In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul has some pretty strong words to say about how the church should manage its internal affairs. Writing in response to a sordid sex scandal, Paul says this:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people--not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with any who claim to be fellow believers but are sexually immoral or greedy, idolaters or slanderers, drunkards or swindlers. With such persons do not even eat. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. "Expel the wicked person from among you."

                                                                                                (1Co 5:9-13 TNIV)

We have to see this passage in context of course. In chapters 6 and 7, Paul goes on to explain how the church is a community of forgiven and sanctified sinners united in the body of Jesus Christ himself  - and especially forgiven sexual sinners. ‘That is what some of you were’, he famously insists.

What is at issue is the person who claims to be part of the body of Christ, but carries on with greedy or idolatrous or slanderous or a drunkard or deceitfully corrupt or sexually immoral behaviour. In that instance, we are called upon to make a judgement, and to take the decisive action of expulsion if necessary.

So, it seems that some form of church discipline is appropriate for the people of God. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion puts it this way:

                Article XXXIII: Of Excommunicated Persons, how they are to be avoided

                That person which by open denunciation of the Church is rightly cut off from the unity of the Church, and excommunicated, ought to be taken of the whole multitude of the faithful, as an Heathen and Publican, until he be openly reconciled by penance, and received into the Church by a Judge that hath authority thereunto.

Of course, a church disciplinary system could be open to abuse by those in power and used to oppress people or to enforce a kind of legalistic subservience to a powerful regime of conformity. It could be incredibly nitpicky and overscrupulous. In Calvin’s Geneva, the consistory courts (which were set up to judge ecclesiastical cases) seemed to promote what can only be described by the playground terminology of ‘dobbing’ on people for using bad language or skipping church on a Sunday. Not an edifying spectacle.

But on the other hand, the churches of our day have become notorious for their lack of church discipline in cases of alleged and even proven child abuse. Far from being too judgemental, it seems that we have not been judgemental enough. Paul is quite clear that it is not only for the good of the community (and the victim if there is one) that we should act. It is for the good of the unrepentant sinner that we should expel them, such that they are led to repentance and thus to salvation.

But how are we to go about this?

For the Baptist pastor Mark Dever - who names church discipline as one of his ‘nine marks of a healthy church’ – a formal system of church membership is the basis for its negative: church discipline. You have to be accepted ‘in’ by the local church eldership by proving to them your ‘in-ness’, which becomes the basis on which you might later be called ‘out’.

There’s much to commend this approach from a pragmatic point of view. At least every knows where they stand. But there is, I would suggest, a confusion here between the way the New Testament speaks of membership of the invisible church and membership of the visible church. That is, membership of the body of Christ is a prior, spiritual reality which may or may not be expressed by a formal and outward system of membership.

For example, when we have communion at church I do not admit to the table only those who are members of that particular local church. I invite anyone who calls on the name of the Lord to come forward. My assumption is that a person is ‘in’ if they say they are, until something happens to suggest otherwise. It is not for us to ‘make windows on men’s souls’, as Queen Elizabeth 1 once said. Likewise, we do not make people get re-baptised every time they change churches. As a symbol of membership, baptism points to inclusion in the invisible church and not to the visible local gathering.  

This becomes especially important in areas where formal membership may be impossible, or even dangerous. A pastor in Macedonia recently told me that it is very difficult to get people who attend church to sign up to formal membership because during the Communist era being a formal member of the church made you a target for government harassment. And yet membership of Christ and of one another is a deeper spiritual reality which they express constantly. The only list worth being on is held by the Lord Jesus.

However, when the public behaviour of a member of the church becomes a gross parody of the Christian life, Paul says that we need to judge it – however unpleasant this may be. And traditionally the most severe sanction a church can apply has been ‘excommunication’. The term ‘excommunication’ of course refers to the Lord’s Supper as the occasion for church discipline. Paul’s reference to ‘not even eating ‘ with the person to be so disciplined seems to apply rather well to the Supper, especially given what he goes on to say about the Supper in 1 Cor 11 and the danger of eating it inappropriately. If this meal is the symbol of our sharing in the death of Jesus and thus in one another, then banning someone from the Table is a powerful symbol of exclusion.

And yet, if the Supper is going to be effective as an instrument of the kind of discipline that Paul calls us to, we are going to have to think carefully about how we administer it. If, on the day we are having communion, the man who has his father’s wife (or equivalent) shows up and thinks he is going to share in it, what are you (the pastor) going to do? For example: if communion is being passed along the rows, it makes it very difficult to ‘fence the table’ doesn’t it?