A spineless body has trouble standing up for anything.
I was a sophomore in high school and going out for the football team. I will never forget the apprehension and excitement I felt as I walked into the room where everyone was going to meet. There was the smell of liniment and sweat, the sound of metal lockers slamming shut, the hiss of showers, and the sight of those gigantic seniors.
The varsity head coach had been a drill instructor in the Marine Corps. He had a thick neck and a crew cut. His voice was graveled from all the shouting he had done. He was a very successful coach.
All of us had been sitting in the room for a few minutes, doing all the things a bunch of nervous adolescents do when they are alone: laughing extra loud, trying to look cool, concealing our terror of the man who was about to walk into the room. In he came, followed by an entourage of assistants, trainers, and managers. He slammed his clipboard down on the table, scowled at all of us, and announced that he was going to talk to us about the “three D’s” of winning football: Desire, Dedication, and Discipline.
There was absolute silence as he took each of these words and told us what they must mean to us if we expected to play football on his team. When he got to the last D, he told us what had happened to the team the first year he coached. Football had been a failure up until then. But a number of very talented seniors were on the squad. When they heard his speech about the three D’s, he could tell they all thought it a bit amusing, especially the part about discipline. Discipline for him included no late nights during the week and no drinking alcoholic beverages.
The team was three games into the season and undefeated when he learned that all the seniors had gone to a party and gotten drunk after the game. He kicked every one of them off the team and moved sophomores and juniors into the starting line-up. They proceeded to lose every one of the remaining games that year. But the next year he had a team with discipline and experience. They finished second in the league. And from that year on, they were the team to beat.
When he finished his speech, at least one young man in that room knew he meant business and believed in the three D’s of winning football, especially the third. I still do.
What impressed me then, and still does, was the fact that discipline has its reasons. Up until that point, I had always regarded discipline as the rather masochistic exercise of giving up something. What I never understood was that what you give up, you give up for something. Discipline is positive, not just negative. You deny this in order to have that, which is of greater value. Or, as Richard Foster once put it, discipline is simply taking the necessary measures to get the necessary done.
Discipline in the church has its reasons too, most of which have become dangerously unclear to Christians today. Church discipline is on the wane in most circles, if not ignored outright, because of confusion concerning the nature of the church. This is not the only reason, but it is the chief reason.
The New Testament uses many metaphors to illumine the nature of the church, all of which are appropriate to the subject of discipline. But the most helpful of these is the kingdom of God. We all belong to one of two realms: the kingdom of the world or the kingdom of God. The kingdom of the world is ruled by the power of sin and the Devil. The kingdom of God is ruled by God. There can be no such thing as individual freedom, since every human being is bound to one or another of these groups. In the words of the song by Bob Dylan, no matter who you are, “You gotta serve somebody.” It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re still going to have to serve somebody.
The significance of this truth for discipline in the church is fundamental. It is unthinkable that the kingdom of God should tolerate within its fellowship unrepentant sin, open rebellion. That belongs to the kingdom of this world. So Paul, when ordering the church at Corinth to excommunicate one of its members, could describe the act as handing him “over to Satan.” Not to be in the church is not to be in the kingdom of God but rather in the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of the world.
Calling the church the kingdom of God also means that the church is ultimately a theocracy, not a democracy. It is ruled by a Lord. Not everyone has the same authority. In the church there can be but one authority, and that is the Lord. And there can be but one response from those in the church, and that is obedience. As fellow members, we have the right to expect of one another obedience to the Lord. There is a crisis in a church whenever the leaders are not willing to discipline members who are willfully and unrepentantly disobeying the Lord.
The major way we show our submission to the Lord is by showing our practical submission to one another. Paul says to the Ephesians, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” When the brilliant seventeenth-century scientist Blaise Pascal was converted to Jesus Christ, he had what we would term a powerful born-again experience. While it was happening, he wrote on a slip of paper his resolve to be a Christian by swearing “total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.” Such a statement sounds bizarre, if not heretical, to individualistic Western Christians. Pascal was a member of the Roman Catholic Jansenist sect. His “director” was the man the sect would place over him as his spiritual mentor.
I’ve often thought about that. Here is Blaise Pascal, the discoverer of barometric pressure, inventor of the calculator, writer of the incomparable Pensees, placing himself in submission to a spiritual director as a means of practical submission to Jesus Christ. There can be little doubt that Pascal’s director was his intellectual inferior. Nevertheless, he could not conceive of submission to the Lord without some kind of submission within the church itself. He knew better than we what it means to call Christ Lord. To belong to the Lord is to belong to his church and to submit to the discipline of his church.
