needed today to call them and hold them accountable to biblical repentance?Our sad tendency today is for churches to outsource pastoral care to paid independent counselors. And I know that many of these are loving and skilled servants of the Lord. But what they lack is the thing that is needed—and that is spiritual authority to demand real and difficult change and even to impose sanctions of church discipline as they are needed. I suppose the great majority—or a large majority—of Christian counseling today is marital issues. But the whole point is that marriage is an institution of a church. And many times I have had either—sometimes it has been a husband, sometimes it is a wife—who said,
Richard D. PhillipsIt is none of your business, Pastor.And I have been able to help them by saying,I would remind you that you took vows of church membership. And you may not keep them, but your spouse is going to. And the way for your marriage to be healed— sometimes also between parents and children, all sorts of relationships—is for you to come under trusted, not only spiritual counsel, but a spiritual authority that will oversee a process of real repentance and, therefore, of real reconciliation.We will only gain this through membership in the church with trusted spiritual leaders.1
12 Nous vous prions, frères, d'avoir de la considération pour ceux qui travaillent parmi vous, qui vous dirigent dans le Seigneur, et qui vous exhortent.