Not Merry, Not Jolly, Not Ashamed

The Grinch. Scrooge. 

Two names synonymous with failing to be sufficiently gleeful during the Christmas season. Or, at the very least, names given to those who do not have the so-called “Christmas spirit.” The Christmas spirit is, after all, the mood of being jolly, making merriment, being joyful, “singing loud for all to hear,” as was the case in the movie Elf. 

If, then, one defies the expectations of the mood of the season, then you’re liable to be lumped in with a penny-pinching harsh taskmaster like Scrooge, or a thieving goblin-adjacent lonely man like Grinch, or a book-demanding, publishing house-owning, Christmas Eve-working boss like in Elf. But what if you don’t feel jolly this Christmas season? What if the mood for you isn’t merriment? 

I have had a roller coaster relationship with Christmas myself. As a kid, of course I enjoyed it like all kids do. As I became a teenager and young adult, I did not like it all that much, often volunteering to work on Christmas day so that others might enjoy the festivities in a way I would not. Then in recent years I have become more in a Christmas mood, listening to “Christmas music” well before the culturally acceptable window. 

But this year? This year I don’t feel jolly and the season does not feel all that bright. 

This year? No Christmas music for me. The movies we will often play during the season as a family? Not so much. All the decorations at the house? Just a solitary tree my kids put up and decorated. 

To be sure, I understand that Christmas announces a joyous event. The incarnation of preexistent God is an unbelievably boisterous, cataclysmic, earth-shattering event. It deserves a mood of joy. After all, it announces God and sinner reconciled. It tells of incarnate deity who was “pleased as man with men to dwell.” Christ came to dispel darkness, to rescue wayward rebels of which I am chief. 

This is incredible news that surpasses all news. And I am joyful, but is there room in our view of Christmas for a mood that is outside of the “merry” and the “jolly” and all of that? What if I do not feel like singing? What if, for all I care, this season ends quickly? Am I Scrouge? Am I Grinch?

Maybe. Or maybe there really is room in a theologically robust view of Christmas for those of us who feel that this midwinter is bleak. After all, Christ did not, as NT Wright said, come into the world to tell us that everything is alright. In fact, the opposite is true: Christ came into the world to confront it with its brokenness, helplessness, and need. If the world were fine, the incarnation would be unnecessary. So the incarnation does not tell us that we must force joy to mask the painful realities of life in this age. It does the opposite: it is honest that things are not right in this world. 

Let us think about the first Christmas. Joy was declared, this earth-shattering thing had taken place, but it was also surrounded by blood as Herod slaughtered the innocents. It was surrounded by exile as Jesus’ family fled to spare Him of that mortal danger. It was about the Godman who was born to an unwed handmaiden surrounded by donkeys and cows, visited by shepherds, wrapped in whatever clothe was on hand. The Bible is not shy about any of that. 

Nor did the man Jesus, when He preached His first sermon say that He had come to proclaim to the captives that they really were not captives, or the blind that blindness is not so bad. Rather, He proclaimed freedom would come, but not yet. He was not shy that there were things in which humans are bound or things that make us sorrow or things that make us long for a better world. 

Isn’t the trick of Christmas, then, that we live between Advents? Christ came, Christ will come again. Until then, we look forward to when all things are made new, but they have not been made new yet. We still ache, we still weep, we still experience loss and pain. The Bible does not cover over those things. 

There is, then, a tension that must be had at Christmas. A straight jolly Christmas does actually seem to be the proper mood. That does not mean dourness if required. But there is a reason the church has historically (outside of most ‘low’ church denominations) recognized the “Feast of Innocents” only a few days after Christmas. Because that’s honest. Joy must not be an excuse to act as if this place were not profoundly broken. Nor ought brokenness act as if there is not something to be joyous about. 

I appreciate what Tish Harrison Warren put it in a recent New York Times column when she wrote, “American culture insists that we run at breathless pace from sugar-laced celebration to celebration — three months of Christmas to the Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July, and on and on. We suffer from a collective consumerist mania that demands we remain optimistic, shiny, happy and having fun, fun, fun…

I do not want to be the Grinch tsk-tsking anyone for decorating the tree early or firing up “Jingle Bell Rock” before the 25th. I’m all for happiness, joy, eggnog, corny sweaters and parties, but to rush into Christmas without first taking time to collectively acknowledge the sorrow in the world and in our own lives seems like an inebriated and overstuffed practice of denial.”

