Church discipline is something of an icky topic of conversation. Nobody enjoys it. And if you do enjoy it, you probably shouldn’t be in any kind of church leadership.
Nevertheless, if you are a follower of Jesus and a part of a local expression of his Church, then you are called to place yourself under the authority of that community. We all are. And the purpose of that is to keep each other accountable, preserve our witness, and maintain health and effectiveness.
But as you probably know, there are just about a million ways church discipline can go wrong—and has gone wrong. So we don’t want to minimize those stories. In fact, we want to discuss and diagnose those.
In this episode, we center our conversation on Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:15-20 and how they outline church discipline for us. We also share some personal stories of how we’ve seen discipline go well as well as poorly, and we offer our thoughts on how we can keep discipline from turning into a punitive abuse of power.
