Is Church Discipline a Form of Love or a Contradiction of It?

Question 09089

To modern ears church discipline sounds like the opposite of love, which is why so few congregations practise it and so many members would leave if theirs began. The word carries associations of Puritan severity, public humiliation and religious control, and I understand the reaction even while I think it is mistaken.

The question deserves a real answer rather than a defensive one. Is this practice an expression of love or a contradiction of it? I want to argue that it is love, that the failure to practise it is the actual unkindness, and that most objections are aimed at abuses rather than at the thing itself.

What Church Discipline Actually Is

Start with the definition, because the word misleads. Church discipline in the New Testament is not punishment. It is the process by which a congregation seeks to recover a believer who is persisting in serious sin, moving from private appeal to wider involvement only as necessary, with restoration as the aim at every stage.

Jesus sets it out in Matthew 18:15-17. Go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens, you have gained your brother, and there the process stops. Only if he refuses do you take one or two others, and only then does it come to the church. Three of the four stages are private, and the whole thing is designed to end at the earliest possible point.

Notice the language of gaining rather than removing. The goal stated by Jesus is recovery of a person, not protection of an institution. Any practice of church discipline that has lost that aim has stopped being what He described.

The Case That It Is Loving

Consider the alternative honestly. A member of your congregation is destroying his marriage, or defrauding his employer, or drinking himself into an early grave. What does love do? Silence is comfortable for everyone except the person concerned, and it communicates that nobody cares enough to say anything.

Scripture connects discipline and love directly. The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives (Hebrews 12:6). Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline (Revelation 3:19). If God’s own dealings with His children include correction, then correction cannot be inherently unloving.

The parental analogy is Scripture’s own and it holds. A parent who never corrects a child is not more loving than one who does. He is either afraid of the child’s displeasure or insufficiently interested in the child’s future, and both are failures of love wearing a tolerant face.

Where the Objections Have Force

Now let me grant what should be granted. Church discipline has been genuinely abused. Congregations have used it to punish dissent, to enforce leaders’ preferences, and to silence people who asked awkward questions. Members have been disciplined for leaving a church, for questioning a budget, for marrying someone the leadership disliked.

That is not what Jesus described and it deserves the criticism it receives. The safeguards are clear enough in the text. It applies to serious, clear, unrepentant sin rather than to disagreement. It follows a defined process rather than the whim of a leader. The final stage belongs to the congregation rather than to an individual. And the aim is restoration throughout.

Where a church has ignored those safeguards, the answer is to recover the biblical practice rather than to abandon the practice altogether. We do not stop feeding people because somebody once served bad food.

What It Is Not For

It is worth being specific about the sins in view, because vagueness here does real harm. Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 5:11 concerns those who bear the name of brother and are guilty of sexual immorality, greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness or swindling. Serious, identifiable, and persisted in after appeal.

That excludes a great deal. It is not for the member who struggles and repents, which describes all of us. It is not for doubt, for depression, or for asking difficult questions. It is not for differing with the leadership about secondary doctrine. A congregation that cannot tell the difference between sin and inconvenience should not be attempting church discipline at all.

The Corinthian Case and Its Outcome

The clearest worked example runs across two letters. A man in the Corinthian church was living in open sexual sin and the congregation was proud of its tolerance. Paul is appalled, and tells them to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord (1 Corinthians 5:5).

The language is severe and the purpose is stated in the same sentence. So that his spirit may be saved. The severity is instrumental, aimed at bringing a man to his senses, and it worked. In the second letter Paul urges them to forgive and comfort him, and to reaffirm their love for him, lest he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow (2 Corinthians 2:7-8).

That is the whole shape of it. Serious action, taken reluctantly, followed by warm restoration the moment there is repentance. A church that can do the first part and not the second has misunderstood the exercise.

The Kindness of Clarity

There is another dimension that is rarely mentioned. When a congregation practises church discipline, it is telling its members the truth about the seriousness of sin and the reality of judgement. When it does not, it is quietly teaching that these things do not much matter.

Consider the person living in unrepentant sin who continues in membership, takes the Lord’s Supper, and receives the assurance of the congregation that all is well. If their profession is false, the church has helped them towards a terrible discovery on the last day. 1 Corinthians 11:28-29 warns against eating and drinking without discerning the body. Allowing that to continue is not kindness; it is a failure of nerve dressed as compassion.

How to Do It Without Cruelty

Practically, several things keep the process humane. Go slowly. Most cases should never leave the first stage, and a congregation in a hurry to reach the final one has the wrong instincts. Involve the fewest people necessary. Speak to the person rather than about them. Pray more than you discuss.

Keep the door visibly open. Make it plain at every stage what repentance would look like and how gladly it would be received. And handle the public stage with gravity rather than drama, briefly and without detail, with a clear call to prayer for the person concerned.

One more thing. The people conducting church discipline should be conscious that they are sinners doing it, which Paul says explicitly in Galatians 6:1. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Nothing protects a process from cruelty like that awareness.

A Church Worth Belonging To

I would put the final argument like this. Would you rather belong to a body that would let you destroy yourself without a word, or to one that loved you enough to come after you? Most people, asked in the abstract, choose the first. Most people who have actually been pursued and recovered choose the second, and say so with tears.

That is why I regard church discipline as one of the marks of a genuine church rather than an unfortunate historical relic. It is what a body does when a member is injured. The alternative is not a gentler church. It is a body that has stopped noticing when its own parts are dying.

So, now what?

If you are in a congregation that has never practised this, do not begin with the difficult case. Begin with teaching, and with a membership that knows what it has committed to, because church discipline without prior understanding will simply feel like an ambush.

If you lead, resolve now that you will never begin this process in anger, and never delegate the difficult conversation to somebody who was not involved. The manner of church discipline preaches as loudly as the fact of it, and people remember the manner long after they have forgotten the details.

If you have been on the receiving end of an abusive version of it, I am sorry. What was done to you was not what Jesus described, and it is worth reading Matthew 18:15-17 for yourself to see how far the abuse departed from it. It may help to read what church discipline is and what excommunication actually means.

And ask the personal question. If you were drifting into something destructive, who in your church loves you enough to come and say so?

Love that never says anything difficult is not the higher love. It is simply the easier one, and it costs the person you claim to care about far more than it costs you.

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.

Matthew 18:15 (ESV)