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5 Reasons Why People Won't Join a Church (and What to Say to Them)

NOT TAKING THE LORD’S SUPPER

I don’t usually hound a person who won’t join a church. But there was one occasion in which, after numerous conversations, I encouraged a professing Christian who had not joined any church in a decade to stop receiving the Lord’s Supper.

I explained that my counsel was not an authoritative word; it was pastoral advice. He was acting like a free agent, which most certainly does not exist in the Bible. The apostolic local church has the authority to publicly affirm credible professions of faith before the nations through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Yet he had not allowed any church to affirm his profession of faith through the accountability structures of membership. So he should stop “borrowing” the church’s public sign of the Lord’s Supper. It was like grabbing a team jersey when no one is looking and wearing it, even though he wasn’t an official member of a team.

What many Christians don’t realize is to remain aloof from a committed fellowship to a local church is to walk in spiritually dangerous territory. It’s thin ice. Such a person is unaccountable and unprotected.

We love people by encouraging them to come into a fold.