Going Public: Why Baptism Is Required for Church Membership

by Bobby Jamieson

Evangelical ecclesiology tends to be consumed by the question of “what works.” Pragmatism has not only moved to the center of our churchly solar system, but like an aging star it has ballooned and swallowed everything in its orbit.

The thesis of this book, then, is that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are effective signs of church membership: they create the social, ecclesial reality to which they point. Precisely because of their complementary church- constituting roles, baptism must precede the Lord’s Supper and the status of church membership which grants access to the Lord’s Supper.

Believe me, I do not relish the thought of refusing to accept godly, fruitful, paedobaptist Christians into church membership. But it is far worse to disregard a command of Christ, confirm a Christian’s disobedience to Christ, and erase the visible sign of our union with Christ. To remove baptism from church membership is to dig up and discard one of the foundations of the local church. Removing baptism from membership erases the line Jesus himself has drawn between the church and the world.

It’s not the Trinity, but it’s not the color of your church’s carpet.

What is this book about? In one sentence: in this book I argue that according to Scripture baptism is required for church membership and for participation in the Lord’s Supper, membership’s recurring effective sign.

So I’m not going to argue for believer’s baptism over against paedobaptism.

I assume virtually everyone who will read this book is a credobaptist, someone who believes that only professing believers in Jesus should be baptized. Why? Because the church throughout history has held with near-perfect unanimity that baptism is a necessary prerequisite to the Lord’s Supper and church membership. The only people who have departed from this consensus are a smallish slice of credobaptists.

But we, on the other hand, think a huge number of Christians simply haven’t been baptized because sprinkling an infant is not what Jesus and the apostles meant by “baptism.”

Plenty of baptists could join a Presbyterian church, but if baptism is a prerequisite for membership, then those same Presbyterians couldn’t join a baptist church.

Back to my theme of what this book isn’t. This book will not attempt to comprehensively define what constitutes a valid baptism. Neither will I try to say all there is to say about baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and church membership. Finally, I’m not going to attempt to provide a complete pastoral how-to manual on these three things, though I’ll sketch a few practical guidelines in the last chapter.

So this is a debate worth having because there’s no way to escape

this is a debate worth having because of the cost of holding the position I argue.

you’re going to have baptism as a prerequisite for church membership, you better have...

if you’re inclined to see baptism as necessary for church membership but balk at the political price tag, I hope this

It seems wrong at a gut level to have to exclude R. C. Sproul or Kevin DeYoung from your church simply because he hasn’t been baptized as you understand the ordinance.

Fourth, if holding to the historic position usually brings a certain social cost, adopting open membership creates its own set of problems, both practical and theological.

On the practical side most churches who adopt open membership put some type of restriction on how unbaptized members may serve.

Closed membership carries an up-front social cost, but open membership comes with a price tag of its own, of the “bill me later” variety.

How do you escape the conclusion that your church is effectively making baptism an option rather than a command?

open membership creates problems of its own. And those problems should raise the question of whether the position is biblical in the first place.

church polity matters. How your church is structured, governed, and constituted is important to the Lord of the church: he’s said plenty about it in his Word.

Polity isn’t the gospel, but it protects and preserves the gospel.

Piper is a hero in the faith to me and many others, so please don’t confuse critique with condemnation.

Because this is a pressing question for many pastors and churches, and I think there’s a biblical way to answer it. And unless I’m badly mistaken, requiring baptism for membership is an increasingly unpopular stance, so it could use a fresh defense.

By God’s grace the center is increasingly secure, but the center isn’t all there is. And if we make the center everything and everything else nothing, we set ourselves up to lose the center itself. This book is an attempt to shore up some border territories in an effort, ultimately, to make the capital city a little more secure.

Great poi t as to why doctrine matters. Cofessionalism matters

When John Bunyan, Robert Hall Jr., and others argued that unbaptized persons should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper, they were not arguing that such believers should be admitted to Communion but still excluded from membership.

they held that unbaptized persons should be welcomed into full membership, which included and was most visibly realized in participation in the Lord’s Supper.

Baptist circles at least, some have distinguished between “closed” Communion and “close” Communion.11 In this context, closed Communion refers to the position that only the members of a local church may celebrate the Lord’s Supper. No visitors, whether baptized or unbaptized, are invited to the Table. And, as only baptized Christians are members, baptism is a requirement for both membership and Communion.

baptism is the new covenant’s initiating oath-sign, and the Lord’s Supper is its renewing oath-sign. By definition the former must precede the latter. Further, the Lord’s Supper and church membership are too closely linked to allow baptism to be a prerequisite for one but not the other. So in due course I will argue that the open-closed position doesn’t hold water, so to speak.

The first issue is the question of whether baptism is the initiatory rite into the church and how that bears on its relationship to church membership. Does baptism have an ecclesial shape? That is, does it sustain any intrinsic theological relationship to the local church?

