Church discipline’s dirty secret: Power and control

For years now, I’ve considered it a major red flag to find the presence of a church discipline policy in a church. These policies grant church leaders enormous, unchecked power over congregants—who don’t realize how that power may be misused until they themselves are caught in its crosshairs. Usually, the problems of church discipline center on that misuse, which we saw aplenty in the Gracepoint Church scandal. But now, evangelicals themselves have revealed another glaring issue with these policies: Exactly who faces their control-grabs, and when.

Today, we’ll check out this new reveal and explore what it means for churches with church discipline policies. And then, we’ll explore why this new reveal should warn evangelicals to stay far, far away from anyone pushing it.

(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 7/1/2025. They’re both available now!)

SITUATION REPORT: The beating heart of church discipline will always be power dynamics

On June 24, Lifeway Research published a new survey about church discipline. In a nutshell, church discipline policies outline various ways that church leaders can compel and forbid various behaviors in their flocks—and punish those who disobey. Generally speaking, religious leaders bring church discipline against those flagrantly breaking the church’s behavioral rules—especially if these rulebreakers serve the church in some capacity.

(You’ll also see quickly that almost all church discipline cases appear to involve off-limits sex. Weird!)

Unsurprisingly, they found that mainline Protestant pastors rarely discipline anybody compared to evangelical pastors. Seventy percent of mainline pastors reported no discipline at all at their church, versus 47% of evangelical pastors.

As well, Lifeway found that the churches administering church discipline don’t have a consistent way of doing it. Some have pastors alone administering it; others have elders doing so. Still others have a council, trustees, deacons, or even the entire church doing so. And 14% lack church discipline policies entirely.

When we look to Lifeway’s full report on their official site, we also learn that only 16% of responding Protestant churches had “formally disciplined” anybody within the past year. And very small churches (<50 attending) were far more likely to have no disciplinary policies than churches with over 100 attendees: 19% vs 9%.

Further, it seems like churches have been administering slightly more discipline in recent years—and are less likely nowadays to require agreement than they were in 2017. About a third of churches in 2024 require agreement between “two or more of these groups” before administering it. But 51% required it in 2017.

What’s going on in this study and what it shows about the earliest Christians as well as today’s

Scott McConnell, the executive director of Lifeway Research, warns readers that this strange lack of applied church discipline isn’t due to people miraculously just not sinning—as if he had to say that.

Even in the New Testament, we see constant hints of habitual hypocrisy among the earliest Christians. Obviously, all Christians break their religion’s rules at some point. Most break even the most important rules, and they do it constantly. Believing in Jesus doesn’t make them stop breaking rules. Perhaps that is why so many of the letters in the New Testament sound so frustrated. If these are the ones that survived long enough to be canonical, one hesitates to imagine the ones that did not.

Many churches base their church discipline ideas on Matthew 18:15-18. Church discipline advocates also point to 1 Corinthians 5 as their inspiration. These same verses also give church-based abusers a lot of room to hunt for prey, because true justice demands that discipline-givers be good-faith actors—but there is no way for Christians to detect or reject someone who isn’t.

But most churches don’t hold people fully accountable for their rulebreaking. And there might be a few very simple explanations about why.

Church Discipline Problem #1: The money and free-labor angle

In every church, most attendees do nothing whatsoever but warm pews occasionally. A very small percentage of members volunteer to do the myriad tasks churches need every week. These people are the backbone of the church.

Also in every church, most attendees tithe little to nothing. The church survives through the largesse of a small number of congregants. And yes, both they and the pastor know that without these faithful donations, the church would not survive for long. These generous donors are the blood flowing through the veins of the church.

Perhaps that’s why churches with fewer than 50 attendees were less likely than larger ones to have policies in place for church discipline. No effective church leader wants to antagonize either group. Not only would the wrongdoers themselves possibly stop affiliating with the church (and withdrawing their money and labor as well, of course), but their friends might do the same out of solidarity. A church can be ripped apart by a single poorly-considered church discipline decision.

Even if the person leaving didn’t give much money or do any volunteer work, every departure makes it that much harder for the rest to stay.

Churches are like social-media sites in that way. According to Megan McArdle, BlueSky is having that exact problem now. With fewer people to bounce around each other, the site is seeing dwindling engagement. Congregations work the same way. Pastors might not enjoy thinking that people join more for the environment and personal connection to existing members than their preaching and doctrinal stances, but it’s the truth in so many cases.

