The Church Should Be Welcoming But Not Inclusive

At one of my previous churches, the congregation held a lengthy discernment process regarding whether we should change the church’s moral teachings about a particular sin. Throughout this process, the two words that people repeated again and again were the words “welcoming” and “inclusion.” In spite of the fact that no one was able to articulate any biblical or theological arguments for why the church’s moral teachings should change that made any sense at all, the congregation ended up deciding to change the church’s moral teachings, on the grounds that this would be more “welcoming” and “inclusive” to people who choose to commit this particular sin.

Now, it is certainly the case that the Church should be welcoming. The Church’s primary task is to make disciples of every nation, inviting all people everywhere to follow Jesus, welcoming those who do so into the community of His disciples, and extending hospitality to all. But should the Church be “inclusive”? Like “diversity,” “inclusion” has become an extremely popular buzzword in American culture these days, with many organizations actively promoting “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” While this may to some extent be appropriate in religiously neutral, pluralistic organizations, it is not appropriate for the holy Church of Christ. The Church is the community of Jesus’s disciples, and so it must exclude those who are not following Jesus.

Welcoming People Like Jesus Did

This is how Jesus welcomed people into the community of His disciples: 

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’

Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. 

Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear” (Luke 14:26-35).

Rather than indicating that anyone, no matter how they live, can be included in the community of His disciples, Jesus made it very clear to people up front that the demands of Christian discipleship were radical and costly, and that those unwilling to embrace those demands could not be His disciples. Jesus did not tell people to just join the community of His disciples and then, maybe, years down the road, consider growing in Christian maturity and bearing some kind of cost for following Jesus. Rather, He urged people to consider up front the cost of following Him and to not claim to follow Him unless they were willing to bear that cost. 

If the Church is to be faithful to Jesus, it cannot just be welcoming for welcoming’s sake. If it is to maintain its identity as the community of Jesus’s disciples, it must welcome people to a very particular way of life: Christian discipleship. And it must make clear to people up front what this way of life entails. 

In the early Church, converts to Christianity typically had to spend years as “catechumens” being instructed in Christian ethics and doctrine before they could be baptized into the Church. This distinction between catechumens and baptized Christians was visibly maintained during church services, with the two groups occupying different parts of the sanctuary. Baptism was taken extremely seriously, with an understanding that once a person was baptized, they were absolutely required to live obedient, faithful, holy lives. The importance of strict church discipline was universally taken for granted, and baptized Christians who fell into serious sins were typically required to undergo years of penance before they could be received back into Communion. These periods of penance were visibly clear to the whole congregation, as penitents were required to stand apart from communicants during church services. 

It was universally taken for granted in the early Church that Church members were absolutely required to live a particular, holy way of life. The idea that the Church should just be “inclusive” of everyone, no matter how they live, would have been incomprehensible to early Christians. The modern Western church has much to learn from these faithful early Christians about how to be a faithful Church that truly visibly embodies God’s Kingdom in the midst of an increasingly post-Christian culture. 

Now, it might be objected that the early Church’s practice of baptism does not exactly align with what we see in the book of Acts, in which the apostles sometimes seem to baptize people after relatively little instruction. However, it is hermeneutically fallacious to just assume that every description of a person’s actions in a biblical narrative is intended to be a good example for us to follow. The book of Acts describes Paul and Barnabas having “such a sharp disagreement that they parted company” (15:39), and this is certainly not intended to be a good example for us to follow. Not everything the apostles do in the book of Acts is perfect and to be slavishly copied. Certainly, the teachings of Jesus Himself should be given greater weight than a description of some of the apostles’ actions in the book of Acts, and the early Church’s practice of baptism seems to align well with the way Jesus called people into the community of His disciples. 

A Disciplined, Welcoming Community

In any case, it is clear that the apostles followed Jesus in teaching about the importance of church discipline (Matt 18:15-20; I Cor 5; 2 Thess 3:6-15). They did not teach that the Church should continue to be “inclusive” of people no matter what sins they commit. Rather, they taught that, if a church member stubbornly refuses to repent from committing a serious sin, that they should be excommunicated from the church until they are willing to repent.

Without church discipline (practiced in a faithful, loving manner), it is impossible for a church to truly function as a church, because it just ends up being a community of people paying lip service to Christian ideas rather than truly being a holy community of genuine disciples of Jesus. Neglect of church discipline undermines the proclamation and credibility of the gospel message and the church’s life and witness because it allows nominal Christians to dilute the genuineness of the church community, and because it leaves genuine but spiritually immature Christians in a perpetually spiritually infantile state. And if everyone, even those visibly not living holy lives, is allowed to partake of communion, then it becomes emptied of its meaning as a celebration of the body of Christ’s participation in Jesus’s victory over sin, death, and the devil. 

These words of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder regarding the effects of the abandonment of church discipline ring very true: “We are not faithful. The failure to be the real church in which the Spirit works shows up in a sense of formality and unreality in the life of the congregation. More and more we have the feeling that we are going through the motions of what was meaningful in another age, and that the real depths of concern and of motivation are not touched in what we speak about when we are together. In the absence of this central working of the Spirit by which the church is defined, we tend to take refuge in other good works and other manifestations of the presence of the Spirit which, although good, constructive and proper in their place, are nevertheless not equally indispensable.” Doing charitable works and being a community where people feel loved and accepted do not by themselves make a community a church. After all, atheists are perfectly capable of doing these things. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas put it, “The church seems incapable of making up its mind to be a welfare agency at best or one of the last hedges against loneliness. Welfare agencies and hedges against loneliness are not bad things, but they are not the first-order business of the church. The first-order business of the church is to be a people who under the guidance of the Spirit point the world to Jesus.” And we cannot be a people who point the world to Jesus without being a disciplined community of genuine disciples who are visibly distinct from the world. 

If the American value of “inclusion,” rather than the Christian values of holiness and faithfulness, is allowed to control a church’s understanding of how it should welcome people, then that church will eventually de facto cease to be a church. Imagine a fitness club that wants to be more welcoming and “inclusive” of all people. To that end, it starts gradually replacing its exercise equipment with sofas and TVs in order to attract and include more people, including people who are not willing to exercise. At some point, it will de facto cease to be a fitness club, even if it continues calling itself one. Similarly, a church that values the “inclusion” of all people, even those who are unwilling to actually follow Jesus, will eventually de facto cease to be a church, even if it continues calling itself one. 

First, the Church must be a community that is holy, faithful, and truly following Jesus. Then, it must welcome people to join that community and participate in its holy way of life. This means that only those who are following Jesus should be included in the Church, and those who are not following Jesus should be excluded.