Church Discipline 3

Part 1 | Part 2

Thinking a lot about what the borders of church discipline should be -
especially when thinking about an organic, "blurred boundary" type
church community, like The Lab. Here are, I think, some of the key
questions we need to be asking about the boundaries of discipline or
accountability or whatever within an organic-shaped church community.

1. Does membership need to be more clearly defined?
A fairly standard response to this kind of problem would be to choose
to create a multi-tiered approach to church membership. I think that
this is the way the church has tended to work using "covenant
membership", electoral rolls etc. so that there is room for "visitors",
but the core church membership still has a way to "opt in" to church
discipline.

However, if we are searching for a bottom-up approach to discipline,
recognising that rather than coming under the umbrella of the church's
pastoral responsibility, we desire community members to engage in a
discipline process together, then this seems less useful. Also the
negative impact of creating a double standard for living ("if you were
still visiting us rather than being a covenant member then it would be
different but…") and beginning to create an us vs. them ethos don't
seem that great.

If our approach to discipline is going to be based on relationship
rather than structure, then the way in which we set the boundaries to
that discipline needs to be the same.

2. Can we trust the community to organise discipline itself?
It seems to me that there will almost always be one awkward person
who needs to pass judgement on the rest of the community, and cause
problems. So, is a more bottom-up approach to discipline simply an
opportunity for them to go wild and give everyone else hell? The
problem with this kind of judgement is that it is happens outside of a
close, valued relationship – and so if we take accountability or
discipline out of the context of relationship, we hit problems. So we
need to make sure we promote accountability alongside relationship -
the two words need to appear together within the same stream of
thought, rather than seperate.

Of course, on the other extreme is when there are members of the
community who don't manage to build those relationships where there can
be accountability. Is this where the leader needs to step in and nudge
the process along?

3. Is accountability enough or is there a place for firmer, more solid, discipline?
I'm thinking here along the lines of the Anabaptists use of "the
Ban" as a last resort method of discipline – asking members to leave
the community for a period of time to sort themselves out. My
understanding of this increased after our first bit of work on the
Alway estate – thinking about preserving the distinctiveness of the
Christian community as we take on mission. I began to think if there
would ever be a time when we would need to make use of "the ban" to
preserve our own distinctiveness when it came to work in the community
- asking someone to take a time-out if they were acting in a way which
would undermine that distinctiveness. Perhaps it is this missional
reasoning that caused the Anabaptists to use this method of discipline,
rather than from a sense of self-preservation or something else.

Is simple accountability, with an occasional "we're disappointed in
you" enough or does there need to be a more concrete "punishment"? Or
this simply because as the church we have tried to wimp out of a
confrontational edge to accountability in order to provide more
incentive for people to opt in?

4. Rather than a system of church discipline, how can we be
producing a culture or environment in which healthy, accountable,
disciplining relationships can occur?
The most obvious answer seems to be "small groups" – however whilst
I know these can be great and really positive, I wonder whether there
is a less systematic way in which we can create this kind of
environment? Some quick thoughts…

• Church involving less front-driven time and more time building
  relationships. If we are serious about relationships then should our
  main church meetings be more about getting to know the people around us
  and less about following whatever is happening from the front?
• Talk about it a lot. Think I mentioned this to do with building community here.
• "Be" community don't "do" it. Be dis-organised about small groups and social activities. Allow space for relationships to grow?

There's a quick update on my thinking so far this week anyway.
Continuing to take time to reflect on it all as time goes on so will
probably find myself blogging about it again sometime soon. Handed in
my fieldwork portfolio on Friday, so feeling quite relieved at the
moment. Have my end of term assignment due in two weeks, and then am
done for the summer. Finally feel like I'm getting there. Looking
forward to having time to catch up with reading and blog more before
the start of the new academic year in September.

Oh, finally, pray for the person who pinched my car radio aerial last
night that they enjoy making good use of it – slightly inconvenient,
luckily not too costly to replace though.

Church Discipline 2

Thinking a lot about this last post, especially after reading back over Kester Brewin's book
about organic models of church. I think I might be able to begin to
re-construct some ideas to do with discipline and accountability within
an "emerging" or organic model of church.

1. Discipline comes from the bottom-upwards.
The main reason that terms like "church discipline" seem to leave a bad
taste in my mouth is because they bring up images of discipline enforced
by authoritarian church leaders in order to control their
congregations. One of the main images of an emerging church community
which Kester mentions is a self-organising system – like a colony of
ants. If this model of church organises itself from the ground upwards,
then this is the direction that any discipline should be enforced from.

