Introduction
Church discipline has largely departed from the modern American Protestant church. In a 2017 Lifeway Research study surveying 1,000 evangelical pastors from a variety of denominations, 55% of respondents indicated that “a member has not been formally disciplined since I came as pastor nor prior as far as I know.”1Churches Rarely Reprimand Members, New Survey Shows,” LifeWay Research (blog), April 5, 2018, https://lifewayresearch.com/2018/04/05/churches-rarely-reprimand-members-newsurvey-shows/. An additional 21% responded that it had been three or more years since the last case of discipline had happened. These trends are not particularly new; in 1983, Jay Adams lamented in an address that “Church discipline among American congregations almost does not exist.”2Jay E Adams, “Discipling, Counseling and Church Discipline,” Journal of Pastoral Practice 7, no. 3 (1984): 15. The address here described was delivered to the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors (now the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors). Detractors from church discipline, whether actively attacking the practice or silently failing to practice it, question its value in the church today, its alignment with the various structures and methods of church growth, and its consistency with the mercy which is to be offered in Christ.3John S. Hammett and Benjamin L. Merkle, eds., Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline (B&H Academic, 2012), chap. 6. Yet, these detractors miss out on the clearest reason for its application: “Jesus commanded it.”4Hammett and Merkle, chap. 6. Adams: “All the reservations, objections, and hesitations that people have about discipline are irrelevant. Jesus does not leave the matter up to us; He tells us what to do.” Jay E. Adams, Handbook of Church Discipline: A Right and Privilege of Every Church Member (Zondervan, 2016), 48. Emphasis original.
Jay Adams identified an unshakable connection between biblical counseling and the renewed practice of church discipline: “Counseling and church discipline are inextricably intertwined; neither can be carried on effectively and biblically without the other.”5Adams, Handbook of Church Discipline, 11. Adams noted elsewhere that where one found church discipline, he was likely to find someone in the church participating in the revival of biblical counseling.6Adams, “Discipling, Counseling and Church Discipline,” 15–16. Yet, pursuing church discipline correctly requires a right understanding of the people and situations wherein discipline should take place. This essay will argue that biblical counselors have a duty to escalate counseling cases through the process of church discipline. This duty is limited first by salvation/membership status of the counselee (the subject of counseling) and second, the details of the sin being counseled (the counseling situation). Furthermore, fulfilling this duty will also necessarily involve breaching strict confidentiality as the process of discipline is pursued.
In brief, the subjects of counseling who can be disciplined include members of local churches and must exclude non-members and unbelievers who cannot be the subjects of discipline, though they may both experience benefits from counseling and evangelism. The situations in which counseling will lead to discipline involve a church member in clear, ongoing, unrepentant sin and who refuses to engage in ongoing counseling care and correction. And finally, while Scripture does give direction regarding the concept of limited knowledge of transgressions, Scripture’s concept of confidentiality is substantially different than that of current professional and legal definitions, allowing for increased awareness of sin among others as necessary. To argue for these points, the paper will begin with a step-wise understanding of church discipline, followed by advancing the three points above, and will conclude with an illustrative case study.
A brief study of nomenclature will be helpful here before proceeding. In modern writing, the term church discipline is frequently used to describe the final step of the process of restorative and purgative discipline described by Jesus in Matthew 18:15-18.7As will be discussed later in the paper, this is not nearly a full description of the full process in view in Matthew 18:15-18 which includes a number of confrontations which may or may not end in repentance and restoration. Jay Adams’s Handbook of Church Discipline is an extremely helpful resource for laying out the various elements of this process. Adams, Handbook of Church Discipline. In this case, the common use of church discipline would only refer to step 5 of 5 in Adams’s paradigm. In this step, the unrepentant brother has his sin presented before the congregation and upon final unrepentance is declared a “gentile and tax collector.”8Matthew 18:18. All Scripture quoted in the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted. What makes this particular usage helpful, especially in cases of data gathering such as the Lifeway study above, is that the final phase is the only phase of the process which can be realistically measured. Records can be kept of church decisions to exclude someone from membership, and those records can clearly chart the progress of the practice.9Gregory Wills, who wrote the historical chapter for the Hammett and Merkle book quoted above, also wrote an excellent book on this specific topic, tracking the use and eventual disuse of various modes of discipline in Baptists in the American south from the early-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries. Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South 1785-1900 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2003). What makes this use of nomenclature unhelpful is that it ignores the fuller picture offered by Matthew 18.
To keep reading this essay by Logan Williams in the Journal of Biblical Soul Care Fall Edition 2023 click here.
