Living Membership: Belonging in the Body of Christ
Mr. Michael Kearney
Why do you go to church? All right, this may be a silly question. There are plenty of obvious answers: to worship God, to strengthen your faith, to fellowship with other believers—all good motives. If you’re honest with yourself, maybe there are other reasons too: because the rest of your family does it, because it’s where all your friends are, or just because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” At the most basic level, we go to church simply to keep doing what Christians have done since the time of Jesus. However, I’d like to make the claim that not only is this a silly question, it’s actually a bad one. We don’t merely go to church; we are the church. Worshiping God together isn’t an activity so much as a statement of our identity. You may be familiar with the Heidelberg Catechism’s definition of the church in Lord’s Day 21 as “a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith.” But don’t miss the next sentence, which drops the significance of this body squarely on our shoulders: “And of this community I am and always will be a living member” (Q&A 54).1 So, in practical terms, what does it mean to be a member of the church—especially a young member of the church, and specifically a young member of the United Reformed Churches in North America? Although no amount of study can fully exhaust the subject of membership, perhaps exploring the name of our federation can provide the basic outline of an answer. UNITED: Built Up as a Spiritual House First, we identify ourselves as “united.” A line from the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation” comes to mind—“Elect from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth.”2 The perpetual community of God’s people is united across every continent and throughout every age. As Reformed theologian M. J. Bosma puts it, Jesus “not only brings [believers] to himself, and through himself to God, he also brings them together, to form together under him one body, one people.”3 In 1 Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul dives even deeper by explaining that this “one body” actually is the body of Christ, of which each of us is a member.
Membership in a body is fundamentally different from, say, membership in a club. As a member of a club, your participation is voluntary; as a member of a body, your participation is essential. The Boy Scouts will continue to exist whether or not you join them, but an organ can’t separate itself from the body to which it belongs; that would be unnatural and harmful, perhaps even deadly.4 So it is with the church. In Paul’s words, “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:18). Membership in the context of the church universal entails pursuing and fulfilling the role God has set for you among his people.
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