Why Churches Should Excommunicate Longstanding Non-Attenders

Or, you could just purge the membership roll at your annual business meeting and summarily remove people who never attend, have disappeared, or otherwise show no interest in being a member of the community.

Why do church discipline and look for trouble? Isn’t life hard enough!?

at HSBC, we would periodically, erase members who we no longer could contact. At the time we sent out a quarterly newsletter, so if it returned address unknown contact was considered lost. San Francisco has a highly transient population.

Church discipline is for those who want to continue in sin and maintain church fellowship. I don’t see the Biblical mandate for exercising church discipline on those who have left and the pastor knows good and well they aren’t coming back. We periodically let our church family know about maintaining active membership status. It should be no surprise to those who fail to do so that we’ve removed them from membership. We do attempt to recover those we can, but most who persist to fail to come to church have left for good. At that point, just remove them from the membership.

The person who disliked my post is funny. Why not just explain why this is a bad approach?

[TylerR]

The person who disliked my post is funny. Why not just explain why this is a bad approach?

Presumably he or she feels their life isn’t hard enough. Lucky them. :)

[TylerR]

The person who disliked my post is funny. Why not just explain why this is a bad approach?

What’s the point of having a dislike button if it can’t be used to express simple disagreement with a post?

I disliked pvawter’s post out of agreement with its premiss.

Seriously, perhaps we have something of an issue where we automatically assume that “church discipline” is always adversarial, whereas in reality it’s the same root word as “disciple” and ought to encompass all kinds of teaching, and especially the process of rebuke and maintaining/breaking fellowship. In the case of someone who moves or simply stops attending, there is a mild rebuke involved, and that’s OK—it’s not the same kind of rebuke of someone who starts cheating on his wife or something like that, but it is nonetheless a rebuke.

I was half-joking. I suppose you could excommunicate people who have vanished ‘cuz you want to uphold the important of covenental church membership. But, to be honest, unless you’ve built a really good culture of community (and even then), excommunicating folks who have vanished will probably just look petty, cheap and spiteful. Just ask the congregation to remove them from membership at the annual meeting and be done with it quietly.

If you accept a covenant nature of church membership, it’s hard to just cancel memberships like a magazine subscription. The members covenant to look out for one another spiritually and to allow others to look out for them spiritually. If someone drifts off, you’re supposed to follow up with them, or you’re not keeping your promise.

Of course members can change churches, and they do, with blessing.

Our church holds to the 9 Marks notions like this but we’ve had to be sensible about how to practically apply it:

• The church hopper who finally joined our church and stayed a year, but then got dissatisfied and moved on yet again, and never wanted to formally commit to a church again.
• The family who had a lot of internal struggles along with some beef against other church members, who moved on, and the husband and wife could not agree on a church to join, and kept their ostensible membership with our church for months as they looked for another one.
• The lady who was disgruntled at how much the church had changed because of all the visitors who came and didn’t know church etiquette, and eventually looked for another church, but never quite managed to join one.

In all those cases, there were other causes for concern about their spiritual health. But it’s not the same kind of spiritual health problem as active and high-handed sin. In all cases, we stayed in touch with them during the transition. In all cases, we eventually removed them. In all cases, at least four months before final membership termination, we had let the congregation know—with only as much detail as necessary—to pray for the people involved and to stay in touch with them and encourage them to commit to a good church. And in all cases, we eventually terminated their membership without quite calling it church discipline but also noting the problematic condition of not being formally connected to a church for spiritual care.

These are the cases where the sole on-paper cause for termination is non-attendance. Although not-on-paper there were problems that we were caring for.

In most of the other cases of church discipline, the drifting away was accompanied by egregious sin that was later uncovered. And we tell the congregation that drifting away and eventual egregious sin so often go hand-in-hand, that drifting away is not a light thing.

We always contact people who have slipped away. If they don’t reply, or don’t wish to return, we recommend to the congregation they be removed from membership at the next annual meeting. I was at a church once where they didn’t know who the members were, because nobody had been keeping track!

We’ve had people ‘leave’ and announce it … but wish to remain members.

Makes no sense to me! Just remove them!

For Jim, re: people with weird ideas about their relationship to the church.

Before I arrived, a lady had been excommunicated. I can’t remember the cause, but I think it was more than non-attendance. It was brought to our attention that she was continuing to send in substantial checks. We tried following up with her to ask into her spiritual wellbeing and hoping that she didn’t think she was somehow “all right” by still sending money to the church.

Despite us often trying to emphasize the formal-commitment nature of church membership, we still occasional attenders or semi-regular attenders who think they’re members of the church when they’re not.

This is a situation I know a person is in. A person has attended a church for a while. They officially became a member. They thought they were not just members, but personal friends with the pastor (doing things outside of church together) and an elder. This summer their mother died after a short but intense illness.

The pastor and elder knew of the illness, and the person told them their mother died. The pastor had contacted once during the illness, but after the death not a word. The mother died in May. The man and the pastor used to talk once or twice a week, now the pastor never responds. The elder never contacted the man. As a result the “friendship” between the man and the pastor and elder has stopped. BTW, the church also provided no consolation, but in the COVID environment they aren’t so concerned about that.

It is affecting this man’s desire to attend the church. He thought he had friends as well as a church family, but apparently not.

What would you do?

I’m not sure of the dynamics of “never responds,” if the person has been explicitly asking for a response and not getting one, or just leaving periodic messages / texts.

But I would attempt to call the pastor and/or elder and ask for a phone conversation; and if that kind of thing has gone nowhere, then be sure to state specifically that the phone conversation would be about the non-responsiveness. It’s certainly appropriate to say, “Hey, I needed spiritual support during this time, and it hurt not to have it from you. Can we take steps to address this going forward?”

How the pastor and elder respond to that will tell the person far more about them than the initial behavior does. It could fall into the range of “wow, so sorry that we’ve hurt you; yes we’ve been busy but we should have been there; we will take steps not to drop that ball again” to simple excuses to plain old defensiveness.

Where to go from there, especially if it’s an unsatisfactory response, depends on too many variables about the other members in the congregation. A healthy congregation with mature believers would want to address a stubborn or defensive leader.

In my opinion, a bigger issue than this is that, more and more, Christians attend a church without ever joining. When such people stop attending, it puts the church in a difficult position of knowing if and how to pursue them. It has made me feel like a guy who calls a girl who stopped calling him to find out what he did. It feels pathetic.