Various Texts | Steve Bice | Vitally Involved Members

A church congregation can certainly be one that continues to meet and check off the church boxes. They gather to sing and give and hear and then leave and come back the next week. But while that church exists in name, it certainly doesn’t make it a healthy church congregation. We see throughout Paul’s letters to the churches in Asia Minor regular corrections whether they are concerning gospel foundations of a church that are beginning to break or have broken; or relational difficulties between congregation and elders or families or husbands and wives or parents and children, older and younger, people with this preference over that preference, etc…; or perhaps the correction of the allowance of ongoing sin in a church or self-centered worship services and feasts. The list goes on and on. So what does it mean to be a faithful congregation? A faithful church? Not church in the corporate sense where we would be talking about the number of marks of a healthy church, but church in the congregational sense, made up of people….what does a healthy church congregation look like?

You see, while the health of a local church is very much found in the leadership of the church, it is also very much found in the broad membership of the church. We are intricately knit together. We are, according to Paul in 1 Cor 12, members of one another. We need each other. Every single one of us no matter what role we’ve been called to. Each members’ faithful participation, willing submission, mutual love, godly example, and ongoing exercise of spiritual gifts and wise counsel provide strength and stability in a local church. And not to be missed here is the reality of biblical church membership. That we believe that it is biblically imperative for a believer to walk obediently in joining a local church where they can give themselves fully to other members, entrusting themselves to the love, care, teaching, and accountability of the leadership of the church, and to utilize their spiritual gifts for the common good of that local church.

The health of a local church is dependent on vitally involved, Spirit-filled members.