Art imitates life: This Present Darkness edition

Back in 2019, we mega-reviewed This Present Darkness. It’s a best-selling 1986 novel by Frank Peretti that explores how angels and demons fight against each other through the use of prayer, magic, and carefully-chosen pawns on Earth. One of its major plot points centers on church discipline.

Hank Busche is the earnest, TRUE CHRISTIAN™ rookie pastor of a very small church in a college town. In fact, he’s not the pastor the hiring committee thought it’d hired, but apparently they decided to let him stay. Very quickly, though, they regretted that decision. He’s just too earnestly Christian for their taste.

They’re particularly displeased with him Matthew 18-ing a known adulterer in the congregation, Lou Stanley. Stanley is part of a demon-backed group of villains I nicknamed the Cabal of Satanic Wiccans (or Wiccan Satanists, Whatevs) (CSWWSW). Well before the book begins, this secretive group infiltrated Busche’s church as part of the demons’ plot to destroy TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ in that town. By the time of the book’s plot, the CSWWSW makes up about half the church. They are also its most locally-powerful members.

Busche kicks Stanley out of church. At their big meeting in the book, the church must decide whether or not to keep Busche as their pastor. If Busche stays, Stanley remains barred from membership. If they fire Busche, they can hire a new pastor who’ll allow Stanley to resume attendance.

This subplot is, hands down, the most realistic, truly heartfelt part of the book. And there’s a reason for that. The author turns out to be not only a pastor’s kid (PK), but also a failed pastor himself. It’s hard not to think that Peretti saw something similar happen to his father—or even experienced it himself. Hank Busche is very clearly Peretti’s self-insert, with the squabble’s outcome in the book being the one our author wished had happened in real life.

Indeed, a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ pastor would likely feel intensely frustrated by a hypocrite in the pews. No doubt such a pastor would wish he could force that person to behave. But few would dare to do what Busche did. Fewer still would survive the experience with their job intact. Peretti knows it all too well, and so, I think, do pastors in general.

Church Discipline Problem #2: The power dynamics in play

Beyond the simple metrics of numbers and dollars, church discipline reveals a church’s power dynamics like little else ever could. How reprimands and demands flow between church members and leaders tells us so much about how safe that church is. Church leaders may hold titles, but they may be far less powerful than individual members. (Any new pastor figures this truth out in their first tangle with the white-haired leader of the decoration committee!)

So unsurprisingly, we see in Lifeway’s research paper (relink) the lines of power at play here. Here are the demographics of church leaders who are way more into church discipline than their counterparts:

• Male pastors
• Less-educated pastors
• White pastors
• Younger pastors and elderly ones
• Southern pastors
• Evangelical pastors
• Pastors of larger churches

So how a church’s leadership team approaches a Lou Stanley situation pits the discipline-ee’s power against that of the discipline-ers. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of how macaque monkeys “kidnap” the infants of lower-ranking females. These incidents reinforce both monkeys’ rank within the troop. If the mothers try too hard to get their infants back, they face the troop’s vicious retaliation and even potential mortal injury to the infant.

Evangelical churches in particular are dysfunctionally authoritarian in nature, making them very similar to troops like these. In evangelicalism as in monkeys, power is nothing if it is not flexed. So church discipline, like infant kidnapping, serves an important purpose in keeping the hierarchy intact.

In these systems, as well, power doesn’t flow downward from the leader on the basis of skill or merit. Instead, it flows according to the leader’s favor. So lower-ranking leaders will always protect the higher-ranking one above all else. Their rank depends on that one leader’s hold on power.

That’s why it’s such an absolute disaster for churches when even one bad-faith actor gets into a leadership role there. Within short order, every person currying favor with that leader will implicitly accept whatever hypocrisy they see. That’s why we see big names in evangelicalism falling to scandals all the time these days. The higher-ranking the leaders, the more hypocrisy they can safely commit.

Why this church discipline headline is important

This survey is very important in the context of evangelicalism because Lifeway isn’t just some random for-profit survey house like Barna Group. It’s also owned by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which became extremely conservative during a schism in the 1980s-1990s. That schism, now called the Conservative Resurgence, happened because Southern Baptists became enamored of a childish, over-simplistic interpretation of the Bible called literalism.

