In the Southern Baptist Convention, our churches claim 16,000,000 on our membership roles, but we only know where less than half those people are. That is not membership, that is collecting names. Completely meaningless. At NEHBC, we want membership to be meaningfully New Testament. Membership ought to mean the things I listed in the previous post. At NEHBC we try to accomplish this goal through several measures.
1. We try to teach about the biblical meaning of membership during the Discovery Class, a prerequisite for prospective church members.
2. We have membership expectations that we discuss during the same Discovery Class and that we refer to as the three Ts: time, talent, and tithe. We ask our members to give of their time to regularly attending a worship service and bible study class, find at least one place of service in the church, and give their tithe to support the Lord's vision for our church family.
3. Annually, our church staff sits down with the membership roll and we talk through it family unit by family unit. Do we know where each unit is? When is the last time we saw them or heard from them? Where are they serving? If a name comes up and we all have blank stares on our faces, the family unit's name goes onto a list. Once we have the total list of people that we are out of touch with, we make personal phone calls to those families. It is our goal to talk to them live on the phone. We want to see if they are ok, if we have just been missing them in the crowd, if they have moved away, if they are in need of ministry or prayer. If it turns out they have drifted from the Lord and stopped coming to worship, we urge them to come back and live their lives in community with us. This process creates a wide range of ministry opportunities: from counseling situations, to prayer opportunities, to bible teaching moments, to helping spiritually drifting folks come back to the Lord. And yes, we encounter family units each year who wont or can't come back because they have moved away or have been hurt or have lost interest in the Lord. And sometimes, despite our best efforts to win them back, they don't want to be members of NEHBC any longer. It is always our desire that our phone calls result in finding out we either just keep missing them in the sea of faces when they come to worship or that if they have stopped coming, that they return to our fellowship.
By the way, these phone calls are taking place this week.
4. We periodically contact our pending members to encourage them to complete our membership process. I will discuss this process in a subsequent post, but at least annually, and sometimes biannually, we will email or call the pending members to offer them a friendly reminder of what they have left in order to finish the membership process. We want to do whatever we can to help them get the process completed, whether it's just offering a word of encouragement, answering questions, or reexplaining the process.
Often times we find that some pending members have not completed the process because they thought they became members by simply requesting membership on the white card in one of the worship services. Our periodic follow ups with the pending members enable us to find these folks and help them understand that the white card membership request just initiated our membership process.
These phone calls are also taking place this week.
5. We also go through our list of prospects that is VERY long. These are all the people who have ever come to NEHBC and filled out the white guest card. On this list, we annually find some folks who clearly have found their church home at NEHBC and yet have never taken the first step to becoming members. We make a list of these folks and call them with a very friendly encouragement that they begin the process to formally affiliate with us for all the reasons listed in my previous post.
These phone calls are also taking place this week.
I believe that if we are going to be transformed from a gathering of individuals into a living community of God, membership must become meaningful and must matter to our church family.
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