The Church’s Responsibility: How the Community of Faith Holds Truth and Grace Together

Part 4 of a 4 part series

We have spent three articles looking at immorality from the inside out — from the disordered heart (Part 1), to the unfaithful soul (Part 2), to the body caught in sexual sin (Part 3). Now we turn to the community. Because immorality does not happen in isolation, and the Bible has a great deal to say about how the church — the gathered community of the consecrated — is called to respond when it enters its midst.

The answer is not silence. And it is not condemnation. The Bible’s answer is something harder than both: the holding together of truth and grace in a way that honors God, protects the community, and pursues the restoration of the one who has fallen.

This is the fourth and final article in our series on Immorality. It is not an afterthought. In many ways, it is the most practical — because every local fellowship will face a moment when this question is no longer theoretical.

The Problem: When Immorality Enters the Church

The Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians provides the New Testament’s primary case study. The situation he was addressing is almost shocking in its boldness:

Paul was not merely concerned that the sin existed. He was alarmed that the congregation had done nothing about it — and worse, that they were “arrogant” about their tolerance of it (v. 2). They had confused acceptance with grace. They had mistaken silence for compassion. Paul will not let that confusion stand.

The same principle applies to all three forms of immorality explored in this series. Moral immorality — the greed, the deceit, the contempt that Paul catalogs in Romans 1 — left unaddressed, becomes normalized. Spiritual immorality — the divided loyalty, the drift from God, the false teaching that corrupts the community’s fidelity — spreads like yeast if unchallenged. Sexual immorality, tolerated, communicates to the congregation and to the watching world that the church does not take seriously what God takes seriously.

The Leaven Principle: Why It Cannot Be Ignored

Paul gives the reason for the church’s responsibility in one of the most memorable images in all of his letters:

Leaven works invisibly and pervasively. Tolerated sin, Paul is saying, does the same thing: it normalizes what should be extraordinary; it emboldens others in temptation; it corrupts the church’s witness; and it dishonors God. The metaphor also carries Passover theology: the church is meant to be an unleavened community — cleansed, prepared, ready. Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. The church that ignores its own immorality is celebrating a feast that contradicts the sacrifice that purchased it.

Christ himself confirmed the leaven principle when he rebuked the church at Thyatira: “I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray” (Revelation 2:20, NASB2020). The sin was not primarily what Jezebel was doing. It was that the church was tolerating it. That tolerance was what Christ held against them.

The Process: Matthew 18 and the Graduated Response

When a member of the community has fallen into known immorality — and when they are not repenting — Jesus himself gave the church a clear, graduated process. It is found in Matthew 18:15–17, and it is the definitive biblical framework for addressing immorality of all three kinds within the community.

Notice how Jesus frames the goal at the outset: “you have gained your brother.” This is not a mechanism of exclusion. It is a process of pursuit — each step motivated by the desire to restore, not to punish.

Step One: Private Confrontation

The first step is always a private, one-on-one conversation motivated by love and conducted in humility. The approach is restorative, not accusatory; private, not public. The goal is to spare the person public embarrassment while still calling them to account. Galatians 6:1 prescribes the spirit that must govern this moment: “restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too are not tempted.” The one who confronts does so as a fellow struggler, not as a judge standing above.

This step requires courage. It is far easier to say nothing — to tell ourselves that it is not our place, that we might be wrong, that we don’t want to damage the relationship. But Jesus did not present private confrontation as optional. He presented it as the first expression of love toward a brother or sister who is heading somewhere they should not go.

Step Two: Bring Witnesses

If the person refuses to repent, one or two additional mature believers are brought in. This accomplishes three things: it provides witnesses to establish the facts, introduces additional voices of pastoral concern, and protects the process from becoming a private dispute or a misunderstanding. The witnesses are not an audience for the confrontation. They are additional pastors — people who care about the person and who are willing to make the effort of involvement.

Step Three: Bring It Before the Church

If the person still refuses to repent, the matter is brought before the church leadership or congregation. This is not public shaming — it is a final, most serious call to repentance, made in the presence of the whole community. It signals to the person that the stakes could not be higher, and it fulfills the church’s responsibility as a community accountable to God for what it permits in its midst.

Step Four: The Withdrawal of Fellowship

The withdrawal of close fellowship is the most severe action the community can take, and it must not be taken lightly or precipitously. It is not an act of hatred but of love — for the sinner, who needs to experience the weight of their choice; for the congregation, which must be protected from the corrupting influence of tolerated sin; and for the honor of God. Notice that Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 5:11 is not limited to sexual immorality — it includes the greedy, the idolater, the verbally abusive, the drunkard, the swindler. The same principle that applies to moral immorality applies to spiritual and sexual immorality alike.

Paul’s instruction in 2 Thessalonians 3:14–15 is the clearest New Testament statement of the spirit in which this must be done: “do not associate with him, so that he will be put to shame. Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.” Two commands stand in tension and must both be honored: withdraw from close association (addressing the sin) and do not regard him as an enemy (addressing the person). He is still a brother. The withdrawal is the means of putting him in mind of his departure — not a declaration that he is beyond love or hope.

