Is switching church membership a sin?

Contrary to the strangely existing belief, switching church membership is not a sin. Often, saints who make the decision to leave their place of worship to seek greener pastures, or for whatever reasons they have, are looked upon by the rest of the congregants as rebellious backsliders and are regularly shunned.

Admitting that this is the sad reality in many of these cases, Courtney Morrison, pastor of the Fellowship Tabernacle in Portmore, St Catherine, warned that this ought not to be so.

“Church members who have left one fellowship or denomination to go to another oftentimes get the cold shoulder from their former fellow members and even the pastor. They are sometimes not even spoken to … they’re excommunicated,” Morrison said.

“We need to be careful in the Kingdom of God about how we view church membership. Church membership is speaking to us, having our members say, ‘this is where we are committing our time and resources’, and this doesn’t prevent them from visiting other churches or listening to other communications,” he said.

Morrison further described as borderline cultic the behaviour of religious institutions that forbid their congregants from benefiting from other churches or those that condemn a saint for enrolling in another institution.

He noted, “We have to be careful as a church how we treat those who have decided to go to another fellowship. I believe as long as that fellowship is not anti-Christian or anti-biblical that they are still seen as fellow labourers in the vineyard of God.

“We are Christians only but not the only Christians, and so other fellowships are Christians, too, and must be treated as such. Otherwise, we are really setting a very poor example of how to treat others for the world to follow and we then declare that we love one another. Love must be expressed not only in words, but in deeds.”

Sharing his experience with one of his members who had left to worship elsewhere, Morrison said: “I encountered her one day on the road and she said ‘Pastor, I must be making your head hurt you. I left and I didn’t say anything’”.

I said,” “Well I heard about where you’ve gone, and I’m not disturbed. I know it’s of Christian belief and your pastor is someone I know. I’m fine as long as you are in a Bible-believing, Holy Ghost church and you adopt the tenets of scripture.

“And so we just need to be careful that we don’t border on the cultic … and excommunicate certain persons when they are fellow Christians even if they aren’t fellow congregants. We must be very mindful of how we treat each other, or we can cause far more hurt instead of spreading unity.”