Prepare People for Church Discipline

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Matt Smethurst
Discipline that kind of final stage we’re talking about. It’s not just kind of the biggest club we can find to punish someone. The ultimate purpose of discipline is to restore the person for it to function like smelling salts in their life, so that they wake up from their spiritual slumber to see the gravity of choosing sin over Jesus.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome to the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst, a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, and

Ligon Duncan
I’m LIG Duncan, Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary,

Matt Smethurst
and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about the practice of church discipline, and in particular, how to prepare your congregation for a potential case of discipline. Like, why is this a conversation worth having? What is church discipline, and, and, and where does, where does it come from? This idea?

Ligon Duncan
Well, one is when, when we are united to Christ, we’re united to one another. When you’re united to Christ, you’re united to everyone who’s united to Christ, but you are especially united to the members of the local body of which you are a part. And because of that, there’s some accountability. We know you’ve quoted before from Hebrews, that we’re to spur one another on in love and good deeds, but it also means that our sin impacts the whole of our fellowship, of our family, just like in family life, if you have a member of your nuclear family that is engaging in certain types of sin, say a sin of the tongue, in which they’re being harsh, that affects the family life. It affects the congregation’s life. When we engage in certain envy, pride, impatience, also things like that impact the life of the congregation, and of course, especially sins that impact families, infidelity, etc, that impacts the life of the congregation. And so from that standpoint, you can see why it’s important that there would be attention be be given to that in the life of the church. Now, discipline is not just negative in the bad cases, discipline is also nurturing. Discipline is designed, actually, to grow us. There’s positive discipline as well as negative discipline.

Matt Smethurst
Are you distinguishing between, say, formative and corrective discipline, you know?

Ligon Duncan
And so we’re gonna, I guess, focus more on corrective discipline, but it’s important for us to remember that every time you’re, we would say, in my context, catechizing a person, every time you’re teaching people the basics of Christianity, discipling a person, you’re actually engaging in church discipline. But there is also an aspect of church discipline in which we have to address the ongoing reality of sin in the life of the congregation, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, right?

Matt Smethurst
There’s a promise in our church covenant where we say we will pursue transparency with each other, resisting the temptation to hide our struggles and sins that we might experience the grace of God in the care of his saints. That’s what we mean by positive, ongoing, formative discipline that we’re all experiencing in a healthy church, namely speaking into one another’s lives and opening up our lives to be encouraged and corrected appropriately living transparently with one another is what creates the plausibility structure for the kind of corrective discipline, right that the Bible talks about. But if you don’t have a culture where people are speaking into one another’s lives, if you don’t have a culture where it’s a normal thing to ask spiritually invasive questions, and I mean that in the most positive sense of the word, and to welcome such questions in return to be asking people for accountability, then it’s it is going to be jarring. It is going to feel mean. For instance, if you start talking about a formal process of excommunication. So it’s really important to establish that church culture of, hey, we we need to be watching over one another’s lives and professions as we help one another toward heaven. And just to define terms, that’s really what I’m referring to when, when it comes to that corrective church discipline is if church membership is affirming someone’s profession of faith, saying, We think you belong to King Jesus, church discipline is simply removing that affirmation of faith. It’s not saying we know. For sure you’re going to hell. We don’t have God’s perspective on people’s hearts, but it is saying we can no longer be confident you’re going to heaven based on the way you’re living. It seems like you are choosing sin over Jesus. We all sin, but it’s it’s this unrepentant sin that is habitual and ongoing, such that it calls your profession into question.

