Here’s a question I’ve been knocking around with a brother at work: Is the doctrine (requirement) of church membership biblical? If not, then the arguments for church membership will have to rest on practical or traditional reasons, and it will be up to the individual believer to opt in or out. I'd like to argue, however, that a strong biblical case for church membership can be made.

First of all, I acknowledge that there's no explicit command to join a local church as an official member. But the lack of explicit teaching certainly doesn't mean that a particular doctrine isn't valid. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is nowhere explicit but nearly everywhere implicit. (Of course, the relationships between the different aspects of the doctrine of church membership are certainly not as mysterious [in a non-fideistic sense] as they are between the persons in the Trinity!)

The most important verse in which church membership is implicit is Heb. 13:17, "Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account." Earlier, in v7, we find out that the leaders are "those who spoke to you the word of God," which rules out any kind of civil authority. And elsewhere (1 Pet. 5:1-2, for example), we see that elders are the ones designated to provide this kind of leadership (i.e., designated to "shepherd the flock"). So my first point would be that it's difficult to obey and submit to your leaders if you don't have any leaders! Now clearly there are all sorts of people in our lives that offer spiritual guidance and exercise spiritual authority—but Heb. 13:17 seems to be talking specifically about church elders. Which brings me to my second point ...

I find it difficult to believe that Paul would go to the trouble of laying out the detailed requirements for church leadership (in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1) if church membership wasn't a big deal. So between these two passages (Heb. 13 and 1 Tim. 3/Tit. 1), we have requirements for both church leaders (husband of one wife, etc.) and church members (obey and submit to your leaders)—which seems to indicate that local church membership, if not absolutely required, was the ideal (or at least the assumption) and should therefore be the goal for us.

Another crucial reason for church membership is discipline. In a nutshell, church discipline involves the authority to excommunicate a member in the hopes that he will repent and be received back into the body of Christ. There are those (let’s call them “membership skeptics”) who insist that this is possible without the confines of official membership—but how? If I'm persistently sinning in such a way so as to require discipline, yet I don't belong to a church, then from what can I be excommunicated? And who will do the excommunicating? It would seem, then, that to the extent that church discipline is mandated in the Bible, church membership is also mandated in the Bible.

And finally, there is ample evidence of the “like-mindedness” of the early believers (Acts 4:32 "Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul"; Col. 2:2 "that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love"; Eph. 4:3 "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace"). Practically (but biblically!) speaking, it seems difficult to determine who is of like mind (i.e., who is of one heart and soul) without some sort of membership requirement (which usually includes a formal confession of faith or doctrinal statement). There are also passages—Rom. 16:1; Ph'p. 4:3; Col. 4:9—in which Christians appear to have been publicly known to be visibly connected with a particular local body, indicating an expectation toward local church membership.

In sum: there are (at least) several key passages in Scripture that imply or assume some sort of church membership. Although I’m not trying to make any claims about the specific policies or traditions that might characterize a particular church’s membership practices (in fact, I’ve been deliberately vague—“goal,” “expectation,” etc.—about what requirements a biblical doctrine of church membership might impose upon us) I do think that the case laid out above has some implications for how (or whether) we go about finding and joining a church.