I believe that discipleship and growth as well as church membership is
important, but I also know the struggles of being in a place you feel you do
not belong. This is typical when you have been in your church for a very
long time, particularly for those who grew up in the same church they were
called in. I know the feeling of being at the crossroads and it is not a
simple thing to deal with. Regardless of what decision you make, it will still
hurt.
It is sad to hear, there are times when you do not fully understand what
your pastor is talking about. When this occurs, I think it is important to do
your own personal study and not rely solely on the teachings of leadership.
As you stated, sometimes they are busy while other times, they do things
such as charging a fee (which I do not necessarily agree with). There is
also the issue, not all pastors preach expositional sermons. The more this
occurs, the more knowledge gaps there will be within the church.
As Dever stated, a church that encourages expositional preaching is a
church that promotes Christian growth[1]. As many preachers continuously
move away from expositional preaching and focus more so on topical or
feel-good preaching, I believe, church growth, discipleship, and membership
will decline. This is something we need to fix.Church membership is an
important metric to pay attention to in the church today. d I feel that we
spend too much time worrying about the number of members and not
enough time focusing on the number of engaged members. d Do you have
500 people on your member roll? d Great – how many are engaged? d Do
you have 1500 people on your member roll? d Great – how many are
engaged? I would rather have a church membership roster of 25 and have
25 people that are in regular attendance, participating in events, discipling
one another, and living to glorify God over a membership roster of 500 plus
that “attend” or just participate when it benefits them. d I have been a part
of both types of churches over the years and I will take the engaged
church over the populated church any day.
d d I agree with Dever that church membership should be about caring for
one another, ministering to one another, edify one another, and to be
examples to one another.[1] d Our stance at my current church is that
membership is an intentional process that is not for everyone. d Those that
choose to join the membership are committing to the church, specifically the
body, to be an active and engaged part of the body that will fulfill the
exhortations of the Lord on the church. d When people want to join our
church, we hold a membership class and walk through many of the
Scriptures that Dever lists in Mark Six.[2] d When the class is done, we
provide them an application to take home and pray over. d We want people
to take time to absorb what they heard, pray over the Scriptures provided,
and pray for discernment that they are willing to be an active member of
the church. d Our attendance each week is approximately 250, and our
member role is approximately 200. d By our standards, and Dever’s, that is a
healthy church membership. d We have plenty of areas to improve, but I feel
that we are very blessed to have 80% of our attendees also be active and
participating members.I love that churches use social media and technology
to reach more people and engage more people. d I am curious to know
more about your personal experience and how social media related to your
service on the dream team? Was it that you saw growth without connection
or people walking away because of lack of engagement? d Did you see
growth in the youth ministry because of invitations to church through social
media? d Having served in a church with dream teams, I found that they
can be both a great opportunity or a missed opportunity for growth and
discipleship. d I was lead on two dream teams - ushers and safety. d We
held five services a week, so our dream teams were large. d Our usher
team had more than 100 people on the roster, whereas our safety team
was a roster of 20. d The usher team did not provide any other connection
other than Sunday service. d I felt this was a missed opportunity for a large
group of Christians to disciple and lean upon one another to walk together
in Christ. d The safety team, however, participated in bible study together,
broke out into coffee ministries together, and held quarterly family events to
bond and “do life” together. d Many lives were transformed in that ministry,
and I am proud to say I was part of it. d There were other dream teams in
the church that fell into one or the other, and I feel that churches that are
large enough to do “dream teams” need to treat them as small groups and
engaged ministries and not just volunteers for service.
[1] Mark E. Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, 3rd ed., 9marks
(Nashville, TN: Crossway / Lifeway, 2013)., 160.
[2] Ibid., 161.
