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2010 will be a swing year when the church starts to really understand the difference between belonging and membership.  The seeds are already planted for new growth in belonging focused ministry in the local church; small group ministry, for instance, is becoming a more important element of churches at all sizes.

Traditional membership has already been decreasing at churches for a while.  People are seeing less reasons to become a traditional member of the local church, even if they have been attending for a long time and consider the church their "church home." In some ways this may be reversed as people are comfortable with becoming members on websites, but I think that will only be a small gain swallowed up by the overall trend.

The question is, how do you minister to someone who doesn't want to be a church member?  I think the answer lies in belonging.  You focus on bringing the community of the church to the point where people feel they truly belong.  Even as people shy away from the membership process, they are always looking for a place to call their own.  The church should be providing that place and should be working to emphasize that, member or not, the local church is "their" church.

The key points for belonging are exclusivity and cost.  For people to really feel like they belong they have to pass both of those landmarks.

Exclusivity refers not to the church rejecting certain people, but to the select inclusion of the community.  For someone to be one of us, there has to be an us and them. For most churches, a single family will not know everyone in the church so the church as a whole won't have that sense of exclusivity and belonging.  When you can't tell if the same people are there every week, you can't tell if this is "your" place.  Small groups help out here because there is a clear member group, you are part of the group and other people are not.  Hopefully your small groups are setup in such a way that the group is set early in the term; if people are freely changing groups throughout the term the exclusivity and belonging is lost.

Cost is important because exclusivity is not enough.  People need to not only see that the group is exclusive, but the members of the group should have paid some cost to bring them where they are.  Now, I don't think that charging for small group attendance is the way to go, but people are made to belong when they have an investment in the group or have paid some cost.  The best way for cost to work out is through a significant experience.  This could be a missions trip, a service project, or a time or deep personal sharing, but it is something that cements belonging in the group.

Newcomers can never share that experience and won't truly belong until the next significant event.  In fact, if you force a group to accept new members and don't provide a large enough stable core, you break exclusivity and you create a cost disparity that make everyone feel like they no longer belong.

This year, the trend will be to focus more and more clearly on giving people a sense of belonging somewhere in the local church.  The people are not just cogs in the machine or long term visitors; they truly belong to a group focused on worshiping God.