Fellowship You Don't Wanna Miss

When you think about church discipline there are two main tools that come to mind; rebuke & exclusion. Rebuke is sometimes necessary but basically works to point out the shortcomings of others. Not that anyone likes doing this, (well some do, but not many people like them) but when people choose to be held to a higher standard, rebuke is one of the first courses of action in addressing that person's mistake.

Exclusion, that sounds equally as legalistic. But as a higher level course of action, this is often described as 'putting one out of the fellowship'. When someone repeatedly messes up and does not respond to correction or rebuke ( are you still cringing when you hear that word? Me too), the next action is to NOT allow them to be apart of your fellowship. The idea here is that by missing out on what your group is doing they will decide on their own that they want to change.

Now there is some thinking behind this that believes it is right to exclude someone because a fellowship of believers in Jesus should be holy and set apart. So it is just 'right' to prune the bad branches to keep the whole tree from corruption. I'll give that some merit. But that should not be the focus of this type of discipline.

Is your fellowship something you don't want to miss out on? Think about it. If the relational temperature and draw of community were so great, then when you need to correct someone by exclusion they truly feel the loss of friendship, support, and community. Even the threat of missing out would be a preventative measure to those desiring to stay on the straight and narrow of this higher standard.

All this to say, "is your fellowship something that people don't want to miss out on?"

What would the church look like if we spent more time on creating that kind of community than righteousness of exclusion?