Churches Cooperating in Discipline

Yes, autonomous local churches really can cooperate in church discipline. No, they typically don’t. But, yes, they should!

 

The first step my own church takes to cooperate with other churches in discipline is to ask everyone joining the church, have you ever been disciplined from a local church? If the person answers “yes,” more questions will follow, and possibly the pastors will reach out to the former church.  

 

Read Greg Wills’ book Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900, and you will discover that, once upon a time, it was harder for excommunicated individuals to float from church to church because pastors asked those kinds of questions. Yes, it is rarer today. But what if more and more church leaders—like you?—began doing that again? How might that affect the evangelical landscape? My guess is that it would deal a hard blow to nominal Christianity and that our witness to outsiders would improve.

 

If you are a Baptist or believer in a free-church polity generally, say it out loud with me: cooperate.

 

Here are three illustrations from my own church’s experience of cooperating with other churches in discipline:

 

1) In a membership interview, a woman admitted that she had been excommunicated from a church in another part of the country for non-attendance. She had stopped showing up, and the church faithfully excommunicated her (see Heb. 10:25). When pressed, she admitted that she had never reconciled with her past church, but that she wanted to. The elder conducting the interview therefore called her former pastor and asked about the situation. The former pastor said that, in light of the fact that she now lived in another part of the country, her repentance would be shown in joining our church. His congregation then formally and publicly expressed its forgiveness toward her, and she joined our church.   Continue at Jonathan Leeman