Church Discipline

While reading 1 Corinthians 5 I see a clear explanation of how believers are to handle each other in instances of sin. Well, its not completely clear. But what is clear is that there is some responsibility to the community of believers to offer some serious discipline for each other in cases of, most likely, regular sin patterns.  There is the specific example of sexual immorality that is explained, but Paul also throws in a few other instances of sin. I don't think that the purpose of the list is to create a "newer law", just to give some examples.  

The main point here is that we are as a community to apply discipline to those that are regularly engaged in sin and still calling themselves a believer.  We are to put them out of the fellowship. Tell them they cannot identify themself as a believer if they are going to live that way.  This also brings up the question of eternal salvation, but I dont think that Paul was intending to address that issue either. The Hope here is that the individual will realize what they are missing in the community of believers on their own and come and repent.

 It is clear in other places in scripture that God is the only one who has the power to affect that anyways, not humans.  But we are to exclude these hypocritical believers from our fellowship.  But, that doesn't really happen, not with regular church goers. We definitely exclude pastors and other leaders when they sin, whether continuous or a one-time incident.  But I don't think I have ever heard of a "lay" person in a church being excluded form the fellowship.  

But how would that work anyways. If you tell them they can't come to your church tehy can just go to the church down the road. If you had a coalition of churches and they we excluded from all the churches in the area, they could easily just go a little further away to another church.  Either way if there was a coalition of churches excluding a person from church that would probably be horrible PR fr the church in that area. The News media would probably get wind of it and have a field day.    Its obviously a scriptural mandate to discipline believers, but if we as the church in the US today wish to truly attempt this we have a lot fo work to do.