Why no church discipline?

On Sunday, during our Members Meeting, we had the grave responsiblity of voting a member out of the church as a matter of church discipline. That is to say that we could no longer, with integrity, vouch for this man's profession of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. It took months to get to this point, but we finally did, and we continue to pray for genuine repentance.

After the meeting, a man walked up to me and said something like this: "I've been going to church for sixty years, but I've never seen this happen. Though it was sad to see, I'm grateful the church loved that man enough to practice church discipline."

He has been attending churches his entire life. Why has he never seen a church practice discipline? We know that 150 years ago it was common practice in America. What happened?

Gregory Wills in his book, Democratic Religion, offered a suggestion. He argued that churches became so preocuppied with changing the culture (fighting for Prohibition, for example) that they stopped caring about making sure their own congregations were pure. Wills put it this way, "The more evangelicals purified the society, the less they felt the urgency of a discipline that separated the church from the world."

But things only got worse. When we entered the latter part of the twentieth century, many churches stopped caring about theology. They cared, instead, about growing churches bigger. Pastors became practicioners of church growth.

David Wells, in his book, God in the Wasteland, said that in the 1970s a dramatic shift took place in church life: "This was a time when the confessional and theological character of evangelicalism began to fade, leaving the churches wide open to the intrustions of raw pragmatism. As theology moved from the center to the periphery of evangelical faith, technique moved from the periphery to the center. The one gained at the cost of the other." In other words, churches began to sacrifice theological integrity at the altar of church growth. Pastors focused so much on doing whatever they could do get people in the door that they devoted less of their attention to discipling those inside.

I am so thankful that a growing number of churches are taking passages like Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 seriously. We believe that our witness in the world will actually be better and brighter if we stand by those truths that we profess. We believe that church discipline is not simply the act of removing someone from membership for unrepentant sin (though it may be that!) but it is the act of discipling a brother or sister in Christ, lovingly applying the gospel to his or her life for his or her good. Church discipline is, in that sense, living the Christian life togther, holding one another accountable to walk the walk. 

May God give us the grace to exercise church discipline well.

Comments

[Aaron]

I think the driver was theology. As confidence in the Word declined (mid to late 19th century), confidence in business practices increased. The church began looking to the world to judge success. The faithful practice of church discipline was not seen as the way to build a successful church.

[David Derrer]

Aaron, Historically, which was the driver, declining theology or emphasis on church growth? Did a theology that emphasizes man's decision inevitably lead to measuring success by number of converts rather than disciple making? Or did emphasis on growth lead to compromising theology to get it? Both?