Theology Thursday: Church Discipline and Excommunication

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question:
What is church discipline?

At MCC, we desire to practice meaningful membership, and believe that doing so is a crucial aspect of the discipleship process and vital for living out our mission to know God and make him known, for realizing our vision to Love20, and for embracing each of our four core values: unity in gospel truth, spiritual formation, theological thoroughness, and relational authenticity.

As such, we're spending a few Theology Thursdays diving into MCC's membership philosophy and policy. Today: What is church discipline?

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
Church discipline is one aspect of the discipleship process. In fact, “discipleship” and “discipline” share the same root word: “disciple.” Church discipline is the part of discipleship that seeks to correct sin and guide the disciple back on the correct path. To be discipled is, among other things, to be disciplined.

The practice of church discipline can vary case-by-case, but should generally follow the guidelines Jesus laid out in Matthew 18 (see “How should churches practice discipline?” below). After the other steps are taken - private conversations, loving accountability, and efforts toward sincere repentance and reconciliation - and have proven unfruitful, the final step of church discipline is excommunication.

Importantly, excommunication is the act of removing an individual from membership. Except in rare cases (usually including active and persistent disruption in the worship service, seeding congregational division, and/or perpetrating threatening behavior), church discipline does not mean barring the individual from attendance at the church’s public gatherings. The goal is always repentance and healing, both personally and relationally with the church and with God.

Implementing excommunication is the church saying it can no longer affirm the person’s profession of faith, based on obvious and outward (unrepentant) sin. The result is a removal from the membership roster and the various privileges membership entails.

In addition to Matthew 18, perhaps the most well-known scriptural passage on church discipline is 1 Corinthians 5. In this account, Paul rebukes the Corinthian church for tolerating a man who is sleeping with his father’s wife, his step-mother. He tells them to “put out of your fellowship” this man (5:2), to “judge” him (5:12), to “expel” him (5:13), to “hand this man over to Satan,” (5:5) that is, the Kingdom of Satan, which is the world. He can no longer be regarded as a citizen of God’s Kingdom, since he is not turning from sin but living in it.

To be a church member is to be a representative of Jesus. Church discipline, then, is the appropriate course of action when the character of a person’s representation brings shame on Jesus’s name.

What’s the purpose of church discipline?
Church discipline has at least five purposes:

1. Discipline aims to expose. Sin, like cancer, loves to hide. Discipline exposes the cancer so that it might be cut out quickly. (1 Corinthians 5:2)

2. Discipline aims to warn. A church does not enact God’s judgment through discipline. Rather, it takes seriously God’s call on the church to be set apart and holy, and to be faithful in leading its people from justification to sanctification. (1 Corinthians 5:5)

3. Discipline aims to save. Churches pursue discipline (especially excommunication) when they see a member taking the path toward death, and none of their pleading and arm waving causes the person to turn around. It’s the device of last resort. (1 Corinthians 5:5)

4. Discipline aims to protect. Just as cancer spreads from one cell to another, so sin quickly spreads from one person to another. Enacting church discipline for a member in unrepentant sin helps protect the rest of the body from the disease of sin. (1 Corinthians 5:6)

5. Discipline aims to present a good witness for Jesus. Church discipline is good for the individual being disciplined, for the other church members, and for non-members and for non-Christians, because it helps to preserve the attractive distinctiveness of God’s people. Churches are to be salt and light. “But if the salt loses its saltiness,” Jesus said, “it is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot” (Matthew 5:13). 

The underlying purpose in every act of discipline, of course, must be love: love for the individual, love for the church as a whole, love for the watching world, and love for Christ.

God, after all, “disciplines the one he loves” and “he chastens everyone he accepts as his son” (Hebrews 12:6). By avoiding or refusing to discipline, we claim that we love better than God. God lovingly knows that discipline yields life, growth, and health. “God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness” (Hebrews 12:10). Yes, it’s difficult and potentially even agonizing, but it’s worth it. “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).

When should churches practice discipline?
Broadly, church discipline should take place whenever someone sins. The majority of the time, this will look like personal (even one-on-one) conversations, gentle prodding, prayer, and individual counseling and accountability. Informal, relational correction should be the norm amongst members and from leadership for any church claiming to represent Jesus.

Specifically, formal excommunication should be reserved only for sins of such significance that the church no longer feels able to affirm a person’s profession of faith. The individual continues to call himself or herself a Christian, but his or her words are no longer believable; they are betrayed by actions, by the nature of the sin.

Church leaders cannot claim to know people’s hearts, but God does call churches to consider the fruit of individual lives and make a judgment call (1 Corinthians 5:12, Matthew 3:8; 7:16-20, 12:33, 21:43). For each individual case, church leaders must identify and agree upon the (blurry, gray) line between common, expected sins for which there is shame, regret, and an effort to overcome, and patterns of serious, relationship-damaging sin that give reasons to no longer trust the individual’s commitment to Christ.

Examples include, but are not limited to: sexual infidelity, financial embezzlement, divorce outside of biblical grounds, same-sex romantic activity (not just feelings, but activity), persistent insobriety, false teaching (heresy), etc.

Formal church discipline - excommunication - is required when patterns of sin meet these three criteria:

1. The sin must have an outward manifestation. Churches should not throw the red flag of ejection every time they suspect greed, pride, or lust in someone’s heart. It must be something that can be seen with the eyes and/or heard with the ears, and is affecting the individual as well as doing damage to relationships in the individual’s biological and/or church family. 

2. The sin must be serious. Not every sin should be pursued to the utmost. There needs to be some place in church’s life for love to cover “a multitude of sin” (1 Peter 4:8). We all fall short. Thankfully, God does not perceptively discipline us every time we fall short.  

3. The sin must be unrepentant. The person involved has been confronted with God’s commands in scripture, but he or she refuses to let go of the sin. From all appearances, the person prizes the sin more than Jesus. 

How should a church practice discipline?
Matthew 18 describes the basic process of church discipline, moving from one person, to several, to the whole church. Jesus’s basic concern here is to extend the process no wider than necessary for producing reconciliation.

Sometimes the process should move quite slowly, especially if the individual shows interest in turning from sin and engaging in healing, or when there are sensitive or legally-intricate considerations. Sometimes the process should be swift, especially when the sin is flagrant and the sinner is blatantly doing much damage.

Also to be considered is not just the nature of the sin but the disposition and attitude and personality of the individual. Different sinners require different strategies (1 Thessalonians 5:14-15).

Restoration to membership is possible, desired, and encouraged. Genuine repentance and sincere reconciliation are prerequisites.

Next week: MCC's membership policy

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.