Philosophy of Membership

One thing that sets The Remnant apart from many other churches is its emphasis on serious, committed church membership. We believe that the calling to follow Christ is a serious commitment requiring nothing less than the surrender of one's whole life into his hands. We believe that a Christian's commitment to a church should be as serious as his or her commitment to Christ because we believe that the calling to follow Christ and the calling to be part of a church body are inseparable. To be a Christian is to be part of a church.

When we say that to follow Christ and be part of his church require serious commitment, however, we are not saying that a person needs to live up to some kind of impossible standard to do either. Just as Christ meets us where we are, just as we do not have to have our lives in order in order to become a Christian, so, too, does our membership process mean to invite people to come as they are. The different steps to becoming a member are not intended to be works by which we evaluate a person's "worthiness" to become a member. Rather, each step is is designed to encourage people to make a thoughtful and serious commitment. We ask people to do certain things, but none of these things are "graded." People sometimes half-jokingly ask, "So, does anyone ever fail the membership process? Is anyone ever rejected?" Living as we are in a performance-oriented society, it is a natural enough question to ask. The question of whether we perform well or not drives us daily. But the standards of this world are turned upside down in the kingdom of God, and in Jesus' kingdom, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. In his kingdom, those who work for one hour get paid as much as those who work the entire day. As a church, our aim is to reflect kingdom values rather than the values of this world.

But to say that there is this grace and that we are not valued by our performance in the kingdom of God is not to say that Jesus requires nothing of us at all. For to become a Christian, there is this one requirement - not to do anything but to humbly admit one's very inability to do anything. And as we admit that we can do nothing to earn our salvation, we accept what Christ has done and invite him to be the one to do things in our lives. We surrender all to him, and we say that we will follow where he leads us. This is serious commitment, but the seriousness is not measured by how much we do but how completely we surrender. Surrender and submit. This is the kind of serious commitment we are after in our members. It's not about what we do but more our hearts of discipleship. We want people's becoming members to be an expression of what is on their hearts - a desire to be a disciple of Christ and a recognition that we become disciples of Christ in the context of the church.

In this context, the strong connection between membership and discipline becomes clearer. It is no accident that discipline and discipleship come from the same root words. When a Christian is not accountable to any kind of authority or discipline, can he or she really say they are involved in discipleship? Can a person follow Christ without being corrected, rebuked? And what is the mechanism designed by God for correction and rebuke? The authority of the church. A person can say they answer to God and so they do not need a church. The trouble with this statement is that God has given his authority to the church. The church is the authority of God on this earth. So to answer to God is to answer to the church.

Discipleship is not only about being disciplined, but we choose to emphasize this particular aspect at The Remnant because it is the aspect that this generation has the most trouble with. Most of us have no problem with being loved, cared for, and invested in. We want to become more like Jesus; we want to grow. We enjoy church life. We like to learn through the bible studies. We like to be challenged through the sermons. But the problem with all this is, we can pick and choose what we want to accept and what we do not. Why is this a problem? Because we all have blind spots. When it comes to someone telling us to stop doing something we do not want to give up, we have a hard time with that. We have grown up in a generation, and a nation, for that matter, that was founded on a declaration of independence. Our culture is one of challenging authority, and hence, we have a profound distrust of it. And as Christians, we can wrongly justify our distrust of human authority by saying that we are accountable to God alone. While it is true that we are accountable to God alone, when we use that truth to justify our living any way we please because no one else is allowed to tell us what to do, we are guilty of manipulating scripture to suit our own ends. Right principle, wrong application. The one who is truly concerned about his or her accountability to God alone would have every reason to become a member of a church, recognizing that God has chosen to place his authority in the church.