What is excommunication?

Question 09056.

Biblical excommunication is the final step of church discipline, in which a congregation formally removes an unrepentant member from its fellowship and no longer treats that person as a believer in good standing. The word itself means to put out of communion, from the Latin behind our word koinonia, fellowship, and it carries centuries of baggage that has almost nothing to do with what the New Testament describes.

Say the word to most people and they picture a medieval bishop, candles snuffed out, a soul consigned to hell by ecclesiastical decree. That image has done enormous damage, and part of my task here is to separate it from what Scripture actually asks a church to do.

What Biblical Excommunication Actually Is

Strip away the history and the practice is simple. A member of a congregation is living in serious sin. He has been approached privately, then with witnesses, then before the whole church, and at every stage he has refused to repent. The congregation then declares that it can no longer regard him as a brother in good standing and removes him from membership and from the Lord’s table.

Jesus describes the result as treating him as a Gentile and a tax collector. That phrase is often read as harsher than it is. Jesus ate with tax collectors, and the Gentiles were the very people the church was sent to evangelise. The change is one of category rather than of affection: this person is now to be treated as someone outside the faith who needs the gospel, not as a brother who needs encouragement.

Biblical excommunication does not send anybody to hell. No church has that power and no church ever had it. What a congregation is doing is recognising publicly what a person’s conduct has already made evident, and declining to give false assurance to someone whose life contradicts his profession.

The Corinthian Case

1 Corinthians 5 is the clearest example we have. A man in the congregation was sleeping with his father’s wife, the situation was public, and the church was proud rather than grieving. Paul is appalled at both the sin and the complacency.

His instruction is to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. The language is severe, and the aim in the same sentence is his salvation. Paul also tells them not even to eat with such a one, which in that culture meant the withdrawal of ordinary social fellowship, not the pretence that the person does not exist.

Then comes the qualification everyone misses. Paul says he is not talking about the immoral of this world, since then you would need to leave the world altogether. He is talking about anyone who bears the name of brother. Biblical excommunication concerns those inside, and Paul explicitly declines to judge outsiders.

Who It Is For and Who It Is Not For

The New Testament cases involve serious, persistent, unrepented and usually public sin: sexual immorality, greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness, swindling in 1 Corinthians 5, disorderly idleness in 2 Thessalonians 3, divisiveness after repeated warning in Titus 3, and doctrinal shipwreck in 1 Timothy 1:20.

What never appears is a single case of somebody being put out for struggling. The believer who fights a besetting sin, falls, confesses and gets up again is not a candidate for anything except help. Repentance, however imperfect and however often repeated, stops the process every time.

Nor is biblical excommunication for those who disagree with the leadership, hold different views on secondary matters, or fail to meet a congregation’s cultural expectations. Where it has been used that way, and it has, it was misused, and saying so plainly is the only way to recover the practice honestly.

Why the Word Frightens People

The medieval church attached to excommunication a set of claims the New Testament never made: that it barred a person from the means of grace and therefore from salvation, that it could be imposed by an individual prelate, and that it carried civil consequences including loss of property and legal standing.

Under that system excommunication became a political weapon. Popes excommunicated kings. Bishops excommunicated inconvenient priests. The threat was used to enforce payment of dues. Whatever else that was, it was not biblical excommunication, and the Reformers had to argue their way back to the text against several centuries of accumulated practice.

Some modern groups have produced their own version, using formal exclusion to enforce loyalty to a leader and cutting off family members entirely. If that has been your experience of the word, I understand the reaction completely, and I am not asking you to defend anything of the kind.

How the Congregation Should Behave Afterwards

This is the practical question and the New Testament answers it with more nuance than people expect. 2 Thessalonians 3:15 says, do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother. Paul had just told them to keep away from the disorderly, and in the same breath he rules out treating the person as an opponent.

