Where I Belong

This morning, I leaned over to my hot husband during Paul's sermon and said, "I want to marry Summit Crossing Church."

Today was awesome on so many incredible levels, but one thing that I'm thinking of in particular is the concept of church membership.

We went to this class called Discover this morning, where we heard about some vision, mission and history of the church. This is kinda a class to tell people what the church is all about, and if people are down, then it leads to church membership.

I have a weird relationship with church membership.

Believe it or not, I was not even a member at the last 2 churches where Billy worked. At the first one, Billy was a member by default by being on staff. But the pastor told us that I could could go through a membership class that was supposed to start the month after Billy got hired. It got canceled for some reason, and a month later, the pastor announced that he was leaving the church. No new membership classes were given.

At Chase Valley, no one told Billy that he wasn't a member until about September. (This would be 9 months after he started working there.) He asked what he had to do, and they said that he had to come up front and proclaim that he wanted to be a member and serve there. It was odd, as he'd been serving there quite prominently for quite a while. Yet, still, we weren't members.

The church we went to in between those two (which I'd gone to for several years before marriage) didn't really emphasize formal membership because they held the belief that members would make themselves known by their participation in the church life - small groups, service, etc.

Today, though, I got another flavor of membership. There is a commitment made with membership at Summit Crossing. Membership is an agreement and there are requirements, and I appreciate that because it helps to show people that there's more to following Christ than saying, "Oh... yeah... church is cool." We're supposed to learn more about the specifics next week, and I'm excited.

But one thing that really excited me and Billy was the heart that the elders have for reaching the city. Having requirements for membership will limit the number of people who want to join, but it never has to limit the number of people who will meet Jesus and eventually join the Kingdom of God and grow in their faith and relationship with God.

We learned today that there are about 230 members of Summit, but there averages 500 people who come to a service on Sundays. This means that the members of Summit are reaching out to our community. Instead of having tons of people "on the rolls," and few people in the chairs, Summit has lots of people in the chairs and then asks for a deeper commitment made to be considered an actual member.

I don't know. I guess I don't really have a point to this post. I just thought that it was neat, and I love my church, and I wanted to share where we are in the process of getting involved.