Is Membership in a Local Church Necessary?

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Dr. John MacArthur often engaged in a question and answer time with his own congregation. Here is a transcript of one such interaction regarding church membership.

Elliot: My name is Elliot.

John MacArthur: Hi, Elliot.

Elliot: My wife and I have enjoyed coming to your church for the past couple of months.

John MacArthur: Great.

Elliot: We have been considering church membership. In light of that, I think I understand the rationale behind church membership, but I wonder whether there is possibly a danger in making a distinction between members of the body of Christ and nonmembers of the body of Christ. What Scripture supports church membership? Could things such as church discipline, fellowship, and commitment simply accompany a genuine profession of faith?

John MacArthur: Well, let me simply say this.

We will start with the Day of Pentecost, when the church began. Three thousand people believed, and three thousand people were baptized, essentially by the apostles and the other believers. There were only 120 believers before that, so they knew the number. There was no such thing as an unbaptized believer.

When a person becomes a believer, he is placed into the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit, who literally immerses him into the body of Christ. You become one with Christ, in union with Him, and one with everyone else who is in union with Him. Spiritually, therefore, you are part of the body of Christ. You have to understand the spiritual reality of that. All believers are part of the body of Christ.

All believers were then baptized. That is, they were publicly identified with the other believers. They were publicly identified by the leaders of the early church. Later in the book of Acts, it says that there were five thousand men who believed. They were keeping track of who was a believer, who had been baptized, who had publicly confessed Christ, and who was under their care.

What we are saying is that, from the very beginning, there was leadership in the church. By the time you reach Acts 6, they knew who their people were, and they knew they had a responsibility to care for those people. In Acts 6, they were struggling to ensure that the widows among the believers received a fair allotment of food.

They knew there was a shepherding responsibility. Therefore, they chose men who were full of the Spirit and full of faith to serve the flock. Peter says to the elders, “Shepherd the flock of God which is among you.” There was no such thing in the early church as a believer who was simply unattached.

In the book of Acts, we find that when people moved from one city to another, they took letters from the church of which they had been a part to the church to which they were moving. In this way, they were introduced as members of the church of Jesus Christ in another place. They knew who the people were. They kept track of them.

Church membership is not simply signing your name on a line. It is essentially saying, “I submit myself to the shepherding, leadership, discipleship, and discipline of those who are over me in the Lord.”

In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, he says that we are to give honor to those who are over us in the Lord. They knew who their shepherds were. They knew who their spiritual leaders were. On the other hand, in the book of Hebrews, the leaders are presented as examples whom the people could follow. The people are told to follow their faith.

There is no ambiguity about life in the church. You submit to godly elders who care for your soul and to deacons who minister on your behalf. You submit to the discipline of the church, which is for your benefit, just as the discipline of God described in Hebrews is intended to produce righteousness.

You place your life in the care of the shepherds. The Great Shepherd is the Lord Jesus, who shepherds His flock through undershepherds. This is simply what the New Testament defines as life in the church.

What, then, are the privileges of membership? By becoming a member, you are saying, “Care for me. Lead me spiritually. Direct me. Help me to use my spiritual gift. Help me to be a blessing to others by practicing the ‘one anothers’ of the New Testament, such as praying for one another, loving one another, and edifying one another.”

The New Testament knows nothing of a free-floating believer who simply bounces from one place to another. There is a built-in sense of accountability, obligation, and responsibility for shepherding. That is the only kind of church life the New Testament knows.

When we talk about church membership, we are simply saying that it is a covenant between a true believer and those whom the Lord will use to shepherd that believer. The believer commits to receive that shepherding, follow the faith of those leaders, learn from them, love them, and honor them. That is exactly what a church is.

As a believer, therefore, you should seek to be fully connected to that process, where the leaders know who you are, you know who they are, and you share together in that mutual ministry.

Okay?

Elliot: Thank you, sir.

Heaven, the Verdict, and the Fire

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Paul wanted the church to be able to stand when the winds shift. He longed for believers to grow up, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). His answer was maturity, the kind that can receive what is true and refuse what is false without panic. “Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). That is the work in front of us.