So discipline has its reasons, and the most important is that because the church is what it is the expression of the kingdom of God-the church must exercise discipline in its fellowship.
I fear the church of Jesus Christ means too little to its members for it to discipline them-at least the church in modern North America. The chief reason for this devaluation is the individualism of most evangelicals. Martin Marty once remarked that the chief rival to the church today is not secularism, but “do-it-yourself religion.” This is religion in which the self becomes the measure of all things. It is a me-and-Jesus faith, strong on personal pronouns.
What would the people of your church do if you tried to discipline them for some persistent and insistent sin? The reactions I get to this proposal usually fall into one of two categories. Some threaten to drop out of church altogether, a version of “You can’t fire me-I quit.” Naturally, it carries the threat of withdrawing financial support from the church. Then there are others who would simply leave and go to another church. The church of Jesus Christ has been so splintered by sects and denominations that the situation is not unlike that of divorced parents, with the children playing one off against another. “So you won’t let me do what I want? Then I’ll just go and live with Daddy” i.e., another church.
Discipline is impossible when Christians adopt a consumer, filling-station attitude toward the church. Then the church becomes to religion what a tennis pro is to tennis instruction and a gardener is to gardening. If you do not like one person’s services, you can always hire somebody else. And today it is a buyer’s market. Is it possible to even discuss discipline meaningfully in such an environment?
The individualistic Christian was once described by Archbishop William Temple as the one who says, “I believe in one holy infallible Church, of which I regret to say that at the present time I am the only member.” The great British economist and Christian R. H. Tawney said that “the man who seeks God in isolation from his fellows is likely to find, not God, but the Devil, who will bear an embarrassing resemblance to himself.”
Much has been written about the crisis of leadership in the church. Not enough has been written about the crisis of “followership.” Attribute it to post-Watergate cynicism or whatever, but there is present in our churches an profound resistance to being led, and therefore to being disciplined. What happens when this is the case is that we get the kind of leaders we deserve: weak, indecisive, and confused-people we can identify with and manipulate rather than be challenged by. We would rather keep our options open and make our own individual needs and desires the final authority.
I began this article by suggesting that discipline is basically a positive endeavor. It is really no more than taking the measures necessary to get done what must get done. What must get done in our case is nothing less than the work of Jesus Christ, the work of the kingdom of God. Our ability to do this great work is hamstrung by our lack of discipline. And this stems from the most critical of issues: the very nature of the church. If the church cannot be the church, it cannot do the work of the church.
For most of my colleagues, the mere idea of disciplining a member of the church along the lines indicated in Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 is unthinkable. “It is just not done anymore,” I am told. The circular reasoning of that comment aside, they are probably nearly correct in what they say-nearly correct. The Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California was faced with an agonizing problem a few years ago. One of its very prominent and nationally known members had become an avowed and practicing homosexual. You’ve probably heard of him. His name is Lambert Dolphin, a brilliant and articulate physicist at the Stanford Research Institute.
Peninsula Bible Church did what is unthinkable. The leadership of the church set out to go through the steps outlined in the Scriptures and hopefully reclaim a member caught up in what seemed to be unrepentant sin. Lambert was finally put out of the church, “delivered over to Satan,” to use the words of the apostle Paul. Many members of the religious community in Palo Alto and Stanford University were outraged at what Peninsula Bible Church did. Dolphin himself went through a public and private hell. He nearly lost his life in the process. Pastor Ray Stedman tells the story in his new commentary on the Corinthian letters.
But one day Lambert Dolphin came back. In a letter sent to Stedman, to be read aloud before the congregation, he repented of his sin and thanked the church for its faithfulness to the Word of God in taking the steps it had with him. Looking back on that time, Dolphin feels the leaders of the church could have been more gentle with him in dealing with his sin, but nevertheless, still applauds them for their courage and determination to be obedient to God. “We both [Dolphin and the church] have grown a lot since that time,” he told me in a recent phone conversation.
The Bible says the kingdom of God consists not of talk but of power. Both Lambert Dolphin and the Peninsula Bible Church have witnessed in a dramatic way exactly what that means. My prayer is that my church and many more would have the same experience. “
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