1.21 blog

If you’ve been journeying with us through the last several weeks, you know that 1.21 Church is currently exploring what it is that makes us a church rather than just another religious or civic organization. A consistent refrain in my preaching during this time has been that as a church in the Reformed tradition we answer this by saying that the marks of a true church are: the word of God rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and discipline carried out. In our preaching we’ve been able to cover preaching and the sacraments, but not discipline. So for the next couple of posts we’re going to take a quick look at church discipline, the third mark of the church.

The first thing we ought to address is the fact that when we hear “church discipline” (or discipline in general) our primary thought is of punishment. Someone has messed up, and now we’re going to do something to them in order to show them that this was a bad thing to do. That’s not discipline. That’s retribution. And churches aren’t called to retribution. (God will take care of that when and if it’s appropriate) Now, sometimes discipline does involve correction after sin has occurred , but even that isn’t punishment (we’ll talk about that in the next post). Before we talk about that, though, we need to talk about discipline in general.

As Christians we are all called upon to be disciples of Jesus. And you’ll note discipline and disciple share a common etymology. That’s because the one is necessary for the other. Being a disciple isn’t something that comes to us naturally, in order for us to be disciples, we need to experience discipline. And that’s the primary reference when we talk about church discipline (or at least it should be). Through the church’s practices of prayer, preaching, and sacraments, we are formed into the kind of people we should be, but would not be on our own.

Through this sort of discipline we are trained, we learn what to do, what not to do, how to speak, how to think. As Stanley Hauerwas observes, we don’t have minds worth making up until they’ve been formed by the Bible, and the practices of the church. And so in that sense, everyone who belongs to a church is under that church’s discipline. We place ourselves under its authority, and basically say, “Okay, I’m asking you to look out for me and tell me what my life should look like.” I know that in our Liberal North American context we hate and distrust authority. But God says that we need it in our lives, and that one of the forms in which it should come to us is the church.

We need to be under the church’s authority, under its discipline because we need to be under Jesus’ authority. Apart from God ordained authority, we’re in a dangerous place spiritually (but we’ll talk more about that next time).

Are you under church discipline?

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger