Paul's Passing Thoughts

Ordinarily, I would think that the following fact is bizarre:  the vast majority of church discipline practiced today is unbiblical. But the fact of the matter is, as a former elder, I was on an elder body that practiced errant discipline. What we were doing had a semblance of  biblical correctness and the church had always done it that way – it’s an easy trap to fall into. In the Christian life, most assumptions (concerning truth not verified) are dangerous; you eventually learn that. However, my past error will serve to make my initial points.

Like everyone else, we used Matthew 18:15-20 as a schematic for church discipline. That was our first mistake. The passage has nothing to do with church discipline, it is clearly a procedure initiated by Christ to resolve conflict among Christians. But worse yet, we didn’t even use the wrong text the right way once we…