Discernment also means recognizing genuine gain. There is a recovery underway in some corners of the church, and parts of it are worth celebrating. The Bible really does tell one long story, and that story does not end with us escaping earth for a disembodied heaven. It ends with God coming down to dwell with His people. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Revelation 21:3). The Old Testament is not a husk we discard once we reach the New. The new creation is not a consolation prize. When these truths are recovered and pressed on us, I find myself nodding, and I thank God for the reminder.

A recovery becomes a loss when it denies what it only needed to rebalance. That is the danger here. Genuine gains have come at a serious cost, and that cost must be faced plainly. So let me name the three doctrines at stake. The first is the comfort of being consciously with Christ at death. The second is the imputed righteousness of Christ, the heart of justification. The third is the reality of eternal judgment, which a gentler telling quietly softens. These three are not all of one weight. The first robs grieving believers of real comfort. The other two reach nearer the center, to the sinner’s standing before God and to the judgment from which Christ came to save. These claims do not always travel together, and I am not suggesting that anyone who presses one of them presses the other two.

The Comfort of Being With Christ

The storyline does climax in resurrection and new creation. That is our final hope, and we ought to preach it plainly. Yet Scripture never makes us choose between that hope and the comfort of heaven, as though loving the one required denying the other. Paul did not speak only of the renewal of all things still to come. He wrote, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23), and that to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). To the dying thief our Lord promised a present welcome: “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The book of Hebrews can speak even now of “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). And the promise that crowns it all is His own: “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3).

This is where the denial costs the most. Stand at a graveside, a widow’s hand in yours, and tell me whether it is a small thing to be able to say where her husband is. The believer who dies is not lost in the ground awaiting a bare future. He is consciously and safely with Christ, which is far better, until the morning of resurrection makes him whole in body as well. Our confession says it without flinching: at death the souls of the righteous “are then made perfect in holiness and are received into paradise. There they are with Christ and behold the face of God in light and glory” (1689, chapter 31). We lose nothing of the new creation by holding this. We forfeit a deep comfort if we let it go. Why surrender what the Lord gave to steady the dying and comfort those who weep?

The Heart of Justification: A Righteousness Credited

The second denial cuts deeper, because it touches the very mechanism by which God saves. One of the clearest and most memorable forms of the objection comes from N. T. Wright. Righteousness, he wrote, is not “a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom,” and a judge does not transfer his own righteousness to the defendant (What Saint Paul Really Said, Eerdmans, 1997, p. 98). If imputation meant passing a substance across the room, the objection would land. It never meant that. And he is right about something further: a judge cannot simply hand his own righteousness across the bench. But the transfer he rejects is not the one the Reformed have ever taught. The righteousness credited to the believer is Christ’s own, the obedience and satisfaction of the incarnate Mediator and covenant head, reckoned to everyone joined to Him by faith.

Imputation, at its root, is a forensic reckoning. Forensic is simply a courtroom word. In justification it describes the verdict God hands down and the standing He grants, rather than the inward renewal He works in regeneration and sanctification. The word Paul reaches for again and again in Romans 4, eleven times in that one chapter, is logizomai. It can mean to consider or to calculate, but here its accounting sense is unmistakable: to credit, to reckon, to set to one’s account. Paul takes up Abraham: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3, citing Genesis 15:6). And lest we think faith is itself the merit being counted, he adds that God “counts righteousness apart from works” (Romans 4:6). Not infused. Not earned. Counted. Picture a ledger rather than a gas tank. The Judge does not pour a substance into the defendant. He enters a verdict and assigns a standing, and He does so on the basis of a righteousness that is truly Another’s.

Whose righteousness? “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). There is the great exchange: our sin reckoned to Christ at the cross, His righteousness reckoned to us. “By the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Paul’s own longing was to be found in Christ, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but … the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:9). A righteousness from God, received, never manufactured.

Now notice something. Those who deny imputation often love the language of being “in Christ,” of union with Him. Good. But that is exactly where imputation lives. Union with Christ is no rival to imputed righteousness; it is the saving bond by which Christ and all His benefits become ours. We are not credited with a righteousness hanging free in the air. We are credited with the righteousness of the One to whom the Spirit has joined us through faith. Calvin saw this and called it a double grace (Institutes 3.11.1): united to Christ, we receive at once both justification and sanctification, never the one without the other. It is what the older preachers meant when they turned a trembling sinner away from himself and toward “The Lord our righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6). So the man who treasures “in Christ” has every reason to keep imputation and none to deny it. To let it go is to saw off the branch he is sitting on.

