Pastor William B. Johnson addressed Elizabeth Jones, whom the church had just dismissed for habitual sin. He reminded her of the obligations she had taken upon herself when she claimed the name of Christ—and of her failure to meet these obligations. Though hers was an “awful censure,” his words were “enforced upon her heart & conscience with encouraging words to induce her to turn from the error of her ways to the Lord for mercy & pardon.”1

The setting was First Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, June 21, 1812. It was a day, unlike the present, when such actions were commonplace. Believing God would bless a pure church with revival and drawing on the counsel of both Jesus (Matt. 18:15-18) and Paul (1 Cor. 5:1-3), congregations conducted the business of church discipline with the utmost seriousness.

Baptist churches in the antebellum South dismissed almost two percent of their members every year.2 When a man joined the church, he also voluntarily placed himself under the authority of his brothers and sisters, knowing they would keep watch over his life and rebuke or even exclude him if the occasion required. Churches usually held their conferences (or business meetings) once a month, and much of their time was taken up with matters of discipline—reproving this brother, restoring that one, appointing a committee to investigate this matter, or hearing a report about that one. They focused on such behavior as drunkenness, adultery, and fighting—public sins which brought scandal on the name of Christ.

No one actually called for an end to church discipline or preached against it. Yet by the 1920s, it had all but disappeared. One Baptist pastor wrote in 1910, “Church discipline, it seems, must be reckoned as a thing of the past, belonging to the fossil remains of bygone ages.” Another lamented, “We have ceased to require our members to live, at least, a decent Christian life.”3 Urbanization was one cause, as people abandoned the accountability context of small-town America. Growing fascination with “efficient” and “progressive” methods of church growth was another.4

John L. Dagg once said, “When discipline leaves the church, Christ goes with it.”5 These are convicting words today, when the Church is being seduced by social correctness and reflexive tolerance. If she would reclaim her place as Christ’s herald on earth, she must first re-embrace her calling to be His spotless Bride.

Preventative medicine is much preferred to surgery, and so it is in the Church as well. “Formative discipline” is more desirable than “corrective discipline.” Far better to nurture the membership in holiness than to dismiss a member for unholiness. But a Church without the will to excommunicate is as flawed as a hospital without surgery. As painful as it might be, the people of God must be ready to apply the knife of expulsion as well as the balm of encouragement—if, that is, they aspire to be a New Testament Church.

Footnotes:
1
Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 43-44.

2
Ibid., 22.

3
Ibid., 116-117.

4
Ibid., 116-138.

5
John L. Dagg, A Treatise of Church Order (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1858), 274, quoted in Mark Dever, “The Noble Task: The Pastor as Preacher and Practitioner of the Marks of the Church,” in Polity, ed. Mark Dever (Washington, DC: Center for Church Reform, 2001), 15.

article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 W. Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD