The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Covenanted Gospel Membership
Baptists have almost always argued the local church should be a covenanted community of gospel-believing individuals. In fact, my Southeastern Seminary colleague John Hammett calls this conviction the “Baptist mark of the church.” We often refer to this ecclesiological distinctive as either the believer’s church or (more commonly) regenerate church membership. Whatever we call it, Baptists normally argue a local church’s membership is to be comprised only of individuals who provide credible evidence they have repented of their sins and trusted in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. In keeping with my desire to more closely wed the gospel and Baptist identity, I call this ecclesiological distinctive covenanted gospel membership.
The New Testament indicates the earliest churches included only professing believers in their membership. Arguments for infant membership seem strained, frequently based more on tradition or a theological system than a simple engagement with the biblical text. Just as important, a believer’s church is more consistent with the gospel than a church that grants any form of membership to non-Christians. To apply this to a contemporary debate, the gospel way and the New Testament pattern is that you must believe before you can belong.
Because a church is a covenanted gospel community, it ought to be comprised of individual “gospel people” who voluntarily commit to walk together as a local expression of the body of Christ. Any other view is alien to the New Testament and fails to clearly reflect the relationship between the gospel and the church.
There are two alternatives to covenanted gospel membership: pre-Christian membership and non-Christian membership. Pedobaptists practice pre-Christian membership because they grant a form of membership to infants and small children before they are old enough to believe the gospel for themselves. To be fair, our pedobaptist friends rarely extend all the privileges of membership to unbelieving children—they typically reserve communion, voting rights, and leadership opportunities for “full” or “communicant” members who have actually been converted or confirmed in their faith. But to me, the very fact that pedobaptists observe a two-step membership process indicates that they know intuitively that church membership in the truest sense of the term is intended for believers alone.
The second alternative to covenanted gospel membership is non-Christian membership, which is practiced by many liberal mainline churches and some congregations in the emerging church movement. These churches argue that belonging comes before believing, and that the church is for anyone who is asking honest questions and is interested in being a fellow traveler with professing Christians. Belief is encouraged among members, but it is not a requirement for membership.
I appreciate the emphasis many pedobaptists place on raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and I appreciate the reminder from liberals that our churches should be welcoming places because we worship the Friend of Sinners. Nevertheless, I think Baptists are right to limit formal church membership to individuals who have responded in faith to the gospel and voluntarily join together for the sake of the gospel.
Historically, Baptist churches have employed two practices that aid us in our pursuit of creating churches that are covenanted gospel communities. The first is the adoption of local church covenants. Charles DeWeese defines a church covenant as “a series of written pledges based on the Bible which church members voluntarily make to God and to one another regarding their basic moral and spiritual commitments and the practice of their faith.” Until about a century ago, to join a Baptist church meant to voluntarily embrace the church’s covenant as a general guide for life and godliness. Individually, each member covenanted with the wider body. Corporately, the whole body covenanted with Christ.
While covenants were neglected for most of the twentieth century, there has been renewed emphasis on covenantal church membership over the past couple of decades. Mark Dever has probably been the most influential pastoral advocate for church covenants, while scholars such as Hammett, DeWeese, Jason Lee, and James Leo Garrett have written on the importance of recovering covenantal membership. In my opinion, this renewed emphasis on church covenants bodes well for Baptist churches.
A second practice, closely tied to church covenants, is a commitment to practicing redemptive church discipline. Redemptive church discipline safeguards regenerate church membership by protecting sound doctrine and promoting godly living. It protects the “back door” of church membership in the same way that clear gospel preaching and believer’s baptism protect the “front door” of membership. (Baptism is the subject of my next post.)
Unfortunately, church discipline has a bad rap among many Baptists. Some of this is because we live in a hyper-individualistic culture where we think our business is our own. But even many relatively healthy churches are skittish about discipline, no doubt in part because they’ve seen it or heard of it being practiced in unbiblical, sometimes even vindictive ways.
It’s important to remember that church discipline is not meant to be punitive, but redemptive. When practiced properly and in the right spirit, church discipline is intended to do one of two things. Sometimes it brings about conviction and repentance in the life of the offender, whether that means drawing the true believer back to God or awakening the false believer to his or her need for the gospel—this is always the outcome we hope and pray for when we practice church discipline.
But other times church discipline helps to remove potentially unregenerate people from church membership by excommunicating incorrigible sinners. Withdrawing membership in such situations protects the purity of the church and clearly communicates to the disciplined individual his or her need to repent and seek reconciliation with Christ and his church. Excommunication is never what we want to happen, but nevertheless sometimes it is necessary to remove an unrepentant sinner from church membership—for the sake of her soul and the health of the local church.
As with church covenants, church discipline has also been revived in recent years, sometimes by churches that had not practiced discipline in many decades. Many readers will know that at the 2008 SBC Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, we adopted a resolution titled “On Regenerate Church Membership and Church Member Restoration,” a document that argued for a recovery of gospel-driven redemptive church discipline. Many diverse Southern Baptists from a variety of theological and methodological perspectives came together and promoted that resolution. I know of more than one pastor who took the resolution back to his church and initiated a conversation with his congregation about meaningful church membership.
I hope in a generation we will look back on the early years of the twenty-first century as the era when Southern Baptists recommitted themselves to understanding local churches as covenanted gospel communities comprised of professing believers who are walking together for the glory of Christ and the benefit of his body. If this is to happen, we must clearly articulate the nature and expectations of church membership. Local church covenants and redemptive church discipline can be key tools to help us in our ongoing recovery of covenanted gospel membership.
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Note: This is the fifth post in an ongoing series on the relationship between the gospel and Baptist identity. Earlier posts in this series include:
The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Introduction
The Gospel and Baptist Identity: What is the Gospel?
The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Pondering Baptist Identity
The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Four Categories of Baptist Beliefs
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Nathan A. Finn serves as Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He's a husband, father, elder, baseball enthusiast, and Broadway musical fan. He's still trying to figure out why we drive on parkways and park on driveways.
[...] The Gospel and Baptist Identity: Covenanted Gospel Membership [...]
[...] week, I wrote on the importance of what I call covenanted gospel membership, which I argue is a helpful way to articulate the historic Baptist principle of regenerate church [...]
[...] 02: What Is the Gospel? 03: Pondering Baptist Identity 04: Four Categories of Baptist Beliefs 05: Covenanted Gospel Membership 06: Confessor Baptism by Immersion 07: Christocentric Congregationalism 08: Cooperative Autonomy [...]