The Crucial Distinction: Unrepentant vs. Struggling

One of the most important pastoral distinctions the church must make is between two very different people who may appear, on the surface, to be in the same situation.

The person who is unrepentant is not simply someone who has sinned. They are someone who, when confronted, refuses to acknowledge the sin, continues in it, and will not submit to the counsel of the community. This is the person the Matthew 18 process addresses. Their posture of defiance — not their sin alone — is what calls forth the graduated response.

The person who is struggling is someone who knows they have sinned, hates it, is fighting against it, and is genuinely seeking help. This person needs exactly the opposite of church discipline. They need the arms of the community around them — accountability, prayer, pastoral support, and the repeated assurance that the gospel is sufficient for what they are fighting. James 5:16 is written for them: “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”

The church that conflates these two — that treats every struggle as requiring discipline, or that treats every unrepentance as merely struggling — will fail both groups. It will crush those who need support and enable those who need correction.

The Goal: Restoration, Not Destruction

Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is the sequel to the discipline of 1 Corinthians 5. The discipline had its intended effect — the person repented — and Paul now writes with urgency:

The discipline had done its work. Now the church was to receive the repentant person back — fully, warmly, publicly. To forgive. To comfort. To reaffirm love. Church discipline that never leads to restoration has become punitive rather than redemptive. It has forgotten its own stated purpose. James 5:19–20 names that purpose precisely: “the one who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.” Saving a soul from death — that is what all of this is for.

What C.T. Russell Taught: Hating the Sin, Loving the Sinner

The familiar phrase “hate the sin, love the sinner” does not appear verbatim in Scripture — its earliest form appears in Augustine of Hippo’s Letter 211 (c. 424 AD). Pastor Russell never used this exact formulation. But the theological principle it encapsulates is central to his documented teaching on church discipline and the law of love.

_{Russell, C.T. “Converting a Sinner.” Zion’s Watch Tower, 1883, Reprints p. 494. Verified at htdb.space/1883/r494.htm. Drawing on James 5:19–20, Pastor Russell argues that the primary duty of the congregation toward the erring is “earnest solicitude” — watchful, loving concern — and that the community’s first calling is to pursue, not to reject.}

Pastor Russell’s most systematic treatment of the principle appears in Studies in the Scriptures, Vol. VI, The New Creation (1904), Study 6, “Its Order and Discipline” (pp. 273–348). There he applies Galatians 6:1 as the governing spirit of all congregational discipline: the erring one is to be “restored… in a spirit of gentleness.” He understood the Matthew 18 process not as a mechanism of exclusion but as a graduated expression of love — each step motivated by the desire to “gain thy brother.”

_{Russell, C.T. “What Pastor Russell Said,” Q438:1 (1909). HTDB. Verified primary text: htdb.space/QB/QB_L.htm. The question Pastor Russell is answering: “How can an imperfect being attain perfect life?”}

The distinction Pastor Russell draws — between rejecting the sin and retaining love for the sinner — is grounded in his theology of consecration. The erring believer remains, in Pastor Russell’s framework, a person for whom Christ died and in whom the New Creature has been awakened. The community’s love for that person is not negated by their sin; it is expressed through the willingness to bear the difficulty of confrontation, the patience of the Matthew 18 process, and the earnest hope of restoration. His 1883 Watch Tower article concludes with a direct statement of this priority: “If in the face of the foe a soul may be saved from death — that should be sufficient reward.”

The Necessity of Fellowship: You Cannot Do This Alone

The biblical framework for church discipline — the Matthew 18 process, the withdrawal of fellowship from the unrepentant, the restoration of the repentant — presupposes a community that actually assembles and knows one another. Fellowship is not an optional spiritual enhancement; it is the structural reality within which all of these processes operate.

The Greek word translated “forsaking” (enkataleipontes) carries the sense of deserting or abandoning — strong language suggesting that the failure to gather is a form of abandonment of the community itself. The reason given for assembling is striking: not primarily formal worship (though worship is implied), but the mutual stimulation of love and good deeds. The community meeting is the mechanism through which believers provoke one another toward holiness. And the eschatological urgency — “all the more as you see the day drawing near” — establishes that the need for corporate gathering intensifies as the age advances.

A community that does not meet cannot admonish one another, cannot bear one another’s burdens, cannot restore the erring in a spirit of gentleness, and cannot fulfill the law of Christ. The Matthew 18 process, the leaven principle, and the goal of restoration all depend on the foundational reality of an assembled, relationally connected community.

The early church’s pattern is instructive here. Acts 2:42–47 describes a community that devoted themselves “day by day” to one another — in teaching, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayer. This is the soil in which the Matthew 18 process grows: confrontation, witness, and restoration are only possible within a community that knows one another well enough to notice departure and cares enough to pursue it.

Three elements in this passage are decisive. First, the agent of restoration is “you who are spiritual” — not those who are morally superior, but those who are walking in the Spirit and therefore capable of the gentleness the task requires. Second, the posture is one of self-examination: “each one looking to yourself, so that you too are