Ligon Duncan
And of course, you’re you’re speaking when you when you speak in those categories, you’re thinking of the final step in church discipline of excommunication, when the church is rendering that judgment. Thankfully, we have some other tools in our kit before we get there, and one of the big ones is admonition, and you see that all over the New Testament, and hopefully we’re giving that admonition to people that we do have good confidence, that they are trusting absolutely the Lord, and we’re trying to keep them from going in a direction that would lead them off of a cliff. And even I love I remember a friend of ours saying that he was reading an old Baptist Church covenant where it said something like this about the people that had been excommunicated by the congregation that we will no longer call you brother but friend. And I thought even even that language indicated that it was the discipline, that ultimate step of discipline and excommunication was designed to awaken a person to sin, and not to have the church as his enemy, but as his best friend, who’s willing to give the wounds of a friend and and hopefully that that, in and of itself, would be used to win a person back from a spiritual condition and a practice that is potentially soul destroying. And so the ultimately, all church discipline is practice for the glory of God and for the testimony of the church and for the good of the individual who is being disciplined. And so we’ve got to keep that in mind, and especially if it’s a shocking or sensational sin. I can, I can testify, having been a part of that, one of the things that happens is you feel wounded. Even if the sin hasn’t been done against you. You feel wounded about that, and it’s hard to get into the proper mode of, you know what I need to think about the eternal, spiritual well being of this person, because you’re mad and you’re hurt and you’re surprised and and it can take some adjustment as we go through this process, I am concerned about the glory of God, I am concerned about the witness of the church, but I’m also concerned about the well Being of this person, and it means taking some steps that are really hard.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, that’s a great note, because discipline that kind of final stage we’re talking about. It’s not just kind of the biggest club we can find to punish someone. It really is restorative. The ultimate purpose of discipline is to restore the person for it to function like smelling salts in their life, so that they wake up from their spiritual slumber to see the gravity of choosing sin over Jesus. And I love that you talked about how ultimately it’s about the glory of God. So yes, it’s a way. It’s a way to love the individual living in unrepentant sin. It’s also a way to love the congregation by reminding them that this is not what it means to live for Jesus. It’s a way of loving the watching world, as you mentioned, because it shows them that actually Christians are distinct from you, not because we think we’re better than you, but because we serve a holy and beautiful God, and it is ultimately a reflection, as you mentioned, of the character of God himself, because that’s the purpose of the church in the world, is to reflect His holy character and love. So there’s a little booklet by our friend Jonathan Lehman, called, is it loving to practice church discipline? And I, I appreciate that framing, because obviously, on the surface, this is often gonna feel unloving to us, but he shows in just that brief booklet, it would be a great thing to hand out to members of your church that, yes, actually, church discipline can be one of the most loving things you can do. In fact, I can, you know, share this story without, you know, giving too many details, but there is a sister in our church who moved away for a time and was not responding to our messages. How can we pray for you? How can. Encourage you. Have you found another gospel preaching church to join. She was just kind of ghosting us, and it prompted a process of what could have eventually led to excommunication, but the Lord used that in her life to actually wake her up and bring her back, and she’s one of our most involved, happy members, and in fact, in the next couple of weeks, she’s gonna stand up in front of the church and share her story of how, basically, church discipline saved her life. So done well, it is meant to be restorative, and just so we’re clear, if this is at all new for you as a pastor, this idea, maybe it’s something you’ve you’ve thought about in seminary or in general, but it’s not something you’ve ever practiced in your church or led your people to think about. The key passages we’re thinking about are Jesus’s words in Matthew 18. And of course, in there will be some differences in church polity, right? But what’s very clear is, is that Jesus says, If your brother sins against you, go to him yourself, right? If he refuses to repent, take a couple others along, and if he still fuses, refuses to repent, then it becomes a matter for the church, right? And you and I would both agree it goes through the elders, whether it ends there. But the point is, Matthew 18 is a wonderful place to take your people, to help them understand that this is not something that pastors made up again as a way to punish people, but it’s actually coming from the Lord Jesus Himself. First Corinthians five, where Paul is writing to that dysfunctional church in Corinth, and it seems like there’s a man in their church, a member of their church, who is sleeping with his stepmom or something like that. And Paul does not say Praise God for His grace. Paul actually says, This is ridiculous. You’re tolerating something. Even the pagans are not remove this person from among you. And then there

Ligon Duncan
are other places, and by the way, he’s fussing at them even more than he’s fussing at him. In other words, he’s, he’s, he’s concerned that the leaders of the church and the congregation have turned a blind eye to this. And so he’s remonstrating with the congregation, especially about the particular matter, which, again, just reminds us all of the responsibility that we have to one another. You know, it’s, it’s a part of our submitting ourselves to the kingship of Christ, right in the same body, to care about one another in that way. And and Paul expects the Corinthian congregation and your congregation and my congregation to care about those things, and he’s gonna fuss at us if we don’t care about those things. But let me, let me quickly admit so in the 19th century in America, Baptist and Presbyterians were both known for discipline. We have not been known for discipline. In the 20th century, part of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention has been to recover historic Baptist convictions about life together as believers, and one of those has been the practice of church discipline, which is a standing mark of the Baptist tradition, in my tradition as well, the Presbyterian tradition very much cared about discipline, and it’s something that goes all the way back to the Reformation. The reformers were concerned that the practice of church discipline had just completely dropped off the map in medieval Roman Catholicism, and they they felt that the preaching of the Word, the right administration, the sacraments and appropriate church discipline was those were marks of a true Gospel Church, And so they really cared about it, and they attempted to restore that in the life of the congregation. So both of us have church traditions that have emphasized that, but in the 20th century, my tradition did not do a great job of that. We lost our conservative resurgence in my part of the Presbyterian world, and one of the things we’ve tried to do is recover a healthy practice in that regard. But it’s, it’s, it’s tough sledding. We’ve been at this for over 50 years now, and there are a lot of churches, a lot of Bible believing, you know, gospel, loving, Christ, exalting Presbyterian churches where there’s not much of a practice of discipline at all. And I love the fact that you quoted Jonathan’s book title, because that’s one of the first things that I hear. Was just not loving. Jesus says not to judge, and we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t judge others. And so there, even in Bible believing circles, there can be a resistance to doing church discipline? Absolutely.

