Every year, Southern Baptist churches are asked to fill out what’s called the “Annual Church Profile” (ACP).  This is the primary means by which the Convention collects and compiles statistical data concerning SBC churches.  In the ACP, you are asked to provide information concerning the church’s giving, Sunday School attendance, baptisms, membership, etc.

For a number of years now, I have left the “Total Membership” and “Resident Membership” sections blank on our ACP.  I did that the last few years at my last church in Dawson, GA, and have carried the practice here to Central Baptist Church in North Little Rock, AR.

I do have my secretary fill in our average attendance figures, so it can be seen roughly how many attend, but not the “Total Membership” or “Resident Membership.”  Why?  Simply put, because while our “Total Membership” is just over 2,000, our average attendance for the last year was 519.

That means that just 25% of our total membership attends church.

To be sure, there are some legitimate reasons for this.  Some members are elderly or are in poor health and cannot come.  Others may be in the military stationed abroad or perhaps are out of the state on business for a protracted period of time.  Yes, there are legitimate reasons.  I suspect, however, that these reasons do not make up a very large percentage of the 75% of our members who do not attend.

Let’s be charitable and say we can explain 5% of that 75% on legitimate reasons.  That would mean we have 70% of our membership that does not attend…and that really is no improvement.

Now, I am not proud of that.  In fact, I find it embarrassing.  However, let me point out that the evidence suggests that we are the norm and not the exception.  In fact, most SBC churches have a shocking disparity between their membership and their attendance.

This was not always so.  For the better part of our 400 year history, we Baptists have held to what is called “regenerate church membership.”  That is a particular way of looking at membership.  It means that the membership of the church is comprised of those who have been born again and duly baptized.  How can a church know whether or not a person has been truly born again?  Of course, ultimately, we cannot see into the hearts and minds of human beings, but Baptists have historically asked for a credible confession of faith in Jesus as Lord followed by believer’s baptism.  In this way, Baptist church membership is distinguished from, say, a state church model or paedobaptist models that would extend the title “member” to those who have not made a profession of faith and been baptized.

Regenerate church membership carries with it a very simple implication:  that if the church is, by definition, comprised of the regenerate, it is reasonable to expect that there will be, at the least, an agreed upon effort among the membership to live as Christian people.  Of course, we fall.  We fail.  We sin.  And the grace of the Lord Jesus is ever present and must be present among his people.  If this grace is not present, the church becomes a graceless cult, a gathering of Pharisees.

Regenerate church membership in its healthiest manifestations (and, I would argue, in its New Testament manifestions) is fully aware of human frailty, even among the redeemed, but comes together in loving agreement about what the Christian life should generally look like.  Baptist churches have often spelled these agreements out in church covenants.  One of these elements is association with the local church.

As a result, for most of our history, Baptist churches have had watchcare over the membership, living in covenanted accountability with those walking with the body of Christ and lovingly but clearly calling those who have fallen away back to the fold.  This explains why church discipline has historically been important to Baptist Christians.  Church discipline, in both its formative and corrective manifestations, was seen as a biblical and necessary and redemptive means by which the regenerate character of the church was encouraged and maintained under the ministry of the Spirit’s guidance and the church’s faithfulness.

The disparity between membership and attendance in most modern SBC churches shows that all of this has changed in our day.  Our commitment to regenerate church membership is now largely theoretical, and very few people even know the term at all.  Church discipline has been cast off as an awkward disonaur of the past, a relic that wreaks of legalism and inquisitions and hypocritical judgment.  The fact that church discipline has indeed been sometimes abused in these ways does not make it easy to get a reasonable hearing for it today.

Because of this, the idea of membership accountability is increasingly alien to our church culture.  The reasons are many and varied:  historical illiteracy, biblical illiteracy, the rise of the ecclesiastical marketplace, consumerism, hyper-individualism, the loss of a sense of community, the privitization of spirituality in American Christianity, the privitization of confession and repentance, rampant, low ecclesiology, the ease with which we can move from one church to another when our feelings get hurt, the collapse of the letter system among Baptist churches, competition among churches for congregants, and a shift from biblical teaching to the assuaging of perceived felt needs among congregants in the local church.  The list goes on an on.

At Central Baptist Church, we are trying to restore a sense of “church,” a sense of “we,” a sense of being a covenanted community.  We are trying to re-learn church, to re-learn the gospel, to re-learn what it means to be the body of Christ.  As such, we have committed ourselves to becoming “an authentic family around the whole gospel for the glory of God and the reaching of the nations.”

In the meantime, I am asked yearly by the ACP to write down our membership number.  But here’s the thing:  I know if I write “2,000 members” that (a) it’s true only in a coldly technical sense but not in any sense that my forefathers would recognize and (b) that that figure will be added to similarly inflated figures from other churches, compiled and then reported to the world as part of the largely-mythical idea of the Southern Baptist Convention having almost 16 million members.

In other words, I leave that section blank because I believe it is a sin to bear false witness.

Now, those are my thoughts.  I am not claiming that churches which report that figure are, in fact, sinning.  Again, the number is technically true, and a church may indeed bemoan the inflated nature of it yet still report it as the technical truth.  (In doing so, however, it would be conceding that the word “membership” means something very different to us than it did to our forefathers.)  But, for me, when I consider the reality of our church climate and the need to be honest about where we truly are, I have determined that I cannot write the figure in good conscience or give assent to it.

We are a congregational church.  The church may choose to vote to add the number at any time.  Should it choose to do so, the number will be reported.  However, short of that, it will not be.

Our current situation was not created in a day.  It will not be fixed in a day.  It is, admittedly, of relative importance, but it is not unimportant.  So we will continue to strive towards regenerate church membership.  Perhaps in time our statistics will regain a sense of integrity, at least a sense of movement in the right direction, at the very least a departure from the realm of fiction.  When that happens, I think I can, in good conscience, fill in the blank.

Finally, let me make this perfectly clear:  I do not wholly (or possibly even mainly) blame the non-attending members for the predicament.  Perhaps most of the blame falls upon me, upon us as a church.  Had we lovingly ministered to and consistently reached out to our non-associating members, perhaps many would still be in open, visible association.  The predicament should cause the church to ask herself whether or not we have been negligent.  And, yes, it should cause the non-attending member (who is physically able to attend) to ask himself or herself why it is that they could join a church and then neglect it.

It is a painful path we will have to walk towards restoration.  But, by God’s grace, we can restore integrity to membership.