f you could pick and choose the makeup of your congregation, who would be in the “must have” column? Whom would you take a pass on? And who would get the “over my dead body” treatment?

Certainly you’d pass on that cantankerous and overly sensitive woman who is so consumed with herself and her department that she renders everyone and everything else unimportant by comparison.

How about the department head who’s so disorganized, flaky, and more often than not unprepared for the most minor emergency?

In a limited sense you do get to choose your members by choosing your church congregation. Especially in urban settings in North America, if you don’t like a particular congregation there’s another Adventist church relatively close by. But really, your choice is restricted to church A versus church B, not the individual members. You don’t have a personal requirement list that someone must meet before he or she is granted membership. You don’t have veto power.

There are more than 40 Adventist churches in the Toronto area. Yet every Sabbath morning I turn away from my neighborhood church, reject another that’s one and a half miles away, neglect to attend a third and a fourth just two miles away, pass three or four that are 10 minutes away—all so I can drive 20 minutes to my group of sinners and saints at Toronto West. And I’m not alone. Commuting to church is a common occurrence. Some Toronto West members travel an hour to get to church.

So many of us do exercise choice in our places of worship. We get used to the people, the pastor, the choir, the music, the style of worship, the vigor and verve of that particular fellowship of believers.

Yet the question is still relevant. If you could pick and choose the members themselves, whom would you accept and whom would you reject?

Near the top of my list of “must haves” would be an outstanding choir director and singer like my cousin Rose Heavens. I would want a maestro at the organ. The youth leader would be energetic and creative. Only a meticulous treasurer, a careful church clerk, and conscientious deacons and elders would make the grade.

And yet, as I look back on over two decades of active church involvement, I can see the mistakes I would have made, the people who are now on my “must members” list who would have been the first ones voted out a decade ago.

I’ve seen enough shy, geeky girls grow into gorgeous, confident young women. I watch aimless, unmotivated boys sprout wings and soar into manhood. I stand in awe as a previously undiscovered talent explodes from someone who finally gets a chance to shine for Christ.

In fact, there’s nothing so invigorating and affirming as a group of members—brought together by the working of the Holy Spirit, and bound together by a love for God and for His lost people—who achieve the impossible and confound the enemies of God’s church.

What is clear is that we humans are pretty lousy judges of a person’s character, motives, and fitness for membership in the church, much less the kingdom of God.

The youngster who was an unholy terror in my Pathfinder Club is now a terrific youth leader, able to relate to the rambunctious and awkward kids in a special way. The girl who wanted no part of discussions during the Cornerstone lesson study in the youth Sabbath school can be seen cajoling and encouraging the current crop of youths.

And that elder at the pulpit, exhorting his members toward lives of devotion to God. Isn’t he the one who used to throw the craziest Saturday night parties as a youth, the very parties condemned by the adults because they provided stiff competition for the church-run socials in the basement?

Repeatedly the people we choose as most likely to succeed end up failing, and the ones we dismiss as hopeless become raging successes.

Think seriously, then, about the many members, tender plants they, whom we would have uprooted and tossed, as it were, into the fire.

Sort of helps us understand the Master’s admonition in the parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13:24-30: “Let both grow together until the harvest” (verse 30).

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Royson James is the urban affairs columnist for the Toronto Star. He is also an elder and youth worker at the Toronto West Seventh-day Adventist Church.