Geoff Chang has offered a “primer” on church discipline on the 9 Marks website. He defines “Church Discipline” as
“the process by which members of a church guard one another from the deceitfulness of sin and uphold the truth of the gospel.”
He then goes on to recommend the following process, based on Matthew 18 as follows:
- Have a private conversation
- Take one or two others along
- Involve leaders or elders
- Give adequate notice to the one caught in sin
- Tell it to the church
- Remove the unrepentant person from church membership.
I’m nervous about going head to head with 9 Marks but that is one lousy bit of advice. “How can that be so?” I hear you ask “after all, the author has developed his process from Scripture.” Am I not only going head to head with 9 Marks but also with the Bible and Jesus himself?
Well I would suggest that I’m not going head to head with Jesus and the Bible and here is why. What Geoff has done, in my opinion has made two significant mistakes. The first is to start from the wrong place. He’s wanted to show us how to do church discipline and he knows that church discipline is to do with sin and that it sadly, often ends in a person being excommunicated, removed from membership and fellowship in the church. He’s then done something that most of us have probably done at some point. He’s found a Bible passage which talks about sin and talks about excommunication. It seems to have a process in it, so this, surely must be the church discipline process. Certainly, the end result is a form of church discipline but this doesn’t mean that Matthew 18 should be our starting point for church discipline.
Think about all the situations where this wouldn’t work. What do you do when someone is standing up and proclaiming false doctrine on a Sunday from the front? What do you do when they are caught in a public scandal? What do you do when they’ve been persistently attempting to split the church by encouraging division and discontent. Well, all of those things can happen, do happen and in fact, the New Testament does deal with them. And from what I can tell, it doesn’t insist that we follow a Matthew 18 process, certainly there’s nothing about private conversation or giving notice first. Rather, there is a swift and public response.
The second thing that he has done is to impose onto Matthew 18, his own process, reading a 21st century context onto the Bible passage. The result is of course that there are things he reads into the process that aren’t present at all in the text.
Matthew 18 isn’t attempting to set out a flow diagram for large 21st Century Western Churches in order to help them so due process when removing troublesome members. Its intention is certainly not to create a system to encourage and support private law disputes. Rather, Jesus, in the context of teaching on forgiveness, tells people how to sort things out when they’ve been offended or hurt by their brothers. It’s not about public sin in the church but rather about differences and fallings out. It’s aim is to correct those issues at heart. The aim is to get to repentance and forgiveness as quickly as possible with the minimum number of people involved as possible. It’s aim is to stop gossip and hearsay.
So the whole idea of Matthew 18, is that neither party really wants to be drawing in other people, getting the whole church involved, turning this into a public matter. The challenge at each stage should be “is it really this serious? Can we not sort it out between us now?” To create a clunky process of steps and appeals doesn’t help with that. Now, whilst the specific issue here is Church Discipline, I want to suggest that there are wider lessons to learn about how we handle Scripture. There are other contexts where we can find ourselves seeking to get an answer to our problem, landing in the wrong part of the Bible then seeking to impose our own context and processes onto what the Bible says. The big risk is that we fail to hear what God is really saying through his Word
Faithroots 