How do your communities handle membership and decision-making?
Was just reading some articles about the notion of "church membership" amongst missional communities.
From my experience, it seems some communities (particularly in the UK) have completely done away with the concept of church membership and instead ask for little commitment and do decision-making by general consensus of those gathered at the time.
Other communities place a high value on membership and commitment - part of a reaction towards "just show up on a Sunday" church values. They have a strong sense of membership and also community practices which require a high level of commitment.
Others are in between, seeing "membership" as still a useful concept and one which people like to have (they want to know how to "belong" or fully be part of a community).
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So - how does your community do membership? And how are the big decisions then made - are they democratic, are they made by members only, or are they made by the leadership?
And is the traditional concept of membership still a useful one?
Tags: decisions, leadership, membership
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Angela Harms on -
I'm gonna comment just to say I'm interested in this question too. Maybe bumping it up will encourage some more folks to see it?
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Permalink Reply by Trevor Wright on -
Great question and topic. It's one that I've struggled with recently. We just merged a 3 year old church plant with a 50 year old traditional church. We're trying to steer toward missional focus in all that we do. Because we're a part of a denomination, there are a few things that we are required to have in place structurally, and some of that requires membership. We have a few people on our "council" that had to become members officially so that it was all legit, so while we were at it we extended the invitation to everyone who might want to "enter into covenant partnership with us". Some did so. Some scratched their heads and looked blankly at me b/c in their minds they were already committed and fully vested in the life of the church. Membership, or even covenant partnership, was a completely foreign concept to them and absolutely unnecessary part of the church.
Phew. All that to say that I'm struggling with it. We likely won't have a lot more people join the church in the future. The denomination is going to have to grapple with that b/c we just won't have that portion of our church conforming to their old paradigms and reporting systems. Our denomination is much more council driven and less congregational, so the leadership team is what drives decision making. What I may actually do in the future, is wave my magic wand and make them "members" for reporting procedure, but not really make a big deal of it in the daily life of the local church.
I'd rather have a church full of fully committed followers of Jesus than a church full of marginal members. I'm just not sure how to work within my denomination to live in a both/and world.
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Permalink Reply by Jacy Green-Sprehe on -
I think membership gives a sense of belonging, community and "ownership" that is important now.
You have more of a tendency to be involved when you are a member of a community.
For us, making decisions depends on what the topic is. Some decisions are by vote of the members and some are by the Church council.
Membership will always be important to me.
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Permalink Reply by Fred Shope on -
Our fellowship has no formal membership. We make decisions by consensus mostly, although when something needs to be decided quickly a couple of the leaders make the decisions. Big decisions, such as whether to move to a new meeting place (if we outgrow the current one) would be made by consensus of the group.
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Permalink Reply by Tyler Priest on
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When the conversation of membership comes up, I think of bounded set vs. centered set (as in Frost and Hirsch's The Shaping of Things to Come). In a bounded set, membership is a given. You are either inside the fence, or outside the fence. There is no fluidity and it is difficult to get in, and difficult to get out. But in a centered set, there is no membership--simply those who are centered around a common thing.
The concept of membership, for my community, a 7 year old church plant, has been done away with. Membership, for our community, is too connected to the "country club" kind of church that many of our folks were getting away from. We hope to embody "centered set" values. From your descriptions above, we would most identify with the missional communities in the UK, and we function similar to Fred's community as mentioned just above.
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