“The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘This is the statute of the Passover: no foreigner may eat it. . .If an alien resides among you and wants to observe the Lord’s Passover, every male in his household must be circumcised, and then he may participate; he will become like a native of the land. But no uncircumcised person may eat it. The same law will apply to both the native and the alien who resides among you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the criticisms often leveled against Christianity today is that it is very exclusive. In a world in which being inclusive is one of our highest virtues (unless you are deemed insufficiently inclusive, in which case you are excluded with prejudice), this charge carries a lot of weight with some folks. It can be an apologetically difficult question to answer. Well, as we are going to see in the next part of our story here, this charge is not completely without merit. The people of God is an exclusive group. But it is exclusive in the most inclusive way possible. Let’s talk about it through the lens of God’s instructions about who could and could not participate in the Passover festival.

Our culture has a vision of inclusivity and tolerance in which those two things are virtues in their own right. It used to be that tolerance assumed disagreement on some point, but a willingness to entertain the arguments of your opposing interlocutors. The very fact that you were tolerating them rested on the assumption of disagreement. Today, tolerance is taken to mean a willingness to not only embrace, but celebrate someone else’s viewpoint. At the point you have embraced and celebrated an opposing viewpoint, though, it’s hard to continue to say you don’t agree with it. Thus, in a classical sense, you aren’t tolerating it at all. You’re now in agreement with it.

Something similar has happened with the idea of being inclusive. Today the idea gets filtered through the lens of our twisted definition of tolerance to the point that if you follow the generally progressive party line your group ceases to be able to make any kind of meaningful distinctions between you and someone else. By this, the distinctions that once defined your group become so diluted that it begins to become impossible to tell where your group stops and another group starts. Without any meaningful distinctions, you eventually lose the ability to be inclusive at all. In this way, inclusivity used to mean you were willing to accept people into your group on fairly generous terms. Today, it means your group largely ceases to exist in the first place.

Critics of the church today, inspired by the devil himself who hates the church and wants to see it destroyed, insist the church should be more inclusive. By this, they mean the church should allow people to be members who aren’t followers of Jesus. It should drop the moral expectations it has of its members. It should cease to proclaim that some behaviors are sinful and some are not. A classic example would be when secular universities insist Christian groups on campus allow atheist students to serve on their leadership boards in the name of inclusivity. They insist the church is far too exclusive for modern tastes.

Well, they’re right. The church is an exclusive group. When we get it right, there are clear boundaries around who is a member and who is not. Now, the church today can certainly be guilty of being exclusive in an unloving way in terms of adding requirements and otherwise refusing to allow people in the door who don’t check off certain cultural or political or economic boxes. There’s no support in the Scriptures for that kind of exclusivity. But in terms of saying clearly and definitively who they are and who they’re not, the church fits the charge of being exclusive to a T.

This is not something the church has simply made up to make it hard to join, though. This is something God Himself has directed. What we find throughout the Scriptures and of which we see a perfect example right here is that God has always been abundantly clear about who His people are and who they are not. When He gives something to His people, it is often for His people and no one else. The Passover festival is a perfect example of this. It was for the people of God. It wasn’t for everyone. If you weren’t a part of His people, you couldn’t participate in it. It was incredibly exclusive in that regard.

But it was exclusive in the most inclusive way possible. Just because it was given to His people for them alone to enjoy didn’t mean He wasn’t willing for everyone in the world to be able to take part in it. He was glad for them to do so. In fact, anyone could take part in the Passover festival. They simply had to become a part of His people. For them, this meant having all the males in the household circumcised. The rest of the household just had to commit with them to keeping the laws of Israel. That was a pretty high bar to membership. Thankfully, the church doesn’t require surgery as a requirement for membership any longer. If you want to be a member, you simply need to be a follower of Jesus. That is in some ways an even higher bar to membership than Israel had, but it is also one that anyone can clear. The church is open and available to everyone. You just have to be a follower of Jesus to be fully a part of it.

Now, this doesn’t mean that churches should completely close their doors to non-members. That would rather wildly violate the approach of Jesus Himself. The church should be the most welcoming and open place in the world. We are to be actively engaging with and loving the least, last, and lost of the culture around us. We should make even the dirtiest sinner feel at home in our midst. But to be fully a part of who we are, you have to be following Jesus. The reason for this is simple: if we are following Jesus and you are not, then we’re going in two different directions. To say we are all going the same direction together in spite of that is a lie. That’s not being inclusive, it’s being dishonest. A group built on dishonesty can’t last. And so, yes, the church is an exclusive group. It’s an exclusive group that anyone can join and be a part of just as God designed it.