Here is what I cannot deny this Christmas season: I thought when Christmas 2025 arrived I would be watching my children open presents while I held my baby boy Ambrose. Instead, I held his lifeless frame on August 1. Instead of feeding my son, I’ll be recalling the fleeting moments I had with him. Instead of hearing him make the various noises newborns tend to make, I will be hearing the faint echoes of my restrained sobs bouncing off the bedroom walls. 

I know some people are fairly good at phoning in a cheery mood for the sake of others. I am not one of those people. I point people to the hope of Christ for a living, and that hope is what keeps me on two feet. But it would be pastoral malpractice if I didn’t also tell my people that this world is incredibly broken and that the Bible does not demand a forced mood of happiness when one feels acutely how sorrowful it is to lose someone you love. 

So this year I will remember the earth-moving incarnation, and hope in a second advent. I will be joyful, but not merry. I may be violating the prosperity gospel, consumeristic, culturally happy clappy mood of the season, but I will not be violating the honesty that the real Christmas declares. The man of sorrows wept as both a baby and a man, He hurts with us still, for we are united with Him. I have a High Priest, then, who knows what it is like to feel as I do. In Him I rest, even through my sadness. That seems to be closer to what Christmas is about.  

Ambrose Was to be Born Today

Today, 1 December 2025, was the due date for my Ambrose. On July 1, I fully expected to reach this day and be holding my baby boy. Instead, on July 31, the Lord called Ambrose to himself, and Ambrose went. I held Ambrose on that July day, but he wasn’t there, not truly. 

Not a day has gone by since that miserable day that I haven’t wept. Not a night has passed that I haven’t woken suddenly with thoughts of him. Many nights I identified with the psalmist who called his tears his bed. Many nights I identified with Augustine who said that he let the tears flow and his heart rested upon them. And though I know many have gone through similar loss, and worse, I find myself asking with the poet of Lamentations, “Is there any sorrow like my sorrow?”

I’ve found some solace in the words of others who have experienced a similar grief; perhaps that’s why I feel the need to write myself? Not only in their words of hope, but in their articulating well what I feel. And how do I feel? A lot of things, but I feel acutely that I will never recover; I’ll never be the same. The old me is gone, died the day my beautiful son did. That’s ok, though, isn’t it? 

One told me that this was a “sore providence” and “You will never be the same again, but God will be the same to you, again and again.” Isn’t that what matters? 

Nicolas Wolterstorff wrote a book that has been my favorite, “Lament for a Son.” He said at the beginning, “Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. 

So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it. I do not try to dis-own it. If someone asks, ‘Who are you, tell me about yourself,’ I say – not immediately, but shortly – ‘I am one who lost a son.’ That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story. I struggle indeed to go beyond merely owning my grief toward owning it redemptively. But I will not and cannot disown it.”[1]

Recently I stumbled upon a work by Yiyun Li who lost two of her sons to suicide (six years apart from one another) and wrote a little book called “Things in Nature Merely Grow.” She said, “Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.” And “Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.”

Li said in an interview, “I don’t ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children…This pain is in my life for ever and ever, and I don’t want to do anything to mitigate the pain, because to mitigate it means that’s something bad, it’s an illness or affliction.”[2]

“To live with pain is possible, you do things in everyday life, you garden, you listen to music, but you’re thinking about,’ she said, trailing off, leaving the unspeakable unsaid.”[3]

Wolterstorff lost his son to a climbing accident; Li, two sons to suicide, but there is similarity and solidarity in their grief, as in mine. To know that it is not abnormal to refuse to ever move on. 

And I don’t want to.

Many things I once enjoyed have lost their color. Again, I resemble the words of Wolterstorff, “I remember delighting in them–trees, art, house, music, pink morning sky, work well done, flowers, books. I still delight in them. I’m still grateful. But the zest is gone. The passion is cooled, the striving quieted, the longing stilled. My attachment is loosened. No longer do I set my heart on them. I can do without them. They don’t matter. Instead of rowing, I float. The joy that comes my way I savor. But the seeking, the clutching, the aiming, is gone. I don’t suppose anyone on the outside notices. I go through my paces. What the world gives, I still accept. But what it promises, I no longer reach for. I’ve become an alien in the world, shyly touching it as if it’s not mine. I don’t belong any more. When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.”

