Jeremy M. Kimble. 40 Questions About Church Membership and Discipline. Kregel Academic, 2017. See here to purchase the book.
Jeremy M. Kimble has a Ph.D. from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and teaches theology at Cedarville College.
As the title indicates, this book is about church membership and
discipline. According to Kimble, the New Testament presumes that the
church consists of regenerate people who know one another and care about
each other’s spiritual lives. A person becomes a member of a church
through baptism and partakes of the Lord’s supper. If a member of the
church sins and is unrepentant about that sin, Kimble argues on the
basis of Matthew 18:15-18 and other biblical passages, church members
have a responsibility to confront the sinning member in a loving
manner. If the sinning member does not repent, then excommunication can
result.
People have questions about this scenario. Is a member required to
confront every single sin that a fellow member commits? If that is the
case, would not a person be confronting and confronted all of the time,
since everybody sins? When Jesus says that the excommunicated member is
to be treated by the church as a heathen and a tax collector (Matthew
18:17), what does that mean exactly? Does it mean that church members
should shun the excommunicated member? But did not Jesus reach out to
tax collectors? When Jesus says that the church’s decisions are bound
in heaven (Matthew 18:18), does that mean that God binds Godself to
follow the church’s fallible judgments? And does excommunication imply
the loss of salvation of the excommunicated person, or (since Kimble
seems to follow the Reformed tradition) that the unrepentant member may
not have been a genuine Christian at the outset?
Here are some thoughts:
A. The book is repetitive, but it is eloquent and thoughtful. An
asset to this book is that it discusses Christian approaches to church
discipline throughout church history, from the church fathers to the
twenty-first century.
B. The author could have been clearer about baptism. The book, as it
stands, can give one the impression that baptism initiates a person
into a local congregation. But what if a baptized Christian moves to
another area and wants to join another church? Does she need to be
baptized again? Kimble probably would not go that far, but he could
have been clearer about this.
C. Kimble recommends an article about legal issues surrounding
church discipline. I read the article that he recommended, as well as
other articles. Essentially, church discipline can bring legal charges
such as invasion of privacy and defamation, since the church is being
told about the sin of the unrepentant church member. The article Kimble
recommends seems to imply that a signed consent form should obviate
that problem. Some sites said, however, that a signed consent form
means nothing, once a person leaves the church. I am not a lawyer, so I
do not know which interpretation is more consistent with the law. I am
just saying that one may want to read more than the article that Kimble
recommends.
D. Kimble tries to be specific in his answers, and, in some cases,
he is helpful. On page 231, for example, he provides Scriptural
references about how members can address various struggles that other
members face. The book would have been helpful had it been more
specific, however. Case studies would have made this book better. Case
studies not only would have elucidated what sins require church
discipline and what church discipline looks like (questions that Kimble
addressed, but not with enough precision), but they could also show how
to avoid abuses that have come with church discipline. And the horror
stories are many! They could also address some of the thorny social
questions that accompany church discipline. On page 218, for instance,
Kimble says that “there are situations where lack of relationship or the
right circumstances make it unproductive to approach a brother about
sin,” but he did not elaborate or offer suggestions about what to do
about this. In the chapter about how to interact with the
excommunicated member, Kimble advised church members to exhort the
excommunicated member to repent if they see him or her at the grocery
store or the gas station. Really? Are those appropriate places to give
someone a mini-sermon?
E. In one chapter, Kimble discusses the procedure for allowing a
repentant excommunicated member back into the church. Kimble suggests
interviewing the member’s “friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and
other church members” to determine if the member has truly repented
(page 240). That sounded a little too FBI-ish to me.
F. Related to (E.), it seemed to me in reading this book that church
discipline is a push for outward conformity. You put people out of the
church, and, somehow, that is supposed to change people’s hearts.
Kimble denies that church discipline is about outward conformity, and
one can make a case that church discipline is designed to change a
person’s attitude. It can serve as a wake-up call that a sinful action
is serious. It can be a warning that God will judge unrepentant sin (as
Kimble argues). And being exposed to Satan and the world through
excommunication can destroy the flesh of the excommunicated member, a la
I Corinthians 5:5 (and Kimble interprets the destruction of the flesh
as the undermining of the sinful nature, which Paul often calls the
flesh). Another consideration that Kimble raises is that true believers
have the Holy Spirit, which influences them to hate sin and to love
righteousness. Church discipline still strikes me as pressuring a
person to conform outwardly by twisting his or her arm (not literally),
rather than producing a genuine conviction of sin and love of
righteousness. In my opinion, this is not necessarily wrong, for a
church should be able to set moral standards and boundaries for members
as well as maintain internal order.
G. In Matthew 16:19 and 18:18, Jesus affirms that what the disciples
(Peter in 16:19) bind and loose on earth will be bound and loose in
heaven. Kimble refers to scholar Daniel Wallace’s argument that we see
proleptic perfects in these verses: “will have been bound” and “will
have been loosed.” Kimble concludes on page 152 that Jesus “is not
stating that the church has the power to determine what will later be
decided in heaven,” but rather that “as the church functions on the
authority of Scripture, what it determines will have already been
determined in heaven.” That sounds reasonable: it is certainly better
than saying that God will honor an unfair, politically-motivated
excommunication and send the excommunicated person to hell! I am not
entirely convinced by the grammatical argument, though. I did a
BibleWorks search of Septuagint and New Testament passages in which a
verb in the future tense is followed by a perfect passive participle,
and the passages did not seem to concern something preceding something
else, or something already being the case. I am open to correction,
though.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher. My review is honest!