And this is why it is the heart. Justification is more than the canceling of our guilt. Forgiveness deals with the debt, and thank God it does. But the law does not only forbid sin; it requires righteousness, a positive obedience we have never offered. Pardon alone, were that all God gave, would leave us with a clean record and still no righteousness to show. God gives more. He does not only refuse to count our sins against us; He counts us righteous in Christ. Our Lord kept the whole law in our place and bore its curse in our stead, and His obedience and satisfaction are counted as ours. We are justified, the 1689 says, as God “imputes Christ’s active obedience to the whole law and passive obedience in His death as their whole and only righteousness by faith” (chapter 11). Take imputation away, and the verdict “righteous” has nothing behind it. You are left to supply a righteousness of your own, which is the very thing the gospel came to spare us.

The Warnings Are the Lord’s

The third denial is the quiet one, and the quiet ones do their damage before anyone notices. It leaves no one troubled about hell, no one pressed to flee the wrath to come. The cartoon of pitchforks and boiling oil is softly set aside, and with it, too often, the thing itself.

But the warnings are not medieval inventions. They are the Lord’s. It was Jesus Himself who warned of judgment, plainly and often, and He set the two destinies side by side in a single breath: “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). The same word, eternal, describes them both. If the life is everlasting, so is the punishment. He spoke of the place “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). John heard that “the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night” (Revelation 14:11), and saw the lake of fire (Revelation 20:15). I did not write these words, and I will not argue with the One who did.

We can grant the objector something. Scripture’s warnings are weightier and stranger than the caricatures, and we should preach the texts rather than the cartoons. But the cure for a caricature is never denial. It is the sober biblical reality, spoken in love. A gospel that troubles no one about the judgment to come is not the gospel the apostles preached in the open air. Paul reasoned about “the coming judgment” until Felix was alarmed (Acts 24:25). The warning is itself a mercy, the lighthouse set on the rocks. To dim it for the sake of comfort is the cruelest comfort of all. So here is a question to sit with: when did any of us last warn a soul, kindly and plainly, of what is coming?

Eat the Fish, Leave the Bones

So let us glean gladly. Where this recovery calls us back to the Bible’s true horizon, God making His home with us, the new heavens and new earth, our calling as image-bearers in His world, let us receive it with thanks. There is real nourishment here. Eat the fish.

But leave the bones, and name them for what they are, because a flock is fed by what we keep as much as by what we praise. Keep heaven and the new creation together. Keep the credited righteousness of Christ, which is the ground of every weary believer’s peace. Keep the warnings of our Lord, and the urgency they lend to our pleading with those who are perishing.

And keep your eyes on the cross, where our sin was laid on Him, the guilt that was ours reckoned to Him and borne in our place. And the righteousness Christ rendered, across a whole life of obedience crowned at Calvary, God reckons to everyone He joins to His Son by faith. We do not stand before God in a righteousness of our own, thanks be to God. We stand in His. That is no doctrine to trade away for a fresh emphasis. It is the only ground any of us will have to stand on when the books are opened. And when you see what that righteousness cost Him, and how freely He gives it, what is left but to bow and adore? To Him be the glory, now and forever. Amen.

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV), 2025 Text Edition. Confession quotations are from the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith in Modern English (Founders Press).

The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Guard

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When I was a small boy growing up in Chester, England, I wanted with all my heart to be a guard outside Buckingham Palace.

This was no passing fancy. I had the uniform, made to my size. I had the belt, the tall black bearskin hat, which as a boy I called a Busby, and a real rifle, unloaded, but a real rifle all the same. And I would stand for hours outside our house, perfectly still, refusing to move a single muscle. The other boys in the neighborhood would come out and ask if I wanted to play. I would not so much as blink. I had seen the real guards outside the palace, and they did not move for anyone. Children could shout, sing, and pull faces, and those guards stood like statues. So I did the same.

Every year we visited my uncle in London, and the highlight for me was always the same. My parents and I would take the Underground across the city to reach the palace in good time for the Changing of the Guard ceremony, and I would stand with my face pressed between the palace railings, trying to get as close as I could to the action, studying every movement of the guards.