I’m not sure what Christian expectations are for grief, but if what Carl Trueman has said is true, that Christians find cries of sorrow like we find in the lament Psalms a “little short of embarrassing” due to the fact that we have “drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries,” then we likely do not know what to do with grief, especially how to handle the grief of others.[4] Is the Christian response to “return” to a pre-loss mood? Does the fact of the resurrection mean that the grieving process has a temporal expiration date at which point we “move on” and act like the people “we were,” in some sense? I don’t think so, and that’s not what I’m going to do. 

I’ll never be the same. I don’t want to be the same. I refuse to move on, and I will forever be marked by the death of my Ambrose. I see his face when I close my eyes, and I never want to forget him. 

Nor will I forget what it’s like to fill out a death certificate for your child. Or to pick up an urn that contains what remains on earth of a son you’ll never hear laugh, or play catch with, or kiss again.

It is a sore providence indeed that I will, for however long the Lord allows me to continue living on this celestial ball of horrors, be a father who lost a son and choose now to be identified as such. My children will hence have a sibling they cannot see, or hold, or play with. But they too, own that he is their brother still. 

Absence and silence.

When we gather now there’s always someone missing, his absence as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech. Still [six] children, but one always gone.

When we’re all together, we’re not all together.

July 31 was the worst day of my life, December 1 comes in a close second. Instead of holding a healthy baby boy, I’m typing. Instead of preparing a crib, I’ll be going to, and from, my office like any old Monday. But it’s not any old Monday. It’s the day Ambrose was to be born, but God had another plan, didn’t He? Why? I don’t suppose I’ll know this side of eternity, will I? I’ll just have to trust Him. “We can trust his hand even in those moments when we cannot see his face.”[5]

I do know that in a truly Christian worldview, one can hold in tension hope and sorrow at the same time. Christian joy and sorrow over sorrowful things. Jesus was a “man of sorrows,” after all. Wasn’t He the ideal man? 

Ambrose is gone, I can’t get him back, I’ll see him at the resurrection, but to sorrow over sorrowful things is to be like Christ. Isn’t that what love is, too? I know the resurrection is coming, but in the meantime, I still live in a broken age. I’ll never not be a father who lost his son. It marks me. I’m not embarrassed by that. I say with Nicolas, “That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story.”

I’d give a million worlds and die a million deaths to reverse time if it meant Ambrose could live. Alas, I cannot. There is, though, a resurrection where Ambrose will be made whole, and I will see him, I just wish Jesus would get on with it already.

“Though I shall indeed recall that death is being overcome, my grief is that death still stalks this world and one day knifed down my [son]. 

Nothing fills the void of his absence. He’s not replaceable. We can’t go out and get another just like him.

There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing….Only a gap remains. Only a void is left…The world is emptier. My son is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.”[6]

[1] Nicolas Wolterstorff, Lament for A Son (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 5-6. 

[2] Alexandra Alter, “I Don’t Ever Want to Be Free From the Pain of Missing My Children,’” New York Times, May 16, 2025. 

[3] Ibid.

[4] https://www.9marks.org/article/what-can-miserable-christians-sing/

[5] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/trust-hand/

[6] Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son. 

Ambrose the Evangelist

This is a photo (not original to me) taken of the moon on July 31, 2025, the day that my Ambrose went to be with Jesus. It was a waxing crescent, meaning the whole moon wasn’t visible, part of it is darkened, as you can see.

The moon has been meaningful to our family the last four months due in part to Jonathan Gibson’s little book “The Moon is Always Round,” which tells the story of a catechism that his family created, and how that ministered to them when Jonny and his wife Jackie’s daughter Leila was stillborn at 39 weeks. The catechism goes like this:

Q. What shape is the moon tonight?

A. The moon is a crescent moon, or a half-moon, or a gibbous moon, or a full moon.

Q. What shape is the moon always?

A. The moon is always round.

Q. What does that mean?

A. God is always good.

We taught (our oldest son) Augustine this before that horrible July day (I actually purchased the book back in 2019 and its been on our shelves ever since), so even before we lost Ambrose, Augustine would sometimes say randomly, “The moon is always round, which means God is always good.”

Now I look at the moon every time I’m outside, day or night. I looked at the moon on July 31 and only saw part of it; half was hidden. Just like that night (and almost all of them since), it’s hard to see God’s goodness in taking Ambrose, but I know He’s good even still.

Ambrose is my evangelist because every time I think about him (which is a lot), I have to think about the resurrection and the hope of the world to come. He ministers to me more than anyone I’ve ever known, and he ministers still. Just like his namesake. If anyone is blessed by something I share here – or through my preaching/teaching – about suffering, lament, sorrow, or hope in dark times henceforth, they have Ambrose the evangelist to thank.