Therefore, after sketching most of a theology of baptism in chapter 3, in chapters 4 and 5 I will investigate whether Scripture gives baptism an ecclesial shape, that is, whether baptism is intrinsically tied to church membership.

I briefly broached this subject when I asked whether the requirements for the Lord’s Supper can legitimately differ from those for church membership.

We’ll see that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are effective signs of church membership: they create the ecclesial reality to which they point. Baptism binds one to many, and the Lord’s Supper makes many one.

We’ll see that baptism is where faith goes public, which lays the foundation for a cohesive theology of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and church membership.

When Jesus inaugurated his kingdom on earth, he gave the church the “keys of the kingdom”: the authority to speak for heaven on earth, to representatively declare who belongs to him (Matt 16:18–19; 18:18). And the initial and initiating means by which the church does this is baptism. Baptism, then, is both the passport of the kingdom and a kingdom citizen’s swearing-in ceremony. It’s how a church publicly identifies someone as a Christian and unites that person to itself.

while baptism binds one to many, the Lord’s Supper binds many into one (1 Cor 10:17). While baptism is the initiating oath-sign of the new covenant, the Lord’s Supper is the renewing oath-sign of the new covenant. Which means the former must come before the latter.

One takeaway, drastic as it may sound, is that speaking of church membership without baptism is like speaking of marriage without vows: such a thing does not actually exist.

I’m going to outline six reasons open membership can seem intuitively right and closed membership intuitively wrong. And I’m going to try to show why those factors shouldn’t decide the question in advance.

Although a few things can be said in favor of the newer definition, the sad reality is that this new, contemporary tolerance is intrinsically intolerant. It is blind to its own shortcomings because it erroneously thinks it holds the moral high ground; it cannot be questioned because it has become part of the West’s plausibility structure. Worse, this new tolerance is socially dangerous and is certainly intellectually debilitating.

What does this have to do with requiring baptism for membership? Our culture regards virtually any act of exclusion as unjust. Therefore, unless we deliberately exercise the moral muscles our culture inclines us to neglect, excluding someone from a church over something as seemingly trivial as baptism will appear not only intolerant but petty.

For now it’s enough to note that culturally inherited concepts of tolerance shouldn’t preempt a biblical discussion of the qualifications for local church membership. If something smells intolerant, it’s possible that says more about our sense of tolerance than about the thing itself.

As Gregory Wills ably chronicles in his book Democratic Religion, church discipline was a defining feature of Southern Baptist churches throughout most of the nineteenth century. Departures from truth and holiness required correction, sometimes public correction. And unrepentant or scandalous sin resulted in excommunication—exclusion from the church.

And over the past hundred years church discipline continued to vanish to the point where, until recently, finding a church that practiced it was like stepping into Jurassic Park. If disciplining for dancing may well have been too strict, ditching discipline altogether is the definition of too lax.

After generations of interdenominational warfare, contemporary credobaptists are wary of erecting any boundaries between churches. In short, a similar transition has taken place with denominational divides and discipline. That these two issues have swung in the same direction over roughly the same time should at least make us stop and think.

far. If previous baptists refused to recognize a Presbyterian body as a true church, some contemporary baptists seem to feel that it’s wrong for us to have separate churches at all. If older baptists were too quick to anathematize Presbyterians, some baptists today are too quick to throw our own distinctives overboard.

Ligon Duncan, the Presbyterian of the bunch, is happy to have fellowship with baptists who would not admit him to the Lord’s Supper: I appreciate the conviction of a Baptist who . . . would argue strenuously that people who have not been baptized as believing adults are not baptized and therefore shouldn’t be welcomed into church membership and communion because, in our day-and-age, that sounds mean to a lot of people. We’re about inclusion. It’s the Baptist who won’t let me join his church who is the Baptist with whom I want to fellowship.

If unity isn’t grounded in truth, it comes at the expense of truth. And a unity that sacrifices truth is no Christian unity.

For many a certain practical stance on church unity is simply taken as a given, in need of no justification. Yet just as many churches are coming to rightly recover the practice of church discipline, so we should also give fresh attention to church distinctives we may have too quickly tossed overboard.

An evangelicalism that majors on “core doctrines” and operates extensively through parachurch organizations has little patience for church distinctives that divide. However unintentionally, Christians reared in this context can come to view any sources of division as counterproductive distractions from the real mission. As such, open membership fits right into the contemporary evangelical ethos. To put it negatively, dividing over “nonessentials” has become a cardinal sin of evangelicalism.

First, because cooperation tends to exert pressure to downplay differences. It takes rare humility and grace to partner closely yet differ strongly. One crucial test of a partnership is how you handle differences, and papering over them is no mark of a thriving relationship.