Church Membership Should Be Based on Faith
R. Scott Clark recently published a case for confessional church membership. Confessional church membership is when a requirement for becoming a member of local church entails the applicant affirming agreement with the church’s doctrinal conviction, which in the case of historic Reformed churches can be quite extensive. I was in the midst of leading a new members call at my church when Clark published the essay, which combined with my past focus on the topic (here at Reformation 21; here in the EPC’s Westminster Society Journal; here on the blog), piqued my interest.
Clark’s argument turns on three points. First, that local church membership is a biblical idea and that the elders of the local church are tasked with overseeing admission into this membership. He has my full agreement on this. Second, that in the early church and among many of the historic Reformed churches there was an extensive catechetical process for new members far more intensive than the normal Reformed approach today, and that this membership process culminated in the catechumans confessing (i.e. reciting and affirming) the creeds/confessions of the church. I grant that this occurred and was often the formal standard, though I am skeptical how frequently this really happened…
A Positive Theological Vision for the CRC and Evangelicalism
Eric Davis and Aleah Marsden have written a well outlined vision for what a Reformed Catholic vision of the CRC would entail. They are happy that the CRC seems to be avoiding mainline liberalism but are wary that in doing so seems to be headed towards evangelicalism. Their proposal for a thicker set of identity markers (not just doctrine, but covenant, ecclesiology, and kingdom) and their articulation of it are excellent. In many ways their proposal maps onto my argument for how evangelicalism and pietiesm differ from confessionalism. There’s a lot they say worth commending, but these two lines in particular are excellent, “We applaud the desire by some to turn more toward evangelism, but we don’t think it requires turning to evangelicalism. A Reformed catholic emphasis on a covenant-keeping God is properly evangelistic in tone and tenor, and precisely what an exhausted culture desperately needs.”
An interesting difference between the CRC and my own EPC on this is the nature of confessionalism and doctrine. In the EPC the Westminster Standards are often relegated to the background. For us to become more Reformed Catholic would include recovering our confessional heritage and making Westminsterian logic our primary vocabulary. Davis and Marsden are concerned that the CRC is headed towards confessionalism (other CRC/RCA critics of the recent shift think that this is CRC moving from the Neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck to the New Calvinism of John Piper and Kevin DeYoung) stripped of the other dimensions necessary to hold a denomination together and keep congregations richly rooted. I don’t disagree with them that the church is more than its doctrine, but my experience with the Reformed Catholic movement is that historic Reformed dogma gets set aside in favor of shared practices. Reformed Catholicism is certainly more than shared confessions of faith, but it is not less than that and requires robust confessionalism to stay Reformed.
