I Thought That Looked Familiar

I’ve been following a fair bit of online discussion about ‘spiritual abuse’ and leaving churches, a trek through the interwebs that took me to The Wartburg Watch 2024. The website looked eerily familiar and the writing tone and subject matter rang a distant bell, so I did a little research. Sure enough, a decade ago I wrote a post about the biblical roles of the sexes prompted by something John Piper said that TWW reported.

Since early 2009, Wartburg has documented and debated cases of spiritual abuse, theological fads, controlling pastors and other church issues, as their mission page declares.

Church Discipline and American Law

That’s neither a recommendation nor a diss. I have great respect for anybody who can mine an oddly specific vein of religious discussion for seventeen years without running out of things to say. What we do here is comparatively easy: the content of any given daily post may be almost anything we think may be of interest to evangelicals or Bible students. Still, I’m not sure I’d be keen on writing about such a relentlessly negative subject. I guess somebody has to keep a record of these things, if only as cautionary tales.

In any case, I’m indebted to Dee at TWW for this post (among others, like this one) on the subject of church discipline, which documents the legal right Americans have to leave a church whenever they wish, including while under spiritual discipline. I hope and fully expect never to need this information, and I would never sue any Christian or Christian organization anywhere for anything, for obvious biblical reasons.

The ‘Offense’ of Leaving a Church

Nevertheless, by odd coincidence, the post deals with an issue I encountered elsewhere this week, one I will readily admit I had never thought about for a single second of my entire life. Apparently, a very small minority of evangelical church leaders from time to time feel empowered to impart a little gift to sheep who have already declared they are departing the local fold, thank you very much. That gift is to tell them they will treat them as unbelievers.

Perhaps that’s an unusual application of Matthew 18, which documents how an individual is to deal with erring brothers and sisters, possibly conflated with 1 Corinthians 5, which documents six sins for which a church must excommunicate. In this interesting variation, one fellow says he was retroactively put out of his local church for daring to tell leadership he was leaving.

Hmm. Adding rape, murder or kidnapping to the list in 1 Corinthians 5 would not offend most Christians, but adding a polite goodbye letter seems a major stretch to me. How far beyond the words of scripture should we be willing to go?

He Said She Said

Let’s start by acknowledging that nobody’s online complaint gives us enough information to litigate the issues in question for ourselves even if we had spiritual standing to do so. It’s one side of a two-sided story, and we know what Solomon wrote about that. I cannot tell you how many times I have listened to the sad tales told by ‘spiritual abuse’ victims only to find out later there was an elephant in the room. Said ‘elephant’ was a reason the complainant felt it prudent to disclaim church membership. Invariably, it had little or nothing to do with the quality of local leadership and everything to do with his own deficient character. As I’m sure we have all experienced, those who seek sympathy from others find it easiest to get by leaving out relevant details that make them less sympathetic.

So we are not going to trash the elders who read this fellow out for how they handled his situation, as all we have to go on are his own comments about his treatment and the reasons therefor. Nor will we trash the departed without evidence of actual guilt.

Four Serious Considerations

However, the situation provides an opportunity to make a few general observations that may be worth thinking about:

• As detailed in the TWW post, legally speaking at least, church membership in the US is a voluntary act that anyone can cease from at will. Church leadership cannot discipline anyone who has ceased to be a member without risking legal reprisal. That doesn’t make discipline unbiblical in the case of, say, a man who commits adultery and quickly follows his public exposure with a letter to his elders declaring he’s “out of bounds”, like a kid invoking a questionable tag rule. It just means there’s a potential cost to doing what the apostle Paul told the Corinthians to do in the case of their sexually immoral fellow believer. Each group of elders will have to count the cost and work that out for themselves.
• The legal liability in such situations revolves around at least four issues: invasion of privacy, harassment, slander and libel. A 1984 Maryland jury awarded US$390,000 to a woman publicly accused of fornication after she had given notice of withdrawing her church membership. Those are not trivial numbers.
• “Church covenants”, implicit or in writing, are no legal protection from such a lawsuit. A signed contract acknowledging a congregant’s willingness to be subject to church discipline is worthless to the church in court from the minute there is evidence the “member” resigned. Bear in mind unbelievers will be primarily responsible for weighing that evidence.
• Behavior at risk of a tort claim includes any negative remark or statement about the departed from church staff or a recognized church leader, or any encouragement to shun them. Truth is a legal defense to both slander and libel charges, but it may not help in the case of harassment or invasion of privacy. Moreover, even in cases of slander and libel suits, the burden of proving the offender actually offended in the manner described is on the defendant church. When the offense happened in a bedroom or a bar without cellphone cameras rolling and the participants flatly deny it occurred, that may be a tough sell.

The legal risk will probably make most elders think twice before making public statements about straying sheep to the rest of the flock. Still, a few days or weeks of sober second thought about any particular case of discipline are not necessarily a bad thing.

Sober Second Thought

For one thing, if a former church “member” has already put their resignation in writing, I cannot see that much remains for church leadership to do other than continuing in prayer. You don’t need to deliver a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh when he has just done a headlong dive into the enemy’s hands. Any desire by leadership to get in a public “last word” is questionable at best.

For another, leaders need to carefully consider the time and place in which they make public announcements about discipline. An 11:00 a.m. Family Bible Hour is not the optimal venue for reading out a “former member”. Frankly, it never was. The biblical object of church discipline is to encourage the sinner to repent. Sharing his error with as many talkative neighborhood visitors, new converts, children and immature Christians as possible is profoundly unhelpful to that process. If fear of legal repercussions ends that dubious practice, it won’t be a bad thing. Discipline is a serious matter best left to a core group of godly, mature, committed fellow believers to discuss and pray about discreetly. Involving people tangentially connected with the church is not only foolish and risky, but biblically questionable.

Moreover, the spiritual effectiveness of church discipline has little to do with how passionately the elders make their case for exclusion to the flock or how many people obey the instruction not even to eat with such a person. It has to do with the agreement of as few as two godly servants of Christ concerned for the glory of the Lord’s name. The power behind that sort of sincere and biblical discipline is off the charts, and no court of law can overrule it.

That can as easily happen behind closed doors, where the law has nothing to say about it, as in front of a congregation.