“Even when we cannot see the whole moon as it orbits the earth, the moon is always round. It’s the same with God’s goodness. There are times in our lives when things happen to us that make us question or doubt God’s goodness, like when someone in our family dies. But just because we cannot always see God’s goodness during difficult times, this does not mean that God is not good in those times. God is always good, even when we cannot see it, just like the moon is always round, even when we cannot see all of it.” ~Jonathan Gibson, The Moon is Always Round.

When Martin Luther Lost a Daughter

Martin Luther is one of the most famous men in the last 500 years. Seen as the fire starter of the Protestant Reformation, his actions are seen as among the most important to move Christendom away from Rome. Through his life, he endured many trials for his stance, the most difficult trial in his life, however, was not when he faced the Diet of Worms or was stuck in the castle tower nor when the Papal Bull was issued in his name. Rather, it was when he experienced the loss of his daughter.

When his daughter Magdelena died, Luther picked her up and said, “Du liebes Lenchen, you will rise and shine like the stars and the sun. How strange it is to know that she is at peace, and all is well, and yet to be so sorrowful!”

The epitaph for her grave was written by Luther and read:

Here, I, Magdalena,

Doctor Luther’s little maid

Resting with the saints

Sleep in my narrow bed.

I was a child of death

For I was born in sin

But now I live, redeemed, Lord Christ,

By the blood you shed for me.

A few days later, he wrote to a friend this: “I expect you have heard that my beloved Magdalena has been born again into Christ’s everlasting kingdom. Although my wife and I ought to rejoice because of her happy end, yet such is the strength of natural affection that we cannot think of it without sobs and groans which tear the heart apart. The memory of her face, her words, her expression in life and in death—everything about our most obedient and loving daughter lingers in our hearts so that even the death of Christ (and what are all deaths compared to his?) is almost powerless to lift our minds above our loss. So would you give thanks to God in our stead? For hasn’t he honored us greatly in glorifying our child?”

When Augustine Lost His Mother

I alone knew what I was keeping down in my heart. I was very displeased to see the power that these human emotions had over me. Death must come in the due order and appointment of our natural condition. With a new grief I grieved that I grieved, so that I was worn out by a double sorrow…

As I lay alone with my thoughts in bed, I remembered those true verses of Your Ambrose, for You are:

the world’s great Architect,

Who dost heaven’s rowling orbs direct;

Cloathing the day with beauteous light,

And with sweet slumbers silent night;

When wearied limbs new vigour gain

From rest, new labours to sustain,

When hearts oppressed do meet relief,

And anxious minds forget their grief…

I was minded to weep in Your sight for her and for myself, in her behalf and in my own. And I allowed the tears that I had restrained to overflow as much as they desired. I rested myheart upon them, and it found rest. For it was before Your eyes, not in front of men who would have scornfully interpreted my weeping. And now, Lord, in writing I confess it to You. Read it, any who will, and interpret it as you wish. If anyone finds sin in the tears I wept for my mother for a small portion of an hour, let him not berate me. This mother who now was dead to mine eyes had for many years wept for me, that I might live before Your face. If anyone feel great love for me, let him weep for all my sins against You, the Father of all the brethren of Your Christ.

~Augustine, Confessions IX

Without the Resurrection, I’d be Sunk

Written 1 September 2025:

Yesterday was a month to the day that the Lord called my Ambrose to himself, and Ambrose listened because being with Jesus is better than being here. I preached yesterday, and I was going to include the following but decided to cut it from the sermon lest I steal the attention from the text. Plus, I’m certain I wouldn’t be able to get the words out if I did include it. Maybe here isn’t even a good place for it, but I figured I might as well share, maybe it will help someone at some point…

July 31, 2025, was, without question, the worst day of my life. The last month has been the worst month of my life. There surely is nothing as sorrowful as holding the lifeless body of your child, then filling out a death certificate, and ordering an urn, then going to pick it up. Every day I think about Ambrose and it’s impossible to articulate the sorrow. Everyone’s grief is different, right? But I’ll tell you this: without the resurrection, I’d be sunk. In the past month, the only hope that has enabled me to wake up and even go through the motions of the mundane is the resurrection past and future.

