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Jesus gave the church authority to exclude members who refuse to repent. Most evangelical churches never use it — and a few churches use it badly. Both failures matter.
Last updated: April 17, 2026
Churches should remove a member after private correction fails and unrepentant sin becomes public or scandalous, following Matthew 18's process of escalating confrontation. Removal aims at repentance, not punishment. Restoration occurs when the person genuinely repents, with the church welcoming them back through confession, accountability, and renewed fellowship.
Church discipline is one of the three marks of a true church — alongside the Word rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. Yet for most evangelical churches today, this third mark is effectively absent. The result, as generations of pastors and theologians have argued, is churches that cannot lovingly confront sin, that lack meaningful accountability, and that have reduced church membership to formality without consequences. Discipline, properly understood, is pastoral rather than punitive — the goal is restoration, not removal. But fear of lawsuits, confusion about grace, and the therapeutic culture have largely pushed discipline out of evangelical practice.
The theological foundation is Matthew 18: when a member sins and refuses to repent, the church has authority and responsibility to act. Yet evangelical churches face a genuine tension between robust accountability and pastoral sensitivity to trauma, mental illness, and complex relational failure. The articles here represent the most careful evangelical thinking on the subject — why discipline matters, what Scripture requires, how to do it well, and how to prevent the abuses that have harmed so many.
Virtually all serious evangelical ecclesiologists agree that church discipline is biblical. The debates are about its scope, its process, and its relationship to church authority. Two tensions define most of the controversy: how much authority does the church have over its members, and how do you balance the goal of restoration with the protection of the congregation?
The recovery of church discipline is one of the most significant developments in evangelical ecclesiology over the past two decades. The 9Marks movement, Mark Dever's Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, and Jonathan Leeman's extensive writing on the subject have moved discipline from the periphery of evangelical church life back toward its center — at least in the conversations of serious pastors. The challenge is moving it from conversation to practice in congregations shaped by consumerism, mobility, and therapeutic individualism.
The key insight that makes discipline intelligible is the connection between discipline and love. A church that never confronts sin is not a grace-filled community — it is an indifferent one. The elders who refuse to exercise discipline because they don't want to seem judgmental have not chosen love over law; they have chosen comfort over care. Church discipline, practiced well, is one of the most loving things a church can do for a member who is walking toward destruction.