One year an American tourist who had missed the Changing of the Guard asked if she could take my photograph. I looked the part. I am, to this day, in someone’s photo album in America, a small English boy at rigid attention.

And I had a secret hope. I used to imagine that the Queen might glance out of one of those tall windows, see this devoted little guard standing there outside the palace, and be charmed. I imagined her summoning a member of staff and saying, “Would you bring that little boy and his parents in? I should like to have tea with them.”

I genuinely hoped for it. I knew when she was in residence, because the Royal Standard flag would fly over the palace. She was in there somewhere, just beyond the glass. Surely all my effort would be noticed.

It never happened. Of course it never happened.

Years later, as a teenager who had traded the dream of being a guard for the dream of playing football, I read in the Chester newspaper that the Queen was going to visit my own city. The paper printed the exact route her car would take the next morning. I knew Chester like the back of my hand, and I worked out that if I climbed a particular lamp post on a certain street, I would be above the crowds with a clear view of Her Majesty as she passed.

The next morning I climbed up and waited. And as her car came slowly down the street, for one brief moment, her eyes and mine met. I gave a small nod. And the Queen, just for a moment, nodded back.

That was it. That was the whole of my relationship with royalty: a nod from a passing car. She never wrote to me about it. It did not feature in the royal records. But for a boy who had once stood for hours in a miniature uniform, it was a moment.

I tell that story because it captures something the apostle Paul says in one of the most important verses in the whole Bible. Writing about why God saves the people He saves, Paul concludes: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” – Romans 9:16

Not on human will. Not on human exertion. Not on the man who wills, nor on the man who runs.

All my striving as a boy could never have made me royalty. I could stand still for a hundred years. I could wear the uniform, learn every detail, climb every lamp post in England, and still none of it could bridge the gap between a subject on the street and a son in the royal house. The most that striving could ever earn me was a nod from a passing car. Adoption into the family was never on offer to my effort, however sincere, however devoted.

But if I leave the picture there, I have told you only half the truth, and the smaller half at that. For at least the boy in the uniform admired his Queen. He loved the Crown and longed to serve it.

That is not what the Bible says we were.

Scripture does not describe us as wistful subjects standing politely on the street, hoping to be noticed. It describes us as rebels. We were “enemies” of God (Romans 5:10). The mind set on the flesh “is hostile to God” (Romans 8:7). We did not tip our hats to the King and hope for an invitation. We took up arms against His throne and did everything in our power to unseat Him from it.

That is what makes the doctrine of election so staggering.

If we were merely admiring subjects who failed to earn our way in, grace would be wonderful enough. But we were traitors to the Crown, and the King reached down not to reward our striving, but to rescue us from our rebellion. He did not adopt us because we wanted in. He adopted us while we were doing all we could to dethrone Him.

Yet this mercy was not cheap. The King did not pretend our treason did not matter. The Son of God bore the judgment His people deserved, rose from the dead, and brought rebels home by blood-bought grace.

And here is the gospel, better than anything my boyhood imagination could invent. The King of all kings, entirely of His own free mercy, has taken rebels who hated Him and made them His own children. He did not wait to be impressed. He did not respond to our effort, because our effort was all bent against Him. He set His love on His people before they were born, before they had done anything good or bad, “not because of works but because of him who calls” (Romans 9:11).

And He did not merely permit us to squeak into a back room of the palace. He brings us near, names us as His own, and bids us “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16).

The boy in the guard’s uniform could only hope to be noticed. The rebel, by sovereign grace, is welcomed home as a son.

If you are in Christ, you did not earn your way in, and you never could have. You did not even want in until He made you willing. You were adopted by sheer sovereign mercy while you were still in rebellion against the throne, and that is not cold doctrine. It is the warmest news in the world.

The believer’s place in the family does not rest on the strength of human striving, which rises and falls. It rests on the unchanging will of the God who has mercy on whom He has mercy, granting repentance and faith to those He saves.

I never did have tea with the Queen. But by grace alone, and not by any effort of mine, the King I once resisted has adopted me as His own, brought me near through Christ, and welcomes me to dine at His table.

“So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” – Romans 9:16