Church Discipline: A Five-Week Class

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Where there is no order, there is no peace.

Most people hear the words “church discipline” and think of punishment, and they assume it is something elders do to other people. This five-week class, taught at Beverly Heights in the fall of 2026, sets out to replace that picture with the biblical one. Discipline, in Scripture, is education with force behind it: the whole work by which Christ forms his people into disciples. It is commanded by Christ, and it is the right and privilege of every member of the church, not a threat held over them.

The class follows Jay E. Adams’ Handbook of Church Discipline (Zondervan, 1986), a short book that remains the clearest treatment of the subject in print. We recommend buying it; it is about 120 pages, and these sessions will mean more with the book in hand. But each session below stands on its own, with the recording, a written summary, and questions for discussion.

The five sessions

1. What Is Church Discipline? Why a church teaches this at all, and getting the word back to its full width: discipline as education with teeth.
2. The School of Christ. The Great Commission as moral education, what it means to make Christians, ruling elders as judges, and why discipline must be swift, severe, and public.
3. Preventive and Corrective Discipline. Why most discipline is invisible, the map of the five steps, and two things you can use tomorrow.
4. Self-Discipline. The step before the steps, the God who is without passions, and sober-mindedness alongside self-control.
5. The Rest of the Way. Steps two through five of Matthew 18, what moves a case forward, and the restoration the whole process is for.

About the teacher

Rev. Dr. Nathanael Devlin is Senior Pastor of Beverly Heights Presbyterian Church in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a member church of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. He holds the M.Div. and D.Min. from Trinity Anglican Seminary (formerly Trinity School for Ministry), where he has also taught as an adjunct professor of pastoral theology.