IDEAS THAT WORK
A cure for deadwood
Dave Zehring
April 1, 1984
A CURE FOR "DEADWOOD"
I stared at the membership brochure of the church where I was candidating, and blinked.
"You are invited to become a member of Covenant Baptist Church by sharing in our Covenant of Membership.
"Membership is for a calendar year, and each year we commit ourselves to God and to one another in this Covenant."
I had served for five years on the staff of a very large church where the membership could only be approximated. A decade could pass before we discovered someone was no longer attending, and the rolls frequently included names of persons who had died several years before. I was bothered to see new people join the church and immediately fade into inactive anonymity. While these cases were extreme, they illustrated the problems of "forever membership."
Now here was a congregation doing something distinctive. From its inception nine years before in a rapidly growing suburb of Phoenix, the charter members and the founding pastor, Fred Williamson, had tried new ideas. The annual renewal of membership-the same as if you were joining the YMCA or your block association-was one such idea.
"We wanted to keep membership from becoming just another ritual," Larie Kelley told me after I accepted the pastorate. Traditional lifetime membership had been considered, I learned, but the charter congregation had voted overwhelmingly for the annual plan.
Today, the Covenant of Membership remains essentially as it was first drafted, although we have reworded it for clarity and a spirit of graciousness. The specific sections are commitments we believe the Lord expects each of us to make as his disciples. They are:
Personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord
Public profession of faith by baptism
Regular participation ...
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