Conference Minister's Corner 10-14-2025

Do You Have A Church or a Club?

By The Reverend Walt Hampton, J.D., CFC

Transitional Associate Conference Minister for Judicatory Ministries

The congregation found itself in turmoil.

Someone new had begun attending worship; someone with a difficult, storied past.

Some members were deeply uncomfortable. A few threatened to leave.

Others demanded that before this person could join the congregation, they’d need to stand up, confess their sins, and ask for forgiveness before being allowed to stay.

The story stopped me cold.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like it. But every time, it shakes something loose in me. Because it reveals a truth we don’t like to name: that sometimes, even in the church, we forget who we are.

We say we follow Jesus. But do we?

Do we really follow the one who dined with tax collectors, who touched lepers, who spoke with women no one else would speak to, who defended those caught in shame and sin?

Do we really follow the one who forgave a thief dying beside him and said, “Today you will be with me in paradise”?

Or have we slowly become something else: a polite, well-ordered civic club that welcomes people like us, so long as they know how to behave?

The difference between a church and a club may not be visible at first glance. Both have members. Both have committees. Both gather regularly. Both do good things.

But the motives are very different.

A club exists to serve its members.

The church exists to serve the world.

A club values respectability and decorum.

The church is called to risk compassion and grace.

A club asks, “Do you belong here?”

The church asks, “How can we make room for you?”

When Jesus launched his movement, he didn’t begin with an application process. He didn’t ask for resumes or statements of belief. He simply said, “Follow me.” That was it.

The first followers were messy, complicated people. Fishermen with tempers. Tax collectors who’d cheated others. Women dismissed by society. Doubters, deniers, and dreamers. Yet together, they formed something holy. Not because they were perfect, but because they were willing.

Over time, though, something changed. The movement became an institution. The institution became a monument. And the monument, in many places, became a club.

It’s not that we stopped loving God or caring about others. It’s just that we started loving our comfort more. We learned to protect our spaces, our traditions, our way of doing things. We made membership mean safety rather than surrender.

We began to expect people to earn their place, to prove their worthiness before being accepted.

That expectation might sound reasonable. Until we hold it up beside the Gospel.

Because in truth, it’s just another version of the old purity codes, those ancient systems of belonging that divided the “clean” from the “unclean,” the “worthy” from the “unworthy.”

Jesus spent his entire ministry dismantling those codes.

He touched the leper, dined with sinners, and lifted up those the religious establishment had cast aside. He didn’t demand purity before belonging. He offered belonging first; and it was that belonging that made healing possible.

And yet, in our churches, we sometimes reinvent those codes in subtler ways. We tell people, “Fix yourself first, then come join us.” As if grace were conditional. As if love needed prerequisites.

It’s as if we’ve created our own form of spiritual hazing.

We would never tolerate hazing in a fraternity or sorority. We would condemn it outright. And yet, sometimes, without realizing it, we make newcomers, or those whose stories unsettle us, jump through hoops to belong. We test their sincerity. We require their confession. We expect them to prove they’re “our kind of people” before we make room for them at the table.

That’s not church. That’s initiation into a club.

The Jesus movement was never meant to be a gatekeeping institution. It was, and is, a living body, messy and merciful, grounded in grace.

To be the church is to risk loving those whom others won’t. It is to see the image of God in those the world rejects. It is to trust that redemption is always possible, even when the evidence is thin.

This kind of community will stretch us. It will make us uncomfortable. But it will also make us alive.

Because the Spirit of God doesn’t move through our perfection. It moves through our willingness.

The church at its best is not about purity. It’s about presence.

It’s about being present to one another’s pain, one another’s growth, one another’s humanity. It’s about refusing to reduce people to their worst moments. It’s about remembering that grace is not earned. It’s given.

If we want to know what that looks like, we don’t have to look far.

It looks like Jesus kneeling in the dirt beside a woman accused of adultery, while the crowd stood ready to stone her. And when he said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone,” the silence that followed was the sound of grace.

It looks like Jesus eating with sinners while the righteous stood outside whispering.

It looks like Jesus hanging on a cross beside someone the world had condemned, still saying, “You are loved. You are not lost.”

That is our model. That is our call.

So we must ask: what kind of communities are we creating?

Are we building churches that embody grace or clubs that enforce conformity? Are we opening doors or drawing lines? Are we protecting our comfort or participating in God’s movement of love?

The world doesn’t need more civic clubs. It needs the church.

It needs communities that practice radical hospitality. That choose mercy over judgment. That believe in second chances, third chances, and seventy-times-seven chances. It needs places where confession is not coerced. Where forgiveness is not rationed, but poured out abundantly.

It needs people willing to say, “You are welcome here. You don’t need to earn it. You don’t need to prove it. You are already loved.”

When we live that way, when we remember who we are and whom we follow, the church becomes what it was meant to be: a living, breathing sign of God’s love in the world.

That’s not easy work. It takes courage to let go of our fear and trust the Gospel again. It takes humility to admit that sometimes we have become gatekeepers rather than grace-bearers. It takes faith to believe that God’s Spirit is still moving, still transforming lives, including our own.

But if we can reclaim that courage, that humility, that faith, then we can reclaim the church.

Not as a monument to what once was. Not as a social club for the like-minded.

But as a movement of love.

That’s what the world is waiting for.

That’s what Jesus calls us to be.