When I drove home to collect an overnight bag to sleep in a hospital room on July 31, I didn’t wish I had a bigger or nicer house, a nicer car, a larger bank account. I didn’t put hope in being able to buy myself ‘treats’ to make myself feel better or vacations and trips to take. None of those things would have helped in the slightest. Nothing this side of the sun, would give me any hope at all. All I had to rest upon, to find comfort in, was the resurrection at the end of the age. To enjoy Christ the way Ambrose has enjoyed Him. When Ambrose will be made whole and I will be with him.

When I said yesterday that there is no better hope than this, and I added “trust me,” that’s what I meant. When ‘darkness seems to hide His face,’ the only ‘anchor that holds within the veil’ is the resurrection of Christ which promises a resurrection of the just at the end of the age. I have nothing else to grasp in the sorrow.

I will never be the same. I don’t want to be the same. Everything else fades into a formless gray. Only Christ has color. Without Him and His resurrection, I’d be sunk.

Maranatha.

Baptists: What Happened to Regenerate Church Membership? Part II

Many years ago, someone asked Dr. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan this via Twitter: “Can a person be a Christian without being a member of a church?” Dr. Keller’s answer was, in essence, “Yes, but not an obedient one.” 

His answer was an important and instructive one. One can repent and give their allegiance to Jesus, without being a member of a church, this we must affirm. But one cannot obey Christ in an ongoing manner without, not only being a member of a church, but being an active participant in the one in which they have covenanted with. 

Derek Rishmawy, commenting on Keller’s interaction there also helpfully said, “Still, yes, theoretically, I’d agree you can be a Christian, be regenerate, and so forth, and not currently be in regular attendance in church. But, and this is Keller’s point, there is no way you can claim to be a Christian who is actually trying to obey Jesus and grow in godliness without it. What’s more, you can’t say you’re striving to love Jesus either. Jesus says “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15), which include those delivered by his apostles in the NT.”[1]

So what of church membership? Can one be a church member and thus be, in some sense, covered from disobedience by merely being listed on a membership roll? Well, no, since Hebrews 10:25 commands regular attendance. In other words, we need both: covenanting with a local church (what we call church membership) and active involvement in the life of the church i.e., bodily presence and service. 

Now, in the second part of this short series of posts where we are talking about membership rolls and their often bloated state, we must ask: does the Bible address this? After all, we see no explicit mention of anything we, in 2025, would call a “membership roll.” Further, we must ask what the Bible says regarding what we are declaring when we (1) accept someone into membership; and (2) what we are declaring by keeping someone on the membership roll. Does the Bible concern itself with such things? Certainly, observe: 

Membership Roll in Scripture? 

Believe it or not, while a “membership roll,” is not mentioned in Scripture, we do have evidence that there was some kind of record kept of who was “in” and who was “out.” In other words, churches knew who they would consider as ‘part’ of the church. Consider a few verses…

In Acts 2:41: “there were added that day about three thousand souls.” Added to what? The number of the earliest church pre-Pentecost. Similarly, Acts 2:47: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” They were added “to their number,” i.e., added to the church.

Consider the Lord’s words (which we will return to shortly) in Matthew 18. Jesus states that the last step of discipline is to tell the church and “if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” In other words, remove them from the church. But the question can be asked, “how can someone be removed from something they were never ‘in’?” The answer is in the question: you can only be put “out” of something that declared you as “in” in the first place. 

Or 1 Corinthians 5. A man who “has his father’s wife” and the church is, not only passive, but is boastful about keeping the man within the church. Paul makes his declaration and gives his orders: “In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” 

Again, the man is to be removed. But how can he be removed if the church at Corinth if he was never considered as part of the church in the first place? The church of Corinth knew who was part of the church at Corinth. While they didn’t have a church office with an old Mac in the corner that had a digital copy of a membership roll, but they knew who were part of the church and who weren’t. 

What Are We Declaring? 

In part one of this series, I said this: “If every church with a bloated membership roll doesn’t know where possibly hundreds of people are, or what they are doing, we are, in a word, lying.” Why would I say that? 

Consider Matthew 18:15-20. This passage shows us that (1) we have a responsibility for one another (15); (2) we are close enough to even know when one is in ongoing, unrepentant sin; (3) the ultimate earthly court of appeals for declaring who is a member and who is not; (4) when they are declaring who is “in” or “out” they are merely echoing heaven’s own declaration (18). 

Jesus also believes that there should be a distinction between the world and the church, such that there is a line of demarcation. The church ought to be holy, according to Jesus, and the members and elders have a responsibility to ensure purity. This does not mean, of course, that no one in the church sins, for this is impossible to avoid. At issue is ongoing and unrepentant sin. And if there is no discernable difference between the ethics of the church and those of the world, then the church is not only not pure, but they are telling the world “we are not that different from you.” In which case, what is the appeal? 

