Love Your Church: 8 Great Things about Being a Church Member

Tony Merida has written a classic text on living the Christian life through active participation and membership in a local church congregation. This book is extremely well-written and forthright on its admonition in support of Hebrews 10:25, "Do not forsake the assembly as the manner of some is." Yet this book is written in an appealing style meant to show applicability in a variety of denominational types, liturgical styles and church cultures. Truth is, in this current age of unbiblical egalitarian individualism, too many people have been convinced that active church membership and participation is unnecessary for the life of a Christian Believer. How anyone reading the Bible--especially the teachings of Christ, the epistles and the history of the early church in the Book of Acts--could ever conclude that church membership and participation are unnecessary is beyond me. But truth be told, most "Christians" aren't reading their Bible and most churches are catering to this spirit by offering spectator oriented services heavy on popular worship songs and so-called "relevant messages" and light on encouraging active participation, discipleship, service to others, and personal sacrifice for the sake of the Church mission. Hence the need for a book like this. Tony Merida's Love Your Church is a biblically sound, point-by-point teaching on the importance of congregational participation for the believer. The main topical point is that Christ and the New Testament teaches believers to love, support and labor with each other to build the Kingdom. This book had been recommended to me by a pastor friend. I immediately saw its value from the title but I am generally not a huge fan of contemporary books on Christian living. I also was surprised at how broad-minded the author was in aiming for a reading audience from a variety of faith traditions. As the first few chapters focus on mushier points like belonging, welcoming, and caring, I feared this wouldn't get to the meat of the kind of service and congregational topics that demand more self-sacrifice and involvement. But the book gets much meatier as it progresses and I ended up very impressed at Tony Merida's ability to draw out the fundamental issue with Church congregational living: it requires you to think less of yourself and more in terms of the Body of Christ, the mission of the Church, the needs of the lost, and loving the sometimes difficult people that are its members and leaders. These issues demand the very dying to self that Christ preached about and which the egalitarian individualism of the post-modern church world tends to resent, replacing it with virtue-signaling and personal development. Love Your Church is a phenomenal resource and I decided to use this book as a reference for a Bible Study based on its 8 main points. It may be the best thing I have read on Christian living in a long time. I highly recommend it.