Matt Smethurst
Talk a little more about those historic marks of a true church. What is the relationship between the right administration of the sacraments and discipline?

Ligon Duncan
Well, the sacraments, of course, have been the gateway at which discipline has been at. Exercised. So just as you said a few minutes ago, you talk about baptism and the affirmation of faith, when a when a person is living a life that seems to be a contradiction of that affirmation, then excommunication is to say we’re going to treat you like you’re living, not like what you claim. And so you know that that baptism has been that doorway into membership in the congregation. Excommunication is the doorway operating on the other way out. And the Lord’s Supper, of course, has been the place where that is regularly publicly experienced. And so Protestants have especially emphasized someone’s invitation to the Lord’s table and or someone’s exclusion from the Lord that’s the word ex community. That’s where it comes from. And of course, that that’s a very old word. Protestants didn’t invent that, but they emphasize that, you know, it’s it’s in who you invite to the Lord’s table and who is excluded from the Lord’s table that we most readily see that final act of church discipline in its administration. There were controversies about that in Geneva with Calvin, because there were people that were living very openly immoral lives, and he would say to the elders, we these people need to be disciplined. They should not be invited to the Lord’s table. And so they, in many ways, they had the same struggles that we have today in figuring out how to do

Matt Smethurst
this. One of the things as we reflect on how how Christians have practiced this throughout the centuries, and how it’s often become practiced today, is is that it has been diluted, as you said in the 20th century, I think a desire for purity in the church, that historic desire for purity has been replaced by a desire for efficiency and a kind of pragmatism has crept in where we’re only thinking about what is going to Make this Christian experience as palatable and convenient as possible for the widest number of people, but that’s not the best way to actually love them, right? And so I think again, going back to establishing that plausibility structure with your people, you have to help them realize that, as I’ve said before, church membership is where it’s none of your business goes to die. If that doesn’t make sense to people, if they haven’t internalized that reality, then this whole idea of church discipline is just gonna is gonna feel mean and petty and unloving, but rightly understood, it’s one of God’s greatest gifts to us. It is in our sin.

Ligon Duncan
And I think your generation gets that more than mine. I’m, you know, I’m born maybe right on the end of the baby boom. And the style of ministry that was done in evangelical churches as I was growing up was attractional, and it was seeker sensitive. Business Models prevailed. And so you did have a an either witting or unwitting tendency to treat church members as customers or consumers. You don’t ever think about disciplining a customer or disciplining a consumer you’re trying to sell or to get exactly the customer in the consumer. And so having the shift that, no, no, we’re not customers or consumers. We are members of the Body of Christ. We are children of God, and whom the Lord loves, He disciplines. And so I loved that phrase you said, church discipline is where that’s none of your business goes to die. Is that what you just said? That’s so good. And so if I’m in God’s family, I’ve got some obligations. I’ve got some obligations of my family members. And there’s, there gonna be some ways that we’re gonna live together. Every household has that, right, you know? I can remember my father saying to me, son Duncan’s, don’t do that, you know? And that was part of his way of saying, these are the parameters of what it’s like to live in this household. And Jesus does that. He’s the king and head of his church, and he he sets the parameters of responsibility and accountability. And so the when the church administers churches, and we’re just trying to let King Jesus be the king and head of the church in the way that he is.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, let’s think about the offended party, the offender. Obviously, there’s various things that can, you know, lead to church judgment. I do want to say that not every sin is easily judged, you know, pride or right or greed. If that’s not expressing itself in stealing or, you know, being divisive, then it, it’s not likely going to become a matter of discipline. But we’re talking about sins that are outward serious. And unrepentant, yeah, and in a lot of cases, I, in my experience, it’s forsaking the assembly, right? Someone who just goes Mia and stops not only attending your church, but refuses to attend another church, and you’re you’re on record as a church saying, We think you belong to King Jesus. We’ve put the Jesus jersey on you, as it were. We have to go and just correct the record, as you said earlier, though, it doesn’t mean we’re we’re saying you cannot come to church, and it’s not a kind of physical exclusion, right? It’s just removing you from our membership as an act of discipline. But there’s actually no place we’d rather you be on the Lord’s day than with us worshiping under the sound of of the gospel. But as we think about situations that are that are often even even more tragic, where there may be adultery or a man leaving his wife, is there any note you’d want to sound in that? No, I want

