For three years Chijioke went to church on his phone. He was a relationship manager at a bank on the Island, and his Sundays were precious. He would wake late, make tea, and choose a service. Some weeks it was a big church in Lagos with excellent music. Some weeks it was a teacher in Atlanta whose messages he admired. Occasionally, when he felt guilty, he drove to a small congregation near his flat in Yaba and sat at the back, leaving during the closing prayer so that nobody would ask for his number. Once, an older woman called Mrs Olatunji caught him at the door anyway and pressed a visitor’s card into his hand. He filled it in to be polite.
He would have told you, sincerely, that he loved God and loved the church. He gave online. He shared sermon clips. He knew the worship songs.
Then, on a Thursday in March, his younger sister called from Enugu. Their father had collapsed at home and died before they could get him to the hospital. Chijioke sat on the edge of his bed with the phone in his hand and realised, with a strange cold feeling, that there was nobody in Lagos to call. The pastor in Atlanta did not know his name. The big church in Lagos had forty thousand people and a prayer line. He had colleagues, but not the kind you ring at eleven at night when you cannot stop shaking.
The next morning there was a knock on his door. It was Mrs Olatunji, with her husband and a cooler of jollof rice. She had kept his card, heard through a friend that a young banker from the Yaba area had lost his father in Enugu, and put two and two together. “We did not know whether you would want us,” she said. “But we did not think you should be alone.” They sat with him most of the day. Her husband helped him sort out his flight. Before they left, they prayed, and Chijioke wept in a way he had not wept since he was a boy.
He told me afterwards, “I had been consuming church for three years. That was the first day I had ever been part of one.”
Chijioke’s story raises a question many believers have never seriously considered. What does it actually mean to belong to a local church? Is membership simply a name on a register, or a badge of loyalty to a particular pastor? Or is it something closer to what Mrs Olatunji carried to his door that morning?
Attending and belonging
The New Testament knows nothing of a Christian who belongs to Christ and to nobody else. When God saves a person, He places that person in a family. Paul puts it plainly: “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Romans 12:5). Notice the last phrase. We are members of Christ, and also members of one another. My life in Christ is joined to yours.
That is the deepest reason church membership matters. It does not begin with an organisation’s need for numbers or income. It begins with the gospel. The same grace that reconciled you to God has given you brothers and sisters, and they have a claim on your love that you did not choose and cannot cancel.
There is a great deal of good that modern technology makes possible. A sick person can follow a service from bed. A believer in a remote place can hear sound teaching. A family abroad can stay connected to a congregation at home. None of that is wrong. But there is a difference between receiving ministry and being part of a body. You can receive a sermon through a screen. You cannot be visited by a screen, corrected by a screen, or carried through grief by a screen. A screen cannot notice that you have stopped coming.
Many of us have drifted into a consumer relationship with church without ever deciding to. We evaluate services the way we evaluate restaurants. We stay while the experience satisfies, and we move on quietly when it does not. Nobody knows we came, and nobody knows we left. That arrangement feels free. In practice it is lonely, and it leaves the people around us poorer too, because the gifts God placed in us never reach them.
What the first believers gave themselves to
The clearest picture of early church life comes right after the day of Pentecost. Three thousand people had believed and been baptised. Luke tells us what happened next:
And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men , as every man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.
“They continued stedfastly.” The word suggests persistence, a steady devotion that kept going after the excitement of the first day had passed. These new believers did not merely attend an event. They gave themselves to a shared life.
Look at what they gave themselves to. “The apostles’ doctrine,” first. They wanted to be taught, and they placed themselves under the teaching that came from Christ through His apostles. Then “fellowship,” the Greek word koinonia, which means a sharing, a common participation. They had something in common, and it showed. Then “breaking of bread,” which in this context includes the Lord’s Supper and the ordinary meals that surrounded it. And “prayers,” with the definite article in the original, suggesting set times of prayer together as well as spontaneous prayer.
