Corporate Discipline
“To the angel of the church in Sardis write:
These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.” -Revelation 3:1-3
Individualism has been a dominate force in American culture for a good long time. It is hard to trace out its rise to prominence in terms of an exact year or day. Even so, at least part of its strength has come from the church in America being very clear about the need for a personal commitment to Jesus as Savior and Lord. This idea and the language to go along with it came on strong in the 1800’s. It has become so engrained in the church that for most of us, the idea of making our faith ‘corporate’ is foreign if not altogether alien. We struggle with concepts such as reading the New Testament’s many ‘you’ pronouns as second person plurals. The vast majority of them are but, when we read or hear them, our immediate response is to think of them as referring to us personally. This isn’t altogether unhelpful in one sense because, a good deal of personal responsibility and ownership is intended in the plural “you” of the Greek language. However, the conception of a person standing alone and apart from their family or people group or church is one that most writers and original readers of the text simply did not have. This linguistic and conceptional tension lies at what we often feel to be ‘unjust’ discipline doled out on a whole group when the sin is an individual’s. Achan’s sin and the discipline that followed are one immediately recognizable Old Testament example (see Joshua 7). But, we often are tempted to think that is no longer how God deals with people. In one sense, that is right because, “The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.” (Rev. 20:12b) God requires an individual accounting of each of us. However, such a final individual reckoning does not exclude a corporate approach to discipline under the New Covenant. Each of the letters in Revelation 2 and 3 are for a GROUP not so much an individual. It is the whole church which is being addressed unless an explicit group or individual is called out (i.e. Jezebel, see 2:20). This is why, we often struggle in applying the New Testament; our way of seeing the world is very different from those to whom the letters and gospels were initially written. One of those rather difficult passages is in the letter to the church at Sardis. Here the church is given a choice: embrace the path of repentance and all the renewal of faith steps needed there OR Jesus is going to show up suddenly and dramatically take away the little bit of vitality left in the church. Barnard and Quick bring this idea home in a way that is instructive to us, even if a little odd sounding. They write, “Jesus readily uses pain and loss as an instrument to bring correction to His churches. How poorly churches, pastors, and lay leaders understand this!... Jesus’ letter to the church at Sardis teaches us that not all trouble that comes suddenly and unexpectedly upon a church constitutes an attack by the enemy. Sometimes it is Jesus coming as a thief to discipline a community whose spiritual senses have become dull.” Now, there is a flip side to this coin where every time there is pain or loss, we attribute it to discipline. That is unhelpful at best and destructive more often than not. It is analogous to seeing every sickness as a result of an individual’s sin. Is sickness linked directly to a sin issue? Not as a rule, no. It can be. So too, corporate discipline is something Jesus still engages in for the sake of His church. It is our work in the pain and loss we experience, as a family of faith, to discern carefully what we can of the origin. Is this discipline? Is this an attack from the enemy? Is this the natural outgrowth of being present and active for Jesus in a world that is opposed to Him? These are questions we must pray through. We must listen carefully. Jesus is not in the business of discipline without cause or clarity. If we are willing to sit quietly in the pain and ask patiently, He will reveal His purpose if in fact discipline is the end in mind. Otherwise, discipline cannot serve its number one purpose; training for future growth and reform. Let us be a people committed to following Jesus. Let us also be a people humble enough to receive corporate discipline in a way that it has a maximum positive impact for our future growth.