Members aren’t customers.

If you are a member, you aren’t a customer. When you paid in, you stopped being the target. You are already in. We’re already turning our attention to the next potential member.

This isn’t callous. It’s definitional. The organization is there to serve a need in the community and becoming a member is making a commitment to serve. It doesn’t mean you can’t be served—but it does expect service from you.

This is true in nearly any organization. Big and small.

Of course, this is also not an excuse for the organization to treat you poorly. And many (like Amazon, Facebook, and Google) are doing it on purpose. Not only because they can but because we can’t imagine forcing them to treat us better.

No, I’m talking about the expectation that we can be a member of an organization and still expect the organization to serve us.

Many of us live with a dialectic confusion: the organization serves our needs—and when the organization needs it must serve itself. Except that’s exactly what we’re signing up for as members. We are the organization. Refusing to see what membership requires is a way of receiving the benefits of membership without fulfilling its requirements (see the free rider problem).

This is especially true in churches and service organizations where staff is nearly non-existent and the needs are legion. It is also the place where the understanding of need gets confused. Because the people who need often struggle to ever truly see themselves as members.

We never would expect the head of Sony to unclog a toilet in the main bathroom. Mostly because they pay someone to do that. But employment isn’t the general standard for plunging toilets; its commitment.

In most organizations, the real sign of membership isn’t a pledge card. Its your willingness to see something that needs doing and then doing it.