Then the fellowship became practical. “All that believed were together, and had all things common.” People sold possessions “as every man had need.” We should read that carefully. Luke is not describing a compulsory scheme imposed by the leaders. A few chapters later Peter tells Ananias that his property was his own and that, after he sold it, the money was still in his own power (Acts 5:4). The giving was voluntary. What drove it was need. When a brother could not pay his rent, others sold something. When a widow had nothing, the community noticed.
And they met “daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house.” There was the large gathering and the small table. Both mattered. In the temple courts they heard the apostles and praised God together. In homes they ate “with gladness and singleness of heart.” They knew one another’s kitchens.
Notice finally who added to the church. “The Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” The church grew because God was at work, and the people He saved were added to an actual community. Salvation and belonging arrived together. Nobody in Acts 2 was saved into isolation.
PunchlineGod never saves a person into isolation. The grace that reconciles you to the Father also joins you to His family, and that family needs your presence.
Considering one another
The letter to the Hebrews was written to believers who were under pressure. Some had suffered public insult and the loss of property. Some were tempted to drift back into old patterns. And some, it seems, had simply stopped turning up. The writer has spent ten chapters showing them the greatness of Christ and the boldness we now have to enter God’s presence through His blood. Then he turns to the community:
And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is ; but exhorting one another : and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
“Let us consider one another.” The word translated consider means to observe carefully, to fix your attention on something. The writer is asking believers to pay attention to each other with a purpose: “to provoke unto love and to good works.” That word provoke is usually used negatively, to stir someone to anger. Here it is turned around. Christians are meant to stir one another up, deliberately and thoughtfully, toward love and good works.
You cannot do that from a distance. To provoke someone toward love you have to know them. You have to notice when they are discouraged, when they are growing cold, when they have a gift that is lying unused. That kind of attention requires presence.
Then comes the instruction most people remember: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.” It is worth noticing the reason he gives. He does not say, “Come to church because the pastor will be offended if you stay away.” He says, in effect, “Keep meeting, because you need one another, and the others need you.” The assembling is the setting in which the “exhorting one another” happens. Elsewhere the same letter urges, “But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Sin hardens people who are left alone. Fellowship softens what isolation hardens.
This means your presence is a ministry. The person who sits beside you on Sunday may be holding on by a thread. Your greeting, your attention, your prayer at the end of the service may be the means God uses to keep them. When you stay away without reason, it is not only you who lose something.
Joined to the disciples
There is a small, moving scene in Acts 9 that shows what it is to be received into a congregation. Saul of Tarsus had met the risen Christ on the Damascus road. He had been baptised and had begun preaching. But when he came to Jerusalem, he faced a problem:
And when Saul was come to Jerusalem, he assayed to join himself to the disciples: but they were all afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way, and that he had spoken to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus. And he was with them coming in and going out at Jerusalem.
“He assayed to join himself to the disciples.” Saul did not consider his conversion complete while he stood outside the fellowship. He wanted to be joined. But the believers were afraid of him, and with good reason. This was the man who had dragged their friends from their homes. They “believed not that he was a disciple.”
Then Barnabas stepped in. He “took him, and brought him to the apostles,” told his story and vouched for him. The result was simple and beautiful: “he was with them coming in and going out at Jerusalem.” That phrase describes ordinary shared life. Saul was no longer a visitor. He came and went among them as one of them.
Two lessons lie in this little passage. The first is for those who stand outside. Saul’s instinct was to join himself to the people of God, even when it was awkward and even when he was not immediately trusted. Belonging sometimes requires us to take the first step, to fill in the card, to accept the invitation to a home group, to let ourselves be known.
The second lesson is for those already inside. Every congregation needs people like Barnabas, who notice the newcomer and take him by the arm. A church can be doctrinally sound and still very hard to enter. Somebody has to take responsibility for bringing people in. In Chijioke’s story, that person was Mrs Olatunji.
What commitment looks like in practice
So what does a believer actually commit to when he joins a local church? Congregations express this differently. Some have a formal membership class and a public welcome. Others are more informal. The forms vary, and sincere believers organise church life in different ways. But the substance of commitment looks much the same wherever the New Testament is taken seriously.
