The Wall Street Journal reports that churches are increasingly willing to show members the door if they don't follow church rules. It is a way for smaller congregations to stand for something while megachurches welcome all comers:
While many Christians find such practices outdated, pastors in large
and small churches across the country are expelling members for
offenses ranging from adultery and theft to gossiping, skipping service
and criticizing church leaders.
The revival is part of a broader movement to restore churches to their
traditional role as moral enforcers, Christian leaders say. Some say
that contemporary churches have grown soft on sinners, citing the rise
of suburban megachurches where pastors preach self-affirming messages
rather than focusing on sin and redemption. Others point to a passage
in the gospel of Matthew that says unrepentant sinners must be shunned.
These cases can get messy when they go public.
The Journal notes:
Scholars estimate that 10 percent to 15 percent of Protestant
evangelical churches practice church discipline -- about 14,000 to
21,000 U.S. congregations in total. Increasingly, clashes within
churches are spilling into communities, splitting congregations and
occasionally landing church leaders in court after congregants, who
believed they were confessing in private, were publicly shamed.
In the past decade, more than two dozen lawsuits
related to church discipline have been filed as congregants sue pastors
for defamation, negligent counseling and emotional injury, according to
the Religion Case Reporter, a legal-research database. Peggy Penley, a
Fort Worth, Texas, woman whose pastor revealed her extramarital affair
to the congregation after she confessed it in confidence, waged a
six-year battle against the pastor, charging him with negligence. Last
summer, the Texas Supreme Court dismissed her suit, ruling that the
pastor was exercising his religious beliefs by publicizing the affair.
Courts have often refused to hear such cases on the
grounds that churches are protected by the constitutional right to free
religious exercise, but some have sided with alleged sinners. In 2003,
a woman and her husband won a defamation suit against the Iowa
Methodist conference and its superintendent after he publicly accused
her of "spreading the spirit of Satan" because she gossiped about her
pastor. A district court rejected the case, but the Iowa Supreme Court
upheld the woman's appeal on the grounds that the letter labeling her a
sinner was circulated beyond the church.
Advocates of shunning say it rarely leads to the
public disclosure of a member's sin. "We're not the FBI; we're not
sniffing around people's homes trying to find out some secret sin,"
says Don Singleton, pastor of Ridgeview Baptist Church in Talladega,
Ala., who says the 50-member church has disciplined six members in his
2½ years as pastor. "Ninety-nine percent of these cases never go that
far."