2. There should be some rule/structure to govern the process.
Organic means to lie in between the lines between order and chaos – to
tread as closely to the chaotic as possible, without the entire system
falling apart. There needs to be some rule which will hold the system
together – although I guess how loose this is will depend on the
volatility of each individual system itself. For the church community,
this means we need to have some kind of rule by which bottom-up
discipline and accountability can happen to avoid things like abuse of
power, trust and relationships.

3. Rather than structuring the system, the "rule" enforces equality and prevents the system from being abused.
At the moment, I have absolutely no idea how this will work
practically. In the modern world of the machine, equality was enforced
by regulating the way the entire system would work. In a post-modern
world, we need to explore some other way in which to maintain our
church discipline, but without controlling the whole system itself -
allowing room for self-organisation, discretion and relationship. Does
the rule need to be static, or is there some way in which to make it
dynamic – allowing for different outcomes in different circumstances?

4. Discipline (and accountability?) is a shared community responsibility, rather than a one-to-one individual task.
This is probably the idea I am most split on. But I think that with a
model of church which seeks to return to a communal, corporate
spirituality and away from individualism, discipline should also be a
corporate, community responsibility. This would mean a huge change in
the way that most church's structures of accountability work -
accountability becomes a groupwork exercise rather than about one or
two close friends. Group accountability does work – our student
guys have an awesome accountability group which I am part of – though
it does make the whole concept of confessing to each other more
daunting.

So, there's some starting points for re-construction. I've challenged
myself to write a positive, reconstructive post for each negative,
deconstructive one – it's often much easier to criticise than to
present an alternative. I'm quite excited to see this concept evolve as
I reflect on it more.

What do you think about accountability and church discipline? Do you
agree or disagree with me? That's what the comments form is there for
;-).

Church discipline?

Got five minutes and just been thinking through some stuff so thought I'd try and make a quick blog post – and possibly one which is slightly unexpected and a little surprising.

I blogged before about the Anabaptist movement – whom I've been exploring a little amongst some other radical models of doing Christian life. Their beliefs and radical model of being church together seems very similar to the kind of radical neo-monastic, organic, missional community that we'd like the Lab to be – except that one thing keeps coming up which I hadn't really thought about before – and that's church discipline.

It sounds like the Anabaptists were pretty tough on discipline – in particular using "the ban" to enforce their high standards of Christian living. They also rejected the idea of "clergy" and "laity", and promoted equality amongst members – so this wasn't some punishment from a totalitarian leadership figure, but instead the loving discipline of the whole community.

But with the organic, missional model of community being thrown around – discipline doesn't really seem to play any part. Our overwhelming value, at least for the Lab, is to love each other and the world around us, and to be forgiving and understanding of each other – but I'm beginning to wonder whether actually there needs to be something more than this.

Found this quote from a guy called Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician who in the mid-1900s advised parents not to discipline their children – saying this would produce more stable, better equipped human beings. Later on, before his death, he said this:

We have reared a generation of brats. Parents aren't firm enough with their children for fear of losing their love or incurring their resentment. This is a cruel deprivation that we professionals have imposed on mothers and fathers. Of course, we did it with the best of intentions. We didn't realize until it was too late how our know-it-all attitude was undermining the self assurance of parents.

And I wonder whether this is part of the problem with the way we do church today? We've produced a generation of church goers who are driven by consumerism and individuality – Christians who are fine with saying one thing and doing something completely different. Maybe it should be the job of the community to discipline one another? Is that what the modern idea of accountability is about, or do we need something more?

Should we be more willing to be firm with one another? And how would we achieve this without venturing into harsh judgementalism and gossip about one another's behaviour? Is the reason that we don't raise the bar this high because we are scared that the way we live will have to live up to it? Too far?

I'm definitely not coming out all in favour of high levels of church discipline – yet – but it's definitely something that needs to be thought through. How do we – through discipline or accountability structures or whatever – ensure we are spurring one another onward as Christian communities, rather than just allow ourselves to continue with a believe the right stuff, do what you like attitude to Christian living? Especially if we want to be a church which is understanding and embracing the broken world around us (Same-sex relationships, Abortion – all those subjects I don't really want to get stuck on…), yet which promotes a radical, distinctive Christian life. How do we deal with that paradox?

PS. feel free to comment and/or rate this post… I know there are some strange people out there who read my blog…