It means showing up with reasonable consistency, so that people can know you and you can know them. It means placing yourself under the teaching of the Word as someone willing to be shaped by it, which is more than sitting through it. It means contributing your gifts. Peter writes, “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10). You carry something that the people around you need, and they carry something you need.
It means sharing in the practical life of the body. That includes giving generously toward the work and the needs of others, as grace leads you. It includes the unglamorous tasks: arranging chairs, cooking for a bereaved family, driving an elderly member to hospital. “And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Membership means you are close enough to suffer and rejoice with real people.
It also means accepting appropriate care and correction. A member is someone who has given others permission to speak into his life. That can be uncomfortable, but it is part of love. Hebrews speaks of leaders who “watch for your souls, as they that must give account” (Hebrews 13:17). Their watching assumes that they know who you are.
And it means praying for the congregation and its leaders. Paul repeatedly asked churches to pray for him. Your prayers for those who teach you, and for the families sitting in the next row, are one of the most significant contributions you will ever make.
NuggetNone of this is a burden laid on you to earn God’s favour. You already have His favour in Christ. Membership is the way that favour is expressed among His people. Sons and daughters of the same Father learn to live as a household.
Elders who serve the flock
Commitment runs in both directions. If members are called to love and support, leaders are called to serve. Peter writes to the elders of the churches scattered across Asia Minor, and he speaks to them as a fellow elder:
The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed: Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof , not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.
“Feed the flock of God which is among you.” Notice whose flock it is. It is the flock of God. The elders do not own it. They are under-shepherds entrusted with people who belong to Another. Peter then describes the manner of oversight. Elders serve “willingly,” as men who want the work, rather than “by constraint,” as a duty they resent. They serve “of a ready mind,” eager to give, rather than “for filthy lucre,” eager to get. “Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.” Leaders lead chiefly by example, by going first in the life they ask others to live.
This passage gives no church leader ownership of a believer. Membership places you within a community under Christ; it does not transfer you into the possession of a man or an institution. Paul could write to the Corinthians, “Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men” (1 Corinthians 7:23). You belong to Christ. Your church is one of the ways you serve Him and receive His care. It is not your owner.
God has always taken seriously the way shepherds treat the sheep. Through Ezekiel He spoke against the leaders of Israel in words that still burn:
Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.
The shepherds fed themselves. They took the fat and the wool. And they neglected exactly the people who most needed care: the diseased, the sick, the broken, the driven away, the lost. “With force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.” God’s verdict on that kind of leadership was severe, and He promised to come and shepherd His people Himself.
So a healthy church does not use membership as a lever. It does not tell people that leaving will bring a curse. It does not monitor members’ private lives in ways that have nothing to do with their spiritual welfare. It does not demand money as the price of belonging. Leaders who serve in the spirit of 1 Peter 5 hold people with open hands, and that is precisely why people want to stay.
When loyalty is used to demand silence
There is one particular abuse of membership that needs to be named clearly, because it does great damage. It happens when commitment to the church is turned into a demand for silence about serious harm.
It can sound spiritual. “Do not bring shame on the ministry.” “We handle these things internally.” “If you go to the police, you are touching God’s anointed.” “A real member covers the church.” Sometimes the pressure is quiet, and sometimes it comes with threats of discipline or exclusion.
Scripture gives no support to concealment of that kind. Paul writes:
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them . For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret. But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.
“Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” The light exposes. A church that hides abuse, fraud or the exploitation of vulnerable people in order to protect its reputation has placed its image above the people Christ died for. That is the very thing Ezekiel condemned. John met a version of it in a man named Diotrephes, who loved “to have the preeminence” and would even cast faithful believers “out of the church” (3 John 1:9-10). John did not treat Diotrephes’ control as legitimate authority. He named it.
Let me be direct. If a child or a vulnerable adult has been harmed, if a crime has been committed, if someone is in danger, then your membership does not require your silence. It requires your courage. Make sure the person at risk is safe. Report to the appropriate civil authorities. Seek help from qualified people, including those trained in safeguarding. A covenant of membership has no power to override the law of love, and love protects the vulnerable. “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction” (Proverbs 31:8).
