Mark Dever is senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC, where he has been intentional about deepening the meaning of church membership and thus church discipline. He is the author of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Crossway - or more on these topics, see http://www.ninemarks.com). The Managing Editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, interviewed him last year.
MG: What is church discipline?
MD: When we talk about church discipline historically, we talk about formative church discipline and corrective church discipline. Formative discipline is all the teaching we do — the positive statements, the modelling, the instruction and sermons and Bible studies and books that we pass out.
Corrective church discipline is where we have to say: ‘Hey, Tom, I think you’re wrong there’. Or, ‘Sally, we need to switch groups because you’re being destructive to that person’. Or even, finally, according to Jesus’s teaching: ‘Mona, I know that you are claiming to be a Christian, but we’ve got to treat you like a non-Christian, because you won’t stop lying. We love you, but you may not take the Lord’s Supper because you are not following Jesus, as far as we can tell, and we beg you to repent’.
