When a church member left her husband and moved in with another man, pastor Aaron Menikoff thought about the couple’s two young children.
“I wanted to be able to one day tell these kids that we did everything we could to save their parents’ marriage,” said Menikoff, pastor of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Sandy Springs, Georgia.
So Mt. Vernon Baptist initiated the church discipline process. Leaders asked the woman to live out her Christian profession by returning to her husband. Eventually, they excluded her from church membership when she failed to repent.
Since that case more than 15 years ago, the church has disciplined between one and three members each year—with the congregation’s support.
Church discipline “isn’t something that has been thrust upon me by a board of directors,” Menikoff said. “This is a body of Christ living out the Christian life.”
Menikoff’s church is not alone. While formal church discipline remains relatively infrequent in the US, it’s making a comeback in some circles, where pastors emphasize membership and position discipline as a form of care and restoration.
Church discipline proponents often cite Matthew 18:15–17 as prescribing the practice. In that passage, Jesus established the process of confronting a sinning church member three times, then excluding the person from their local congregation if they fail to repent.
Nearly one in six US Protestant pastors says their church “formally disciplined” someone in the past year, according to a survey released this summer by Lifeway Research.
“Formally disciplined” signifies following a set process for dealing with sin rather than a “one-off rebuke,” Lifeway Research executive director Scott McConnell said. Though the findings remain statistically unchanged from a similar survey in 2017, some ecclesiology experts see a shift in how certain churches and members embrace discipline as a crucial aspect of membership.
“There has been a slow and slight growth of it, especially in Reformed circles, in the last couple of decades,” said Jonathan Leeman, president of 9Marks, a ministry that seeks to build healthy churches. While pastors and seminary students seemed defensive about church discipline in the 1990s and early 2000s, he said, now they have become more open to the idea and want guidance on how to carry it out.
Still, the prevailing lack of church discipline is a vast shift from the norms of American church life two centuries ago.
In the antebellum South, Baptists excommunicated nearly 2 percent of their church members annually, according to Democratic Religion, a study published by church historian Gregory Wills. If that percentage prevailed today, America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, would force out more than 250,000 church members each year.
That level of church discipline seems absurd to a church culture focused on attendance and budgets, Leeman said. Plus, many Christians are scared away from the practice by horror stories of abusive church discipline—including shunning the person being disciplined, disowning a child, and allowing a pastor to unilaterally excommunicate someone.
But the decline in biblical church discipline remains striking, Leeman said.
“It’s not as if anybody ever stood up and said we need to stop practicing church discipline,” he said. Rather, “the practice gradually faded away as pastors became more interested in other things such as increasing numbers or remaining financially solvent.”
Over decades studying the United Methodist Church, Mark Tooley has seen occasional church trials for clergy misconduct but never formal discipline for a layperson. That aligns with Lifeway’s survey, which found Methodists are the least likely to indicate their church has “official policies in place for disciplining members.”
Such dearth of church discipline is a far cry from John Wesley’s practice of removing from Methodist rosters “people who were not abiding by Methodist standards,” said Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an ecumenical think tank that advocates for the renewal of historic Christian doctrine in mainline denominations.
Christianity in the 21st century is “more consumerist,” he said. “We pick and choose our churches and move from church to church based on whether it meets our needs. No one is going to stick around for any potential disapproval, much less any disciplinary process.”
But can Christians in a consumeristic, attendance-focused culture learn to love church discipline again? Sam Ferguson says yes, and church discipline’s progress at the Anglican church he pastors in northern Virginia supports his claim.
“People respond well if it’s done initially in a very pastoral way, where there’s a good relationship and you are not immediately publicly embarrassing or shaming someone,” said Ferguson, rector of The Falls Church Anglican, a congregation of some 2,000 members located outside Washington, DC.
Three to four times a year, Falls Church Anglican starts the church discipline process, which they call pastoral discipline, with a member. That entails one of the pastors approaching a person with questions and concerns about their behavior—usually serious and persistent issues like marital unfaithfulness, refusal to follow the church’s directions in ministry, and chronic absenteeism from church.
The congregation’s team of pastors confirms any allegations, then confers about an appropriate course of action. After allowing time for repentance, pastors return to the sinning person with another call to repentance.
If the sinning persists, the church’s pastors collectively decide that the person is not a member in good standing and, in extreme cases, may not take Communion. They also provide the sinning member with guidelines for what it would take to restore their membership.
Few people have ended up being excluded from church membership at Falls Church Anglican during Ferguson’s pastoral tenure. Some members have been barred temporarily from communion, and some have simply left during the process of discipline and not returned. Church discipline observers say the latter scenario is relatively common in American congregations, especially those that begin practicing discipline without precedent or ample teaching on the topic.
Generally, Falls Church Anglican members have responded well to the initial steps of the discipline process. Also, if pastors ever hear reports of a crime or allegations involving harm to a minor, Ferguson said, the church contacts police immediately rather than only handling the situation internally.
Gaining buy-in for church discipline begins with explaining the meaning of church membership.
“If you become a member at our church, you can lead a small group, you can run for all kinds of leadership and volunteer roles, and you can vote for our vestry members, who have the authority to call the head pastor,” Ferguson said. “To do that, we expect things of you, both in terms of your theological affirmations and your way of life.”
Menikoff sounded a similar tone.
“When people hear that word ‘membership,’ what they think of is Costco or Sam’s Club or the Y—a manmade way to keep an account of who’s where. In reality, not only is membership a biblical word,”
Menikoff said, citing Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, “but it’s rooted in the covenant community which is visualized by baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”
Not just any sin triggers church discipline in most congregations. Historically, church discipline has addressed sins that are verifiable (rather than attitudes of the heart, like pride) and from which a church member refuses to turn after multiple warnings. To trigger church discipline, a sin also should be “significant,” Leeman said.
“Significant is subjective,” he said. “But we know from both Scripture and existentially that some matters of the law are weightier. There’s a difference between a man selfishly eating all the ice cream in the house and a man leaving his wife for another woman.”
If church discipline continues to rise, its ascent may confound secular critics who say it makes church members vulnerable to attack. Ironically, Menikoff has found it makes believers feel secure.
“After we did one of our church discipline cases, we had a fellowship meal,” he said. “A young mother came up to me and said, ‘Thank you so much. I want to thank the elders for leading us in this direction. I feel safe here.’”
Menikoff’s conclusion: “She felt safe being in a church that took sin seriously. She didn’t feel like we were going to be going after everybody.”
David Roach is a freelance reporter for CT and pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.