Back to 1 Corinthians 5. One of Paul’s concerns in the text is that unchecked discipline will spread: “a little leaven leavens a whole lump” (6). It’s bad for the church for people who are considered “in” to walk in unrepentant and ongoing sin, because it can infect the rest of the body. 

Let’s put it together, shall we? 

When a church accepts someone into membership, or retains them on the membership roll, they are declaring this: As far as we can tell based on available evidence, these people are Christians, not in unrepentant sin, pursuing faithfulness to Christ. 

And we are making these declarations: 

  • To heaven
  • To the world
  • To members actively involved
  • To the members not involved

So, let’s return to my previous statement: “If every church with a bloated membership roll doesn’t know where possibly hundreds of people are, or what they are doing, we are, in a word, lying.”

We are lying on multiple fronts, and in a very serious manner. We are telling that people are faithfully following Christ and not in unrepentant sin when (1) we can’t possibly know that since we never see them; and (2) they are at least disobeying Hebrews 10:25 by virtue of their regular absence. 

I realize this is a serious charge, but this is a serious matter. What favors do we do the church by keeping on a membership roll perhaps hundreds of people who we have allowed to slip through the cracks? Or perhaps are in need? Or perhaps are in sin in which they need help escaping? 

My question, I guess, would be what would be the purpose of retaining people on the roll whom we cannot testify to in regard to their ongoing pursuit of faithfulness? Does it help them? Well, no because simply being on a roll gives no spiritual cover. While being an active member of a local church is necessary for obedience, Christ will not ask us at the end of the age if we were on a membership roll somewhere. 

And I know we love our numbers in church in order that we may boast, but dozens, if not hundreds members unaccounted for is no boast. It means we have failed somewhere along the way, something we don’t want to admit, but must if we are to pursue a holy church. 

“I would urge upon the resolve to have no church unless it be a real one. The fact is, that too frequently religious statistics are shockingly false…Let us not keep names on our books when they are only names. Certain of the good old people like to keep them there, and cannot bear to have them removed; but when you do not know where the individuals are, nor what they are, how can you count them? They are gone to America, or Australia, or to heaven, but as far as your roll is concerned they are with you still. Is this a right thing? It may not be possible to be absolutely accurate, but let us aim at it…. Keep your church real and effective, or make no report. A merely nominal church is a lie. Let it be what it professes to be.”

~CH Spurgeon

“Churches in his day were quite happy to report inflated statis-tics, but Spurgeon believed that such practices compromised the truthfulness of the church, making it a church in name only. As difficult as it was, Spurgeon wanted to pastor a real church.”[2]

[1] Derek Rishmawy, “Do I Have to Go to Church to be a Christian?’ A Few Rough Thoughts,” https://derekzrishmawy.com/2014/08/10/do-i-have-to-go-to-church-to-be-a-christian-a-few-rough-thoughts/#:~:text=The%20other%20day%2C%20someone%20asked,Heb%2013%3A17%20without%20membership.

[2] Geoffrey Chang, Spurgeon the Pastor: Recovering A Biblical & Theological Vision for Ministry (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2022), 128. 

Baptists: What Happened to Regenerate Church Membership? Part I

“If a sheep has strayed let us seek it; to disown it in a hurry is not the Master’s method. Ours is to be the labor and the care, for we are overseers of the flock of Christ to the end that all may be presented faultless before God. One month’s absence from the house of God is, in some cases, a deadly sign of a profession renounced, while in others a long absence is an affliction to be sympathised with, and not a crime to be capitally punished.”

~C. H. Spurgeon

The season turning to spring means many things. For me, it means the Mets begin another season of toying with my emotions, the air becomes ever fuller of allergens for me to battle, and the temperature rises, leading me to complain about how insufferably hot it is. Another significant item that inevitably arrives is Southern Baptists everywhere gearing up for the SBC Annual Meeting that occurs every June. 

With that comes the SBC Book of Reports, a bulbous book full of, uh, reports. One of the most important numerical figures among the sea of numerical figures is found typically on page seven or eight. That is, the number of “members” of SBC churches and the number of “in-person average weekly attendance.”[1] Last year’s read thusly (this year’s has not been published as of this writing): 12,982,090 total members, 4,050,668 average attendance. 