Ligon Duncan
to sound the note you’ve already sounded in answer to that, and that is, you really need to build a culture of church discipline in your church before you have to deal with that kind of a situation. And what often let me just if I can be very candid in a lot of our churches, a lot of our churches have the attitude. We don’t do that here. So if you’re a pastor in a church where we don’t have you’ve got some work to do before you ever get to the point of addressing those kinds of hard cases. And a mutual friend of ours has, I think, very wisely, said, if we would simply discipline for non attendance, 90% of the hard problems that we would eventually face in church discipline would be taken care of. And by non attendance, you don’t, you don’t mean missing. You missed a Sunday. You’re out of here. No, a refusal to come to church. You know, you there’s, this isn’t a health problem. This isn’t, you know? This is you don’t come to you. You said you were going to come to church. It’s been a year you haven’t come to church. Every overture for you to come, you know. So if we would simply address very simple, basic things like that, it would help us in the hard stuff down the line. And so I do think you have to build a culture of discipline where that’s an expectation, where nobody, where maybe not, nobody, but most of the people in the church realize, okay, this is not an unloving thing. This is not because we secretly want to be the Spanish Inquisition. This is because we’re trying to help Christians live with the Lord. We’re trying to bear witness to Christ in our public testimony. We’re trying to bring glory to God in the way we live together. We’re trying to care about the souls of people that are tempted into sin. And so one you build a culture first, and that probably is if you’re in a church that doesn’t or hasn’t practiced this, you need to start with the leaders, because if they don’t buy in, let me just say if the if, if a pastor has a real conscience burden about this and the and his elders, don’t you’re up you are up the creek. Yeah, you got to start. You have got to get the leaders of the church to say, yeah, we’ve we’ve got to do this together. This is the right it’s biblical for us to do church government, our book, church order, our church covenant. They all specify that we should be doing this. We’re not doing this. Let’s figure out how to do it. Then I think Matt, the wisdom of the non attendance thing is, you, you make it known in the congregation that this is normal. This isn’t it’s not abnormal to do this. This is normal to do this. All of us ought to care about this, and that’s part of building the culture. And I think you were right to start there. Then you get to the hard cases, and you talked about the offender and the offended. Very often, these cases are going to have to do with marital issues, infidelity in marriage, or, you know, in the case of non married people, sexual promiscuity or some other kind of scandalous sin that’s at least known to a circle of people. And I think it’s, think it’s important for us to recognize that no matter how cut and dried a situation is, and I’m struck by how few cut and dried situations I’ve run into over the course of 35 years in public ministry. No matter how cut and dried things are, they’re going to be people because of relational connections with the offender or the offended that have their own perspective on how it ought to be handled. And so I just think you need to recognize that when you go into these cases, not everybody is going to agree, and part of your job is to make sure that what you are doing publicly is follows a process where people can see okay, they’re acting with integrity. In this process, you have to figure out how to do that well,

Matt Smethurst
in cases in particular where, say, a wife has been horrifically sinned against, whether through adultery or abuse or abandonment, and the leaders of the church are pursuing discipline, how can pastors ensure that that wife isn’t kind of left, left in the dust.

