Session One: What Is Church Discipline?

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Taught September 13, 2026. Reading: Adams, chapter 1.

Summary

Why teach a class on church discipline at all? Three reasons. It is a significant biblical principle. In all my years at Beverly Heights we have never taught it. And our own recent experience of disorder has shown us what its absence costs. I came up in a charismatic setting where there was no order and discipline was not maintained, and chaos is not conducive to Christian formation. Paul’s conclusion to a whole chapter about spiritual gifts is “all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40); the remedy for disorder is not less Spirit but more order. The modern wish is for peace without the necessity of constraint, and that wish is the sentence this whole class answers. Our Bylaws charge the pastor to instruct the officers and the congregation in the use of discipline, and this class is that charge being kept.

Our text is Jay E. Adams’ Handbook of Church Discipline. Adams was a classicist by training, with a doctorate in speech, whose first pastorate was in Eighty-Four, Pennsylvania, half an hour south of here. He taught at Westminster Theological Seminary, founded the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation, and wrote more than a hundred books. His subtitle is his argument: discipline is “a right and privilege of every church member.” Our own constitution says the same thing. Bylaws 3.2 declares that all members “are entitled to and subject to the benefits of discipline.” Both halves matter. Every member has a claim on discipline and a liability under it.

The first task is to get the word back to full width, or rather to rehabilitate it. We have narrowed “discipline” until it means only punishment, and then recoiled from it. But disciple and discipline share a Latin root tied to education. Education is the positive expression of discipline; punishment is the negative expression, the consequence of an offense. Both are discipline, and we have collapsed the word into the second. Adams calls biblical education “education with teeth,” education that sees to it that the job gets done. American education informs. Biblical education forms, and it follows through.

Hebrews 12 is the proof text, and the word there is paideia, the whole work of rearing and training a child. Notice the inversion of our instinct in verse 8: the absence of discipline is not kindness, it is evidence that you are not being treated as a son. And notice the order in verse 11: painful now, peaceful later. Discipline functions in the educational process so as to produce righteousness as a fruit, which when you bite into it tastes like peace. Nobody gets the flavor who refused the tree.

That gives us the chain of dependence that runs through the whole class. Where there is no discipline, there is no order. Where there is no order, there is no peace. Where there is no peace, there is no learning. Remove the first link and the last one is gone, which is why Adams can define discipline as, “at its heart and core, good order,” and why a class on discipline is really a class on Christian formation.

A paideia is an enculturation, an education in an entire way of life. Start the Pledge of Allegiance in a room of Americans and they will finish it without being asked, because they were habituated to it over years. That is a paideia. There is an American one and there is a Christian one, and God wants his people trained, educated, and nurtured in a distinctly Christian way of being, not merely informed. Discipline, as one member put it, is the Second Amendment of the church: order with teeth in it, the way Romans 13 says the magistrate does not bear the sword in vain. And it runs along a continuum. When you are a child, discipline comes from outside; the point of it is that you grow into a person who enjoys self-discipline. Discipline begins with me, and when it is going well in me, the far end of the continuum is rarely needed. The school of Christ waited for the following Sunday.

Key texts: 1 Corinthians 14:26-40; Hebrews 12:5-11; Romans 13:1-4; Galatians 5:22-23.

For discussion

• When you first heard this class was on church discipline, what did you assume it was about?
• If discipline is a right, what has a member of a church that does not practice it actually lost?
• Where in our life together do you already see discipline doing its positive work, the kind that never looks like discipline?

Go deeper: Jay E. Adams, Handbook of Church Discipline, chapter 1. Buy the book