We do not excommunicate the Christian who is not a member of our church for the same reason we don’t discipline children who do not belong to us.
There is a sense in which the Christian who will not join the local church has already excommunicated himself. Biblically speaking there is no such thing as a Christian who is not attached to a local body. And Christians who will not join a local church are very similar to believers who will not be baptized. They are disobedient to the law of God. Consequently they are left on their own with no protection or real fellowship in the body of Christ at all.
They might attend a local church and think they are members of the larger “body of Christ” because they believe in Christ and have been baptized. But by not affixing themselves to a local church they are in effect saying, “you (the local church I’m attending) don’t have any jurisdiction over me. I am my own man, doing my own thing. I’m happy to give money to you, sing in your choir, and such, but I’m not joining because I’m reserving my right to do what I want when I want in the way I want.
Not joining a church is an immature understanding of the Biblical principles of fellowship and accountability. This holds true for those churches that do not have membership at all. They don’t think they can “lock down” someone to their particular fellowship. But the Bible does not have that “feel.” The Bible says that we belong to the saints of a church and must be in the kind of fellowship where we can be held accountable for what we do. If a man who is not a member sins, there is no recourse that can take effect. The non-member simply says, you can’t excommunicate me, I’m not a member of your church anyway. I’m a floater. I float from church to church and you have no power over me. But a member can’t say that. He might visit other churches on occasion, but the church he is a member of has a particular kind of accountability over him. And a certain kind of responsibility toward him to care for his soul.
So, if a visitor sins, we can bar him from the table and we can warn him of his impending danger, but we cannot excommunicate him from the body of Christ. We can admonish him to repent and to believe in Christ. We can tell him that while he may be a Christian in the sense that he was baptized, there is nothing in his current lifestyle that makes us think he is saved. But we cannot remove him from the body of Christ because he isn’t actually a member of the body of Christ biblically speaking.
Monday, June 26, 2006
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3 comments:
I'm not sure I understand why he should be admitted to the table in the first place. I'm not talking about the person who's visiting, or the family that just moved to town, or the couple that finally withdrew their membership from the local PCUSA congregation last week, but the guy who's been bouncing from church to church in the area for 20 years, never committing and submitting himself anywhere. As you say, he has, in a sense, excommunicated himself. So why treat him as family, or even as an honored guest? Or, to put it another way, would you ever consider such stubbornness grounds to bar a non-member from the Table? I used to know someone like this, and it bugged me that there never seemed to be any deterrent to his behavior.
I would certainly admit such a person to the table if I thought his problem was immaturity rather than rebelliousness. If he was clearly rebellious, it is probably not the kind of rebellion that would warrant excommuncation. However, allowing him to partake of the Lord's Supper would be to allow him to eat and drink judgement on himself. His rebelliousness would soon show up in other areas of his life. He would then either repent or explode and we would discipline him for that rebeliousness, thus barring him from the table.
Thanks, Mr. Lawyer. It seems as if you are saying that although he couldn't be disciplined as a member, it's appropriate for a session to expect guests to abide by house rules, and to deal with particularly unruly visitors. Is that about right?
In this guy's case I think it was more than immaturity, but I don't think the elders at his church du jour (a PCA congregation where we were both involved in a singles group) considered that kind of discipline for someone who wasn't a member of the congregation.
What was ironic in this case was that I had a conflict with this fellow. I had lost my temper at him, and when I went back to apologize, he said to me that I shouldn't feel as if I couldn't take Communion. When I reported this back to the pastor who was helping mediate our situation, he about went through the roof, asking who this guy thought he was to be making such pronouncements about anybody's fitness for the Table.
Thus was I introduced to Reformed thinking about sacramentology! And the way that pastor (and two other TEs, and an RE, and a deacon) spent two or three years graciously trying to resolve that conflict between two people who weren't even members of their church was my introduction to presbyterian government. Definitely one of those "all things work together for good" experiences!
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