This interpretation was the product of evangelicals who bought into Calvinist/Reformed Theology. (Just FYI, I shorthand the two as just “Calvinism.” Yes, there are some differences between the two, but they’re not important for our purposes.)

The Calvinists who sold the SBC schism’s leaders on literalism always intended to use it as a stepping-stone toward getting church discipline into all SBC churches. They were enormously disappointed when the SBC used it only to outlaw female pastors and refused to make church discipline policies mandatory for SBC churches. It’s no accident that Wartburg Watch has noted that when they get requests for help leaving churches, the churches in question tend to be “Reformed Southern Baptist and PCA churches.”

(Please note that the PCA, or Presbyterian Churches of America, is a hardline evangelical denomination that is completely separate from PC(USA), which tends to be progressive and liberal.)

In 2011, Peter Lumpkins brought us a quote from Tom Ascol, now a very big name in the SBC’s hardliner faction:

The conservatives have been in charge now for a couple of decades and our convention is no better off on basic issues than when the liberals were running things.  That’s because inerrancy isn’t enough.  We have to actually understand and apply what the Bible says.  The conservatives thump the Bible but are unwilling to just obey the Bible in the most basic ways.  How can you be an inerrantist and not practice [church discipline according to] Matthew 18?  You might as well be a liberal.  What difference does it make?

Tom Ascol ran for SBC president in 2022, so we know his ideas are still widely accepted by his faction.

So yes, evangelical hardliners want to see more church discipline, and they want to see it in all evangelical churches under their control. Even though even they have no way whatsoever of ensuring good-faith acting on anyone’s part, they’re sure Jesus will make it all work just fine.

Their chief error will always be assuming that if something has enough Bible verses propping it up, then that’s the way Jesus wants them to do it. If someone gets seriously hurt or wrongly accused through church discipline, as elderly Nan Hawkes was in 2012, they’ll always have a way to disqualify that situation from consideration.

The thorn in these extremists’ side will always be civil liberties and human rights

As I said, church-discipline-liking pastors know that congregants have one power that they cannot remove: they can exercise their freedom of assembly and just leave. Church membership can never be mandatory. That’s a major problem for church discipline. Church leaders can’t just force someone to sit there and take whatever they’re considering discipline.

So these pastors desperately want to pare away that right.

All the way back in 2010, a Calvinist pastor, Jonathan Leeman, wrote a post for 9Marks (a hardline Calvinist pastors’ resource group) about this very issue. He decided that anyone resigning during church discipline committed a mortal sin before Jesus himself:

The individual who attempts to preempt this process by resigning before the church enacts formal discipline is guilty of usurping the church’s apostolic authority to speak in this manner. In so doing, he compounds his guilt, like the criminal charged with “resisting arrest.”

Other church leaders loved this idea. In 2014, another pastor, Bobby Jamieson, wrote:

If someone tries to resign mid-process in order to “escape discipline,” should the church just let them go? Of course not. That would defeat the whole point of church discipline. Instead, the church must retain the right to refuse someone’s resignation and send them out another way—through excommunication.

Nothing’s changed in the decade+ since then. Watchdog groups like Thou Art the Man, FBC Jax Watchdogs, and Wartburg Watch have pointed out the ways that such thinking could become abusive. As expected, unfortunately, these Calvinists do not care. They never have.

And why should they? The system serves their interests so well. They’re not the ones facing abuse, and any abuse they do encounter or dole out can be easily rationalized with Bible verses and a bit of talking to the ceiling to make sure Jesus is completely okay with everything. He always is, after all.

That’s the real danger of a bad-faith actor in a powerful leadership position. They’re not there to serve others. They’re there to serve themselves. And in Christianity, bad-faith actors can easily mask their true intentions until well after it’s too late to do anything about it…

… except leave.

(If you need help resigning from any church in America, please consult this Wartburg Watch post for advice.)

NEXT UP: Armageddon is at hand! Well, at some point, anyway. Any day now. Totally. Speaking of bad-faith actors, we’ll check out one nepo baby who’s still trying hard to sell old-school Endtimes panic to evangelicals. It’s almost quaint, really. See you soon! <3

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Endnotes

Last thing I remember, I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax, ” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”