That’s right, there is a nearly nine million person discrepancy between attenders and members. That means there are at least eight million people on church membership rolls in the Southern Baptist Convention that are not regular attenders.[2]

What I am about to say I mean in the nicest way possible, and although I am oft given to hyperbole, I do not believe I am being hyperbolic when I say this: The 9 million person discrepancy is a disaster, and it makes me question whether we believe in one of the principals of Baptist distinctives: regenerate church membership.

What is regenerate church membership? Simply put, it is the concept that members of the local church should be Christian (regenerated by the Holy Spirit). Of course, regeneration is an internal work that God, but Baptist have always believed that the internal work manifests itself in external fruit. This idea, then, is that members of local churches should be people who the church has good reason to believe are Christians striving to obey the Lord. That, since Baptists hold to congregationalism, every vote the church takes is a spiritual matter, and only those who have the indwelling Holy Spirit (i.e., genuine believers) can make such determinations. 

Commenting many years ago (because this has been a perennial problem) President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr. said, “Put bluntly, the total membership numbers as compared to attendance calls into question whether we really believe in regenerate church membership. Members who do not act like members should not be counted as members.”[3]

What I intend to show in this series of posts on this topic is this: bloated membership rolls are both pastorally disastrous for local church and it calls into question how much we believe in regenerate church membership, a core, historic Baptist distinctive. 

In 1905, D. Freeman said of Baptists, “This principle of a regenerated Church membership, more than anything else, marks our distinctiveness in the Christian world today.”[4] Justice Anderson similarly said, “The cardinal principle of Baptist ecclesiology, and logically, the point of departure for church polity, is the insistence on a regenerate membership in the local congregation.”

Adds Hammett: “To put it simply, regenerate church membership is meaningful church membership, involving only those with a genuine commitment to Christ and the congregation of Christ’s people. This ideal of regenerate membership has been central to Baptist ecclesiology.”

So what happened? According to the aforementioned Book of Reports, there are 46,906 churches in the SBC. How many of those have what I’ll call “bloated membership rolls” where the number of members on any given Sunday is perhaps hundreds of people less than the membership roll? Therefore, how many of us have “Baptist” proudly on our church signs while forsaking the Baptist distinctive of regenerate church membership? And where are all those people? Are they OK? Are they walking faithfully with Christ? (Perhaps not since they are effectively disobeying Hebrews 10:25).  Are they in ongoing, unrepentant sin? Have they renounced the faith? Are they apostate? Are they living in a different country? Are they homebound and in need of care? Are they abusing drugs or alcohol and need help to come out of their spiral? On and on we can go. 

Apart from the dread many pastors feel every time a business meeting comes up because non-attenders who are still on the membership roll might show up and disrupt proceedings, having a large swathe of people who the church has declared “This person, as far as we can tell, is a Christian” is disastrous for soul care. It’s disastrous for our witness. It’s disastrous for the missing person’s soul. It means we, somewhere along the way, dropped the ball. 

This initial post I simply want to present what the problem is to give you some food for thought. In the next post we will consider from Scripture why this matters, but before I close this first post, let me tell you what I think our membership rolls are declaring, and you can judge if this is important or not…

A membership roll is not simply a collection of names on a computer somewhere in the church office. The membership roll is a declaration. It is declaring that “every person on this list is, based on available evidence, a Christian.” It declares to heaven, to the people on the list, to the community, to the world, that everyone on the list is faithfully pursuing obedience to the King of Glory. So, if every church with a bloated membership roll doesn’t know where possibly hundreds of people are, or what they are doing, we are, in a word, lying. 

This matters. What we declare matters. And it is common places for Baptist churches to allow image-bearers they had individually covenanted with slip through the cracks. Those swollen numbers might look good on an Annual Church Profile, but they are deceptive. Worse, it blurs the definition of “church” itself. 

Let’s talk about it next time…

Christ is All 

[1] Book of Reports of the Southern Baptist Convention 2024. https://www.baptistpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-Book-of-Reports-Digital.pdf

[2] I say eight million because I am making the generous assumption that one million people on SBC church membership rolls are physically unable to attend because of some kind of physical hinderance. The number “one million,” I made up, and I think is generous. 

[3] R. Albert Mohler Jr., “The Future of the Southern Baptist Convention: The Numbers Don’tAdd Up,” May 31, 2019, https://albertmohler.com/2019/05/31/the-future-of-the-southern-baptist-convention-the-numbers-dont-add-up.

[4] Quoted by John S. Hammett in Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academics, 2019), 92. 