So the withdrawal is from fellowship as a believer, not from all human kindness. He is not welcome at the Lord’s table and he is not to be treated as though nothing has happened. He is entirely welcome to hear the word preached, and the congregation should want him there, since he is now someone who needs to hear the gospel.

Family relationships are not dissolved. A wife is still a wife, a son still a son. Any group that instructs relatives to cut off contact has gone far beyond anything Scripture says, and has usually done so to protect itself rather than the person.

The Way Back

Biblical excommunication is a door, not a wall, and the door opens from the inside the moment there is repentance. 2 Corinthians 2 shows the sequel: Paul tells the church that the punishment inflicted by the majority is enough, and urges them to forgive and comfort the man so that he is not overwhelmed by excessive sorrow, and to reaffirm their love for him.

He adds a reason that ought to sober any congregation. He says this is so that we would not be outwitted by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs. A church that refuses to receive a repentant person back has been played just as surely as a church that never disciplined anyone.

Restoration should be as public as the exclusion was, and it should be warm rather than probationary. If the congregation announced the removal, the congregation should hear the welcome.

Should Churches Still Do This?

Yes, carefully, rarely, and with grief. A congregation that never reaches this step is either extraordinarily blessed or is not looking. A congregation that reaches it often has something wrong with either its process or its leadership.

In practice, formal biblical excommunication is now rare partly because people simply leave. Someone under pastoral confrontation resigns membership and joins another church down the road, often without the second church ever knowing. That is a real weakness of the congregational system and I do not have a tidy answer to it, beyond ministers being willing to speak honestly to one another.

What I would say to any church considering it is this. Do not begin unless you have taught the congregation what you are doing and why, unless the leadership is united, and unless you have already decided what the way back will look like. My article on church discipline sets out the earlier steps that should come long before this one.

The Binding and Loosing Language

Jesus attaches a striking promise to the process. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Those words have carried enormous freight in church history, and they are the reason biblical excommunication came to feel like a supernatural sentence rather than a congregational decision.

The grammar is worth noticing. The construction points to heaven’s verdict standing behind the church’s action rather than heaven waiting to follow it. The congregation is not creating a spiritual reality; it is recognising and declaring one that already exists, in the same way that a church recognises a believer at baptism rather than making him one.

That reading takes the weight off the congregation without emptying the act of seriousness. A church acting rightly is acting with heaven’s authority behind it. A church acting wrongly, out of spite or self-protection, is not binding anything in heaven at all, whatever it announces. See Matthew 18:18, and read it alongside the sentence about two or three gathered in His name that follows immediately.

What It Says to the Person Concerned

It helps to ask what biblical excommunication is actually communicating to the person on the receiving end. It is not saying that God has finished with them. It is saying that the church can no longer offer the assurance that goes with being counted a believer, because the life on display and the profession made no longer agree.

That is a mercy rather than a cruelty, though it will not feel like one. The most dangerous position a person can occupy is settled confidence in a salvation they do not possess, and a congregation that keeps assuring such a person is doing them real harm. Paul’s language about handing someone over is severe precisely because he wants the person woken rather than comforted. See 1 Corinthians 11:32, where discipline from the Lord is described as the alternative to condemnation with the world.

So biblical excommunication says three things at once. Your conduct matters. We are no longer able to affirm what you claim. And the door stands open the moment you turn. A church that communicates the first two without the third has done half the job, and it is the wrong half. My article on when to leave a church deals with a related question from the other direction.

So, now what?

If you are in a church that has never mentioned this, do not campaign for it. Ask instead whether anyone in your fellowship is drifting into something serious and whether anybody has spoken to them. Biblical excommunication is the last step of a road, and almost all the real work happens in the first conversation, which any member can have.

And if you have been excluded from a fellowship, whether justly or unjustly, do not let the injury keep you from God. If it was just, the door is open the moment you turn. If it was unjust, He knows, and He is not bound by any congregation’s decision. Who could you talk to this week about finding your way back?

Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.

2 Thessalonians 3:15 (ESV)