No. 31. >> The other day I was glancing through the table of contents in the Lutheran Agenda and I was a little surprised to find a rite for the announcing of an excommunication to the congregation. I know that excommunication is a part of the church's responsibility under the Office of the Keys. But do Lutheran congregations make much use of this practice? I have never had the personal experience of participating in an LCMS worship service where an excommunication announcement was made. Is this because both incidents of excommunication are handled without public announcement? >>DR. JOEL D. BIERMANN: Church discipline. Excommunication. Big issue. Very relevant here. You're right, the church does have rites for this. And the church does have the expectation that we will actually practice this. Several years ago the CTCR actually put out a very nice document on church discipline. And it teaches this stuff very clearly and very forthrightly. And if we're going to take seriously what it means to encourage one another to faithfully follow God and to faithfully obey God, we're going to take seriously church discipline. And we need to I think pay just a little more attention to this. There are left hand elements of church discipline and there's also right hand elements. And what we see most explicitly in excommunication is where the two sort of come together. If in the left hand realm I become rather lax or lazy or indifferent about following God and his will and maybe even intentionally set out and choose what is evil or what is wicked, and if I do this on a persistent, consistent basis, can I kid myself into thinking that somehow I can behave this way in the left hand realm without it having any implications or any application to the right hand realm? And the Bible and the Confessions agree and they are very clear on this, absolutely you cannot do that. What you do in the left hand can have implications for the right hand. And if I persistently and intentionally choose sin, the Confessions say you actually drive out the Holy Spirit. Excommunication then is the church's responsibility to one of its members who is making that sort of erroneous mistake. That huge error in judgement. Choosing sin. Choosing to do what is opposed to God's will. And doing it intentionally and willfully and persistently and inspite of repeated exhortations to come back. If when the church tries to bring the member back in line with God's will and that member refuses, then the church, if it's going to be faithful, must tell that individual member: You have stepped outside of God's will. You have put yourself persistently outside of God's will and because of your actions, you are actually putting yourself outside of the church. And remember that's all excommunication means. You're being put outside the community. Being put outside the fellowship. You are being excommunicated. You are no longer part of this fellowship. And essentially excommunication is simply declaring the reality of what the person has already said by their choices. They are making choices that put themselves beyond the pail of Christianity outside of the church. So a church that's going to be faithfully serving its people and faithfully shepherding its people will practice church discipline. Does that mean it will be doing excommunications? Not necessarily. But church discipline? Yeah, I think so. So when you have an individual member who is putting himself outside of God's will and refusing to heed any kind of, you know, rebuke or any kind of call to repentance, you have no choice but to help them to see the height of that error and what it's causing. Now, the church needs to be careful here. See, excommunication is not nasty or vindictive. Excommunication is really a very loving act. Because you're telling somebody: What you're doing is so serious and so harmful that you've got to stop because it's going to kill your faith and we don't want to see you lose your faith. That's what excommunication is saying. It needs to be done slowly, deliberately, carefully. And with a lot of prayer. And it's not an easy thing. But it should be happening in churches when you have an individual who is living outside of God's will. My suspicion is that a lot of churches don't want to do it because it's offensive of. It stirs things up. People don't like it. People get -- react negatively to it. And it causes people to feel like: Man, we're really being judgemental. But that's not the point here. The point is we're being faithful. We're loving people. We need to do this. I'm not saying we need to be doing more excommunications necessarily. But I am saying I think we should be more aggressive and more faithful in following through in church discipline and in holding people accountable to God's will. And as Saint Paul says, encouraging each other to do good works. Spurring each other on. And calling people back from their sin. Jude talks about snatching somebody as from the flames. Reaching in and pulling them out of Satan's snare. That's what we should be doing as church members for each other and caring about them. And excommunication is just kind of the final step of that process of church discipline.