Church Discipline -- Part One

Scripture teaches church discipline. Those two words are not in the Bible together, church discipline, so how can someone say that church discipline itself is in the Bible? Those two words describe a doctrine, which is also a process in the New Testament, that God, the Lord Jesus Christ, gave to the church.

Most people that understand and believe in church discipline, either do or might think of Matthew 18:15-17 as the church discipline chapter, but they are not all there is. Several other places in the epistles teach church discipline, whole lengthy groups of verses and even a whole chapter (cf. 1 Corinthians 5).

Discipline in the English has the word disciple in it, even as it takes discipline to be a disciple of Christ. It means you are a learner, follower, pupil of His. Every believer is necessarily a disciple and, therefore, also disciplined.

In the concept of church discipline is a process that says that a church has some kind of authority, because it performs the discipline. It’s like in school when a teacher and then the principal would practice discipline. Parents do it too. It does mean the one practicing has the right or the authority to do it.

I don’t think most people respect the discipline of a church today or have it hardly occur to them, because, first, they don’t see it as real. Nothing is really happening, they don’t think, when a church or its leadership act in discipline. In a sense, this is where one could make the analogy of the inmate running the asylum.

Even though church discipline is true, people reverse what is happening, because in fact they see themselves as in authority over the church. They are the ones “who say so.” What happens will happen if the member or just attender says so. Of course, no family or any other entity could operate like this, but people still see the church on these terms, first, because of the reason that the church itself doesn’t matter as much as a person himself matters.