When does a group become a church?

I need to tell you plainly what this chapter will not do. It will not tell you who is allowed to baptize, how to observe the Lord’s Supper, or what counts as membership. Baptists, Church of Christ believers, Catholics, Methodists and Pentecostals all use this material, and they answer those questions differently, faithfully, out of real conviction. I am not going to pretend I can settle what your own tradition has thought carefully about for centuries.

What is actually settled

A few things are not up for grabs, because they come straight out of the text and out of what obedience-based discipleship already requires.

Baptism arises from the text. A group reading Scripture together will run into it — the Ethiopian in his chariot, the jailer at midnight — and when they ask for it, that request came from the Word and the Spirit, not from you.

As they travelled along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water. What prevents me from being baptised?’ — Acts 8:36 (OTB)

Notice what isn’t in that verse: no altar call, no countdown to a baptism Sunday, nobody deciding it was time. He read, and he asked.

Baptism is never under duress. Whatever your tradition holds about the mode, the age, or the meaning, nothing in what we teach permits pressuring someone toward the water before they are asking for it themselves.

Who administers it is negotiable by tradition. This is not a hill anyone needs to die on here. If who baptizes is a real question for your sending church, answer it their way.

And elders come from within, and after the church already exists. Nobody is imported to run this from outside. That much this material does settle.

What it does not settle — and says so

Everything past that belongs to you and your sending church, not to me and not to this class. Who baptizes. How the Lord’s Supper is observed, how often, by whom. What actually constitutes membership. How decisions get made once there are enough people to disagree about something.

I am not going to dress my own preferences up as rules for your tradition to follow. Where the text and our own convictions run out, I will tell you so plainly, and hand the question back to you.

Answer them early, in writing

Here is my counsel, offered as counsel: sit down with your sending church before you plant, not during a crisis six months in, and put the answers to those questions in writing. A hard conversation on paper in January is a different animal than the same conversation shouted in a kitchen in September, after someone already got baptized and someone else already got offended.

The wrong answer, whatever your tradition, is to postpone being a church until it looks like the one you came from. A group obeying the Word, baptizing believers, and caring for each other is a church at whatever point your tradition says it becomes one — waiting for it to acquire a building, a name, and a bulletin is not required by anything we teach.

Recite this

This class does not answer that for you — your sending church must, early and in writing.

Try it this week

Write down the four questions above. Circle the one your sending church has never actually discussed with you.

Then finish this sentence, with a name and a date:

I will bring these four questions to __________ and get written answers by __________.