I noticed that the folks over at Nine Marks put out their latest e-journal on the topic of church discipline. A lot of helpful thinking there, to be sure.

But while I think about it, I wanted to draw attention to the article by Ken Sande recently posted on our website called “God Disciplines Those He Loves.” (Note that this article is in a “policies” section of our website intended to support the teaching in our new resource for church leaders–The Leadership Opportunity.)

Consider this excerpt:

Wanting to avoid legal liability (as well as the controversy and stress associated with holding people accountable for their sinful actions), most churches have abandoned the ministry of biblical discipline altogether. Many rationales have been given to justify this decision. “We believe in grace in our church.” “We don’t want to scare seekers and new believers away.” “We don’t want to be legalistic.” “We’ve seen discipline abused in the past.” “We haven’t disciplined wealthy and influential members who deserved it, so it would be unfair to discipline others.”

It is true that church discipline has the potential to be harsh, legalistic, offensive, abusive, and arbitrary. But the same can be said of parental discipline, a civil court trial or an investigation by civil authorities into alleged child abuse. All these forms of authority have the potential to be misused, yet no one reasonably argues that parents should let their children do anything they want, or judges should close their courtroom doors, or child protection agencies should stop fighting against abuse.

The answer to bad discipline is not no discipline. The answer is good discipline. This means taking Jesus at his word, obeying what he has commanded in Matthew 18:15-20, and asking him to help us carry out discipline in a loving and redemptive way, as he has always intended us to do (Matt. 18:12-14).

Even when church leaders are willing to pursue discipline, they are often so fearful of controversy that they back off on the steps needed to make discipline effective. Thus, if a person resigns his or her membership or leaves the church during a disciplinary process, leaders usually breathe a sigh of relief and think their job is done. Essentially they allow the person to declare “spiritual bankruptcy” and then start running up a new debt of sin at another congregation’s expense.

This passivity only serves to consign a wayward believer to his sin. It also can expose others to serious harm. What if the individual in question has a pattern of seducing young women in the college and career group, or defrauding seniors out of their life savings, or abusing children in the nursery? If a church is not committed to discipline and prepared to follow through on it even when someone tries to short-circuit the process, the sin and damage often go on and on.

Woe to church leaders who passively allow this to happen!

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