Strategies in Church Discipline from 1 Corinthians

Book excerpt: This book seeks to recover the New Testament ideal of church discipline and to construct a holistic model for the Church in Asia. The Church has wrestled with the issue of discipline ever since her inception. Many of Pauls letters addressed the problems that had arisen in the communities that he had established. The thrust of church discipline in the New Testament was the formation of Christian character through the Word of God worked out in the process of discipleship through teaching, edification, admonition as well as banishing serious sin from the community. The ideal of church discipline in the New Testament is both Preventive Discipline and Punitive Discipline. As the Church became more institutionalized, there was a paradigm shift in the process of discipline. The New Testament ideal of discipline as a character formation was shifted to regulatory ordinances. This led to the development of a strict and regimented Christianity. Since then, church discipline had taken on a penitential and punitive direction. The book seeks to study Pauls management of the disciplinary problems in 1 Corinthians and then to construct a holistic model of church discipline for an Asian context.