Healthy Church, part 8 - Church Discipline

The next mark of a healthy church, according to Dever, is Biblical Church Disipline. This certainly follows after the biblical understanding of church membership.

There are a couple of key passages concerning what has come to be known as "church discipline": Matthew 18:15-20 and 1 Corinthians 5. Many of the Reformers in the 1500s declared that if a church did not practice church discipline, then it was not a true church.

Over the years, church discipline is something that has been used and abused by many churches rather than being exercised in the redemptive manner for which God designed it. Just because it has been abused by some does not make it null and void as a biblical practice of the church.

While discipline itself comes in two forms, formative and corrective, it usually the corrective form that generates the most attention and controversy. Does the church, the congregation of God’s people covenanted together, have the authority to correctively discipline someone who continues in a state of unrepentant sin?

Dever offers “five positive reasons for practicing corrective church discipline”: (p. 106)

1. It shows love for the good of the of the disciplined individual
2. It shows love for other Christians as they see the danger of sin
3. It shows love for the health of the church as a whole
4. It shows love for the corporate witness of the church and, therefore, non-Christians in the community
5. It shows love for the glory of God. Our holiness should reflect God’s holiness.

He closes this chapter with the following sentence: “It should mean something to be a member of the church, not for our pride’s sake, but for God’s name’s sake.”