Matthew 18:15-17, 1 Corinthians 5:2-5, Galatians 6:1
The Most Neglected Practice
If you attend most contemporary churches for years, you will never witness church discipline. The practice is almost entirely absent from mainstream evangelical life, dismissed as harsh, judgmental, or inappropriate to the current cultural climate.
Yet Jesus instituted it (Matthew 18:15-20), Paul commanded it (1 Corinthians 5), and the Reformers identified it as one of the marks of a true church.
The problem is not that church discipline has been tried and found wanting — it is that it has barely been tried.
What Church Discipline Is Not
Church discipline is not a punitive system designed to humiliate sinners. It is not gossip dressed up as accountability. It is not the church inserting itself into every aspect of members' private lives. And it is not something that can be properly exercised by a church without genuine pastoral relationships and genuine community.
What Church Discipline Is
Church discipline is the process of loving confrontation and accountability by which the church seeks to restore a member who is living in persistent, unrepentant sin. Its goal is always restoration, never punishment.
Jesus laid out the process in Matthew 18:15-17:
- Go privately to the person and point out the sin
- If they do not listen, take one or two witnesses
- If they still do not listen, bring it before the church
- If they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as an outsider
Paul adds the most severe form: exclusion from the community. "Let him who has done this be removed from among you." (1 Corinthians 5:2). The purpose is explicit: "so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord." (1 Corinthians 5:5). Even the most severe discipline is for the person's salvation, not their condemnation.
Why Discipline Is an Act of Love
A parent who never corrects a child does not love them. A doctor who ignores a patient's life-threatening condition out of desire to avoid discomfort is not being kind — they are being negligent.
A church that never confronts persistent, unrepentant sin in its members is similarly negligent. It allows the member to continue in a pattern that damages their soul, it allows the sin to affect the whole community ("a little leaven leavens the whole lump" — 1 Corinthians 5:6), and it fails to take seriously what Christ died to set people free from.
Discipline, exercised with patience, humility, and genuine love, is one of the most caring things a church can do.