Quotes about Membership

Membership is the church's corporate endorsement of a person's salvation.

The gospel by which individuals come to personal faith, and so to that radical transformation of life spoken of so often in the new Testament, is the personalizing of the larger challenge just mentioned: the call to every child, woman, and man to submit in faith to the lordship of the crucified and risen Jesus and so to become, through baptism and membership in the body of Christ, a living, breathing anticipation of the final new creation itself

More Chinese attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist Party.

I am persuaded that the church today has many more consumers than committed participants.

A faith that eats its own not only drives people out but also sends up a red flare to the rest of humanity that Christianity is just another exclusive members-only club, and that Jesus is a lingering relic of antiquity, rather than a powerful, present-defining spiritual reality; a means of gaining power rather than relinquishing it. And who needs that, really?

A slave is not a permanent member of the family, but a son belongs to it forever.

And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each of you is a member of it.

Therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household,

For we are members of His body.

They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us.

A church may have the bones of organization and sound theology. It may have the body of a large membership. But, if the breath of the Holy Spirit is not on it and in it, then it is only Sardis, having a name to be alive but dead.