Excommunication

[James]

The Pastor of Cave City Baptist Church in Lexington, KY directed that 70 people who had stopped attending services and stopped giving to the church be sent letters informing them that their membership in the church was terminated. I did not know that the pastor of an SBC church had the power to do that.

[William Thornton]

Might as well put the facts with your ire:

http://www.bpnews.net/51302/churchs-rol ... dia-circus

I would have some issues with the action but the pastor said the church had been going through an eight year process.

1. Looks like the church approved the action.
2. Probably not a good idea for the pastor to tackle this in his first year.
3. I've done this more than once.
4. Churches should maintain the membership as they see fit.

[Tim Bonney]

[Joseph Patrick]

From Gerry Milligan aka Joseph Patrick,
On the question of purging (an inflammatory term) church roles, James 1:8 (A double minded man is unstable in all his ways) describes me. But, for me it comes down to how are they "cumbering the ground" (church/congregation)?

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

"Excommunication" would apply if your local Baptist church in question had close(d) communion. At Fremont and most ABC churches I've known, losing local church membership per se doesn't exclude one from the invitation to the "table".

[Tim Bonney]

[Sandy]

Excommunication? Being taken off the membership roll of a Baptist church because you haven't been there or supported it for a long time is not "excommunication." And each local, independent, autonomous Baptist church can give whatever authority to the pastor that it wants, so if they want him to be the one that trims the membership roll, he can do it. It sounds like that was a little bit misrepresented in this case, though. Apparently this pastor didn't do it on his own.

Even so, I don't have a problem with a church wanting to go through the process of making its membership roll reflect its membership. The SBC reports just north of 15 million members, and just a tad over 5 million in weekly average attendance. Somewhere out there are nearly 10 million people, two out of every three that consider themselves "Southern Baptist," who don't attend the church they belong to. If a church went to the effort of trying to find all of theirs, and came up with a list of people who hadn't attended or supported the church for a while, and didn't get any response from them, dropping them from the membership roll wouldn't seem to be a problem.

[Lamar Wadsworth]

I am reminded of a church business meeting in Alabama years ago. The clerk read her report: "We have received a request from Pine Grove Baptist Church for the letter of Susie Smith (not the actual name)," and then without missing a beat, the clerk commented, "I thought she was dead but I don't guess she is."

[Dave Roberts]

The whole topic seems to bring into focus the larger question of the meaning of membership in the local church. There is no uniformity at all among Baptists. I have been through trying to update the rolls of a couple of churches where I have served. We went through a much more detailed process which included efforts to contact people who had been members but had been gone for some time, efforts to contact family where we knew there were still relatives in the church, and running a list in the newsletter trying to learn if someone could help us contact these members. There seems to be a problem on both sides. First, there were those who had been members who still considered themselves part of the local congregation and wished to remain though they no longer attended (reasons varied). Second, there were individuals who had long ago joined other churches (some of them Baptist) but did not find it important to let us know. Third, there were folks who returned our letter of concern informing us that they no longer wished to hear from us again, but they shared no wishes as to how we should handle their membership. Fourth, we also found people who had been dead for as much as half a century.

The other side of the issue is church concern with and ministry to our members. You can disappear from many churches and never be contacted again, even if you live within sight of other church members. It seems that our individualism has replaced our corporate concern for each other. If we can simply disappear from a church without being contacted, did anyone in the church care about us? Also, I have discovered that churches have sometimes kept very poor records of people joining and have even failed to remove names when letters were requested "because it made us look smaller." It's a broad issue, and most churches have some of the symptoms.

The best model I know is one in which, if someone does not attend for five years, does not give or correspond with the church in that five year period, and has made no effort to respond, they are placed in a hold file. Should they later become active again, their status will be moved back into the active membership. Should they later join another church and inform the congregation, the church then will respond with the statement "This person has been a member of our church." If this is in the constitution and bylaws, it saves many later issues.

As to a pastor purging the roll, I suspect that may be a symptom of the "Calvinist resurgence" in the SBC.

[Haruo]

Fremont Baptist had (20-plus years ago) and perhaps still has a category of "associate membership", created to allow those temporarily in the area (e.g. college students) to participate in church business meetings without having to give up membership in their home church in Minnesota. They were specifically barred from voting on motions affecting hiring, firing, and denominational affiliations, but were otherwise full members, as I recall. When they moved away for more than a quarter, as I recall, they automatically lost this status.

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure come to think of it that sale of the property was also on the disenfranchisement list.

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

[Tim Bonney]

In one church I pastored we did some major revisions of the Bylaws because we realized a hostile takeover of the church would be very easy. Items like changing the denominational affiliation of the church originally only required a simple majority vote at any monthly business meeting. Often we had 30 or less people at those meetings. All someone would have to do is get a handful of new people to join the church, or convince just a handful of other members to come to a business meeting, make a motion to leave the ABC/USA or even sell the building and and a church that ran almost 150 in worship would find itself out of its denomination or without a building by the will 16+ people.

The changes required that a business meeting to sell or buy property or change denominational affiliation (and a few other items like calling a new pastor) had to be announced on two successive Sundays from the pulpit and published in all church publications and that such a vote would require a 2/3rd majority of all voting members present.

At least then if someone wanted to pull some shenanigans the whole church would have an opportunity to know and vote.

[William Thornton]

I asked the church to make a couple of changes to avoid hostile takeover. Just a precaution.

[Rvaughn]

In our area we most commonly use (used) the terminology "exclusion," or removal from church fellowship. Some more colloquially call being excluded, being "churched." I've never heard our folks here call it excommunication, though technically those of us who practice strict communion are in effect excluding the member from communion.

A number of years ago we did an extensive cleaning of the church roll, sending out letters to last known addresses and such like. I had been at the church several years before suggesting it, and we did it as a church (i.e., it was not just something the pastor did). The membership roll had been neglected several years, and we succeeded in making a few people mad. We did this again fairly recently, but due to the "fix" years ago and keeping up with the roll better, it was a simple process that went off without a hitch. We made the note "removed from roll" and the reason (e.g. joined another church, etc.).

[Tim Bonney]

[Sandy]

We did this at the last church I served on staff, and it was done with the approval of the whole church. We had 1,100 members, with an average weekly attendance in worship of 300, and 220 in Sunday School. We actually only found records that matched about 900 names, so we reduced the total number reported, and then went through the process of sending out letters and waiting for a response. The church decided that any names from letters returned with "no forwarding address" would be taken off the roll, along with those who requested removal. We took a good sized group off because of having a birthdate that made them more than 100, and I'm sure not many of those past about 85 were around anymore. The responses we got back, not all that many considering how many we started with, were from people who either lived locally and had joined a church of a different denomination, mostly non-denominational churches, or moved out of the area and were attending a church of a different denomination, again mostly non-denominational. Apparently most of our "non-active" or as the SBC likes to call them "non-resident" members weren't interested enough to bother, and were either not going anywhere else, or had died. We got the total membership back down to under 500 as a result, with a commitment to doing a better job of keeping track.

I'm not sure how that worked out, since we left eight years ago this August, moved out of state, joined a church of another denomination, and we are still on the membership roll there.

[Haruo]

In its early days, Fremont Baptist Church occasionally "withdrew the right hand of fellowship" from some misbehaving member. I think the specific offense generally remained a secret. And I think the last time this action was taken was at least a century ago.

[Tim Bonney]

[Rvaughn]

[Sandy]

[Tim Bonney]