A Brief History of Church Discipline

Greg Wills is a professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this excerpt, he gives a brief summary overview of how church discipline has been practiced across church history, and what factors impacted its practice.

"From the apostolic era to the end of the fourth century, church discipline was a standard practice in the church, though not always practiced universally or consistently. From the fifth century the practice of church discipline diminished, and the practice of private confession and individual penance largely displaced it. During the Protestant Reformation there was a broad desire to recover the practice of apostolic church discipline, but those efforts were not always successful. Both the practice of infant baptism and the control of civil authorities over the affairs of the church made full recovery difficult. The Anabaptists were more successful because of their insistence on the separation of the civil and religious realms as well as their practice of regenerate church membership. Although Baptists maintained active church discipline from the seventeenth until the late nineteenth century, during the twentieth century it waned dramatically. Churches rarely opposed it in principle, but for a variety of reasons they lost their resolve to practice it."

-Greg Wills, Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline

Happy Halloween--Er--I Mean, Happy Reformation Day!

494 years ago today, a monk named Martin Luther started a revolution. Historian Kirsten Birkett explains:

"On [31 October 1517], Luther nailed his famous [95] theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Such complaints were not unusual or particularly offensive, as they were used as a basis for debate, and Luther intended no more than that. He had not counted on the fact that his complaint actually went to the heart of the existence of the church at all.  

Though it wasn't Luther's intention, this became the traditional date that marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

For a good and readable account of the Reformation, see Kirsten Birkett's The Essence of the Reformation. http://www.matthiasmedia.com/the-essence-of-the-reformation

Also, watch this four minute clip from the excellent 2003 film "Luther." The film depicts the famous standoff at the Diet of Worms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5P7QkHCfaI