This does not mean every disagreement or disappointment should be broadcast. Most matters in church life are best handled personally, honestly and patiently, through the right channels. Gossip and online campaigns rarely produce righteousness. But there is a clear difference between handling an ordinary conflict privately and concealing serious harm. The first is wisdom. The second is complicity, and no appeal to loyalty can make it holy.
PunchlineHealthy leaders welcome this distinction, because it protects the church. A congregation where people are free to raise concerns is a safer place for everyone, including its pastors.
Staying well and leaving well
Committed membership does not mean you can never leave a church. People relocate for work. Families move. Sometimes a believer becomes convinced, after prayer and honest conversation, that he should serve elsewhere. Sometimes a church becomes unsafe or departs from the gospel, and leaving is the faithful choice. Paul and Barnabas themselves eventually went in different directions (Acts 15:39-40), and God continued to use both.
But how you leave matters. Where it is safe and possible, speak to those who have cared for you. Express gratitude for what you received. Explain your reasons honestly without turning your departure into a campaign. Hand over responsibilities properly. Do not slip away silently after years of fellowship, and do not take others with you through quiet recruitment. Then find another congregation and join it fully. Moving from one church to another is sometimes right. Moving from belonging to drifting rarely is.
Where you have experienced harm, the situation is different. You do not owe a farewell meeting to someone who has abused you. Leave safely, seek support, and take the time you need to heal. God’s care for you is not limited to one building.
And for most of us, the more pressing question is how to stay well. Staying well means refusing to treat church as a service provider. It means bringing your gifts, your prayers and your presence, even on the weeks when the sermon is ordinary and the choir is off key. It means forgiving the small offences that inevitably come when imperfect people share a life. “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). Love covers the minor irritations of community life. It does not cover crimes. It does cover the hundred small ways we disappoint one another in an ordinary year.
Chijioke buried his father in Enugu. When he returned to Lagos two weeks later, he did something he had not done in three years. He went to the small church in Yaba and stayed until the end of the service. Mrs Olatunji found him at the door, as he had known she would, and introduced him to a house fellowship that met on Wednesday evenings.
It was not always easy. The fellowship was full of people who were nothing like the polished preachers on his phone. One brother talked too much. One sister asked very direct questions. But slowly he began to be known. They noticed when he travelled. They prayed for his mother by name.
About eighteen months later, a young woman from the fellowship lost her mother to cancer. On the morning after the news came, Chijioke found himself standing outside her door with a cooler of rice that his neighbour’s wife had helped him cook. He had not thought very hard about it. It simply seemed obvious that she should not be alone.
That is church membership. It is a name on a register in some congregations and a public welcome in others, and those forms have their place. But underneath them is something older and more beautiful: people joined to Christ who have chosen to be joined to one another, who notice, who come, and who stay. Somewhere near you there is a congregation of such people, and somewhere among them is a person who needs you to show up.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Would you describe your current relationship with a local church as consuming or belonging? What has shaped that?
- Which part of Acts 2:42 is strongest in your church life, and which is weakest?
- Who is the “Barnabas” who helped you belong, and whom might God be asking you to bring in?
- How would you recognise the difference between a church handling a matter wisely and a church demanding silence about serious harm?
- What would it look like for you to “consider one another” in your congregation this month?
This Week
This week, take one concrete step from attending toward belonging. If you have no church home, visit a nearby congregation and stay after the service long enough to speak with someone. If you are already a member, find one person you have greeted for months without really knowing, and invite them for a meal or a phone conversation. Ask how you can pray for them, write it down, and pray for them by name each day until the week ends.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that when You saved me, You joined me to Your Son and to His people. Forgive me for the times I have treated Your church as a service to consume rather than a family to belong to. Give me a heart that continues stedfastly in Your Word, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in prayer. Teach me to consider my brothers and sisters, to notice them, to bring others in as Barnabas did, and to show up when it matters. Give our leaders the grace to feed Your flock as ensamples and not as lords. Make our church a place of truth and safety, where the light is welcome. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.