In Praise of Slow Growth

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” -Ferris Bueller

Life moves fast, and we like it that way. We, by nearly every measure, are a people who want things quickly and feel shortchanged if anything takes too long. Why won’t the traffic light change? The drive-thru isn’t moving fast enough, and where is my Amazon order already? If I need to know who that actor in that one movie was, I can take out a rectangle from my pocket and look it up, but it’s loading too slow. One of the big reasons why gym memberships surely drop after the spike that inevitably occurs on New Year’s Day is because results do not come quick enough. We are conditioned to be impatient and look for shortcuts to quick results. 

This posture is no different for Christians when it comes to personal growth and pastors when it comes to church growth, whether measured spiritually or numerically. 

Every Christian has wondered why they are not further along in their walk with Christ. Shouldn’t we be further down the road by now? It can be terribly frustrating. 

Every pastor has wondered why their faithfulness to ordinary means of grace has not yielded more mature Christians or larger attendance. Isn’t there something I can do to speed things up a bit? 

We ought to resist urges as pastors to bring about growth that may be quick, but is likely synthetic. We ought to resist the urge as Christians to get frustrated, discouraged, or give into the temptation to give up if our sanctification is not going the speed that we would prefer. In both cases, we must not chagrin ordinary, faithful plodding through ordinary means of grace given to us in Scripture. 

After healing a woman who had suffered from a lifetime of being doubled over, Jesus asked this question: “What is the kingdom of God like, and to what shall I compare it?” (Luke 13:18, NASB). His answer? 

The kingdom is like a mustard seed and like leaven. 

A mustard seed was one of the smallest seeds that His audience in first century Palestine would be familiar with and often saw. Even though it was small, it would grow to be a tree that could reach over ten feet in height and the birds of the air would make nests in it, finding shelter and comfort. It was a modest seed, and even became a modest tree. With tender care and persistent tending, it grows slowly in the soil, would break through even the toughest ground, and would grow overtime to become a place of comfort and shelter. 

A little bit of leaven would be put in the flour and with patient diligence, the leaven would spread throughout the whole lump. Eventually, it would permeate the whole thing, if only the woman would continue to work the dough. Like the mustard seed, it would start small, and its growth could be imperceptible through the process, but eventually, it would touch every part of the dough. 

The kingdom of God is like that. Christian growth is like that. Church maturation and multiplication is like that. 

My dear Christian brother and sister, pursue the ordinary means of grace that God has given you: prayer, Scripture reading, church membership, church attendance, accountability, confession, and the ordinances. Results will come, but they will be slow. That is a good thing. Patient endurance, faithful striving, keeping your eyes on Jesus, these are the ways in which we grow like a mustard seed. These are the ways the gospel and the beauty of Jesus begin to permeate our entire being until they touch every part of us like leaven in a lump of dough. Sometimes our hands will hurt, sometimes the change will be imperceptible, but we keep plodding in response to the gospel. 

Brother pastor, there will be a constant draw to attractionalism (what will people like?), pragmatism (what “works”?), and programs that will get people in the door and grow a church numerically. This can be done relatively easily and relatively quickly. The motivation may be good: if we get people to the church, they’ll hear the gospel, and isn’t that the goal? 

We must be careful, however, in our goal to reach people and grow the church, that we turn to methods that create synthetic growth wherein we make consumers rather than disciples. The old saying is true: what you win them with is what you win them to. If you win them with a circus, you better keep the circus going, lest the customers leave once the circus is withdrawn. 

The pressure may feel like it’s on, pastor, when you play the comparison game and see other churches seemingly growing at a faster clip. We ask, “How can I enjoy that same ‘success?’” But there’s the key: how do you measure success? If success is faithfulness, and not numbers, then ordinary means of grace will be much like a mustard seed. How you measure success will determine what you do and lead your church to do. 

Preaching the Word, singing the Word, praying the Word, loving the people, leading the church to biblical church membership, and equipping your members to be sent out to leverage their lives for the kingdom will be slow and often times frustrating. Often the difference it is making in your people and your community will be imperceptible, like leaven. Continued cultivating, watering, and (if I can mix metaphors) plodding, will yield results. Your church will be a place where people can find shelter and shade. Your church members will be kingdom-minded people where the lenses of the gospel will, more and more, be how they see all things in their lives. 

Christian friend, brother pastor, if it seems slow, that’s not a bad thing. God works through the small and the unimpressive. Keep going, keep trusting, keep Jesus as the hero of your life and church. If you do that, you will be a success.