Ligon Duncan
Well, let me say very concrete. I’m thinking right now of a congregation that I have served where there was a an officer’s a wife and an officer, a church officer, and he had been unfaithful to her, and the the church was very responsive to her expression of concerns to the pastors about his behavior. They, they she was the one who revealed it to the pastors. They didn’t discover it themselves. And so she was, yeah, they took her seriously. And now, let me say, even then they followed an appropriate process, it could not happen fast enough from her perspective. You know, I mean, his name was on the bulletin as a church officer, as you can imagine, the very first Sunday that she goes back to church after talking with a pastor, it’s hard for her to look down there and see her husband’s name on the bulletin. So they did a great job of talking with with her, just making sure that she was not left all alone, making sure that there was a supportive friend group around her, making sure that there were elders as well as pastors checking on her. Because she had all kinds of practical decisions she had to make, financial decisions, housing decisions, children decisions. Because of this wasn’t her fault, but it was dumped into her lap. They did a good job with that, but it still was really hard for her to wait for the process to play itself out. I mean, that is just going to be the wheels of of God grind slowly, even in church discipline and and in the best of situations, these things take time, especially if you have a an offended party who makes the church aware of it, and then an offending party who admits it. That makes things quicker, but it rarely goes so often, there are excuses and there’s deflection and there’s avoidance and all of this kind of stuff, and that slows things down. And you do have to follow a process. And most of us have are in churches that and I hope if you don’t, you need to have it. You need to have processes that have to be followed. So if you’re a member of a PCA congregation, I’m a member of the Presbyterian Church in America, we are required to follow the steps in our church book of church order, and every congregation member can look at that process for himself or know what they have to do, and that’s good and so but no matter how well it’s done it, It takes time, and that can be hard for the person who’s been

Matt Smethurst
wounded. And it’s, it’s, it is going to be an uncomfortable and painful process, and that’s why, as pastors, when it comes to cases of church discipline, we need to be leading our churches in sorrow, right? They need to see that we are not relishing this. We are brokenhearted, but we’re doing it because we believe it’s what’s best for this straying person who professes Christ but may actually not know him, right? You mentioned earlier the idea of non attendance or forsaking the assembly. It occurs to me that Alex Duke has written a little booklet called, What should we do about members who won’t attend? Which is just a helpful Look at that. And then, of course, I referenced the work of Jonathan Lehman. He’s got that booklet, is it loving to practice church discipline? He has a short book called Understanding church discipline, and then slightly longer, but still short book, just titled church discipline. You know, if you’re coming from a Presbyterian context, not everything Jonathan says in terms of how things play out step by step are going to be the same, but I would imagine you would agree with the

Ligon Duncan
big difference will be in your setting. In mind is, ultimately, you’re going to need to vote from the congregation, right? And that’s it. Let me say, for as a Presbyterian, that’s a solemn thing for me to look at a whole congregation. Have to make that kind of just now, it’s usually informed by the work that the pastors and elders have done. You know, the pastors and elders are going to bring a recommendation, but that whole congregation has to decide, yes, where I’ve I’ve been able to be at membership meetings at Capitol Hill Baptist Church where that’s happened in the Presbyterian Church, the elders are going to bear a lot more of that burden, and then different churches will do it different ways in how the congregation is brought into that I can commend when Phil reichen, but Phil is now the president of Wheaton College, but when he was the pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church in. Philadelphia, I was there to preach for him on some occasion, and he said, Hey, before the service, I’m going to need to make an announcement about church discipline. And so he beautifully explained to the congregation one of these serious cases where a church member was excommunicated by the elders the congregation was brought in there, not by vote, but by being informed of the process that the elders had followed in discipline, and he was able to give some instruction on how we want to pray for this person who has been disciplined. We want that person to be in worship. We want them to have a relationship. Reach out. Reach out. Express your love and care. The elders will continue to do that, but we’ve done this for the glory of God, for the for the witness of the church and for the well being of this person. Is really well done. And it was sort of our Presbyterian version of what you have to do in a members meeting when you have to act on these things, so that that kind of transparency, use that word earlier, is that’s part of building a culture of discipline where the whole congregate. I mean, that’s always a sobering moment when you’re taking that last step or announcing that last step, and it makes everybody aware. Wow, they I mean, they really care about this. This really matters. This is not a game. This is a serious relationship that we’re in. And we vow our last vow of membership is that we will submit ourselves to the government and discipline of the church and practice its purity and peace. So that’s our last vow to one another. So just like in your church covenants, you make those kinds of commitments, we make that in our membership vows and church discipline is just playing that out right?

Matt Smethurst
Absolutely, it is a grave and serious matter that God would attach his name to churches of flawed, sinful men and women, and in the Bible, name is a very rich word. It has to do with his character and his reputation. Jesus has has entrusted his reputation in the world to those churches who bear his name. So may we be found faithful in the way we have led even when it’s difficult. We hope this episode of the everyday pastor has been helpful to you, hopefully, an encouragement, even as we’ve considered a very serious topic, if you found it useful, we would love for you to share it with a pastor friend. Also, if you could take a moment to leave us a review that helps to use a term that was told me boost discoverability. How’s that word? If you leave a review, it will boost discoverability, so that we can help other pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry. You.