Fatty Lumpkin
Puritan Board Freshman
Friends, another man in my church recently approached me with a view of church discipline that is novel to me. I’ve done some looking into historic church practice and can’t find reference to it, so I wanted to post it here and see if anyone is familiar with the idea.
What he’s proposing is essentially this: Excommunication should be seen as an extreme form of discipline that is reserved for only the most severe cases, and in normal practice the church should more often discipline unrepentant members with “exclusion”. “Exclusion” would involve the removal of an offending individual from the rolls of the particular congregation of which they are a member, but without any statement to the broader Christian community about whether the individual is to be regarded as converted or not. The offending member would not be regarded as an unbeliever, but simply as no longer a part of that specific body. The brother advocating this position grounds it primarily in 2Thessalonians 3:13-15.
Have you encountered anything like this? I have not, and have used the terms excommunication and exclusion almost interchangeably in the past. Is there some precedent for a view like this that I’m unaware of?
What he’s proposing is essentially this: Excommunication should be seen as an extreme form of discipline that is reserved for only the most severe cases, and in normal practice the church should more often discipline unrepentant members with “exclusion”. “Exclusion” would involve the removal of an offending individual from the rolls of the particular congregation of which they are a member, but without any statement to the broader Christian community about whether the individual is to be regarded as converted or not. The offending member would not be regarded as an unbeliever, but simply as no longer a part of that specific body. The brother advocating this position grounds it primarily in 2Thessalonians 3:13-15.
Have you encountered anything like this? I have not, and have used the terms excommunication and exclusion almost interchangeably in the past. Is there some precedent for a view like this that I’m unaware of?