Church Membership and Casual Nibbling

If you've never read anything by Jonathan Leeman, then let me introduce you to him. For readers of this blog who are members of Grace Baptist Church in Hartsville, TN, Leeman has three claims on our peculiar affection. (1) He conducted the wedding of our brother and sister Jared and Maggie Lake. (2) While working at Boyce College in Louisville, he encouraged our brother Chris Davis to run for student council. (3) As a current elder at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., he is an elder over our beloved Josh and Abigail Abbotoy.

So let those points recommend his books to you. He has published two so far, and has a couple more in the works. I will link you to his current published works after I give you these excerpts from his book on church membership.

“If we try to conduct our discipleship with Christ by casually nibbling and grazing wherever we please, moving back and forth between one field and another, it’s difficult to see how we will ever truly submit to the church of God. We may give of ourselves to this or that Christian or church, but we will never truly give ourselves. Submitting to the church on earth means walking up to a group of people and saying ‘I believe what you believe. Now put me to work supporting our mutual cause however you need me. You can count on me.’ In short, the nature of authority and submission requires professing Christians to submit to the local church. It requires commitment.”

        [Note: In the following lengthy passage, Leeman talks about 1 Corinthians 13, the famous chapter on love. What Leeman points out here is that while we often use this chapter at weddings, in context it is mainly describing love in the local church. It is situated right between 1 Cor. 12 and 1 Cor. 14, both of which deal with the church in Corinth, which, in many ways, was a pretty sorry church. So here’s what Leeman says about love in context of a sorry church.

“It’s in this context that Paul grabs back the pretty lyrics of 1 Corinthians 13 from the wedding party and reads it to the local church. Do you want to exercise, practice, embody, and define the glorious love of heaven, he asks us? Then do it in a local church, a church where factions are pitted against one another (1 Cor. 1:12-13), where people have big heads (4:8), where members are sleeping with their fathers’ wives (5:2), where members are suing and defrauding one another (6:1-8), where members are getting drunk on the communion wine and not leaving enough for others (11:21-22), where spiritual gift one-upmanship is rife (chaps. 12 and 14), where the meetings are threatened by disorder (14:40), and where some are saying there is no resurrection from the dead (15:12). Bind and submit yourself and your gifts to these kinds of people. Love them with patience and kindness, without envy or boasting, without arrogance or rudeness, not insisting on our own way, not irritably or resentfully, not rejoicing at wrongdoing but rejoicing at the truth. 

People often complain about the sinners they find in the local church, and with good reason. It’s filled with sinners, which is why Paul calls Christians to love one another by bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. If you won’t love such backstabbers and defrauders like this, don’t talk about your spiritual gifts, your vast biblical knowledge, or all the things you do for the poor. You’re just a noisy gong. Don’t talk about your love for all Christians everywhere; you are just a clanging cymbal. But if you do practice loving a specific, concrete people, all of whose names you don’t get to choose, then you will participate in defining love for the world, the love which will characterize the church on the last day perfectly because it images the self-sacrificing and merciful love of Christ perfectly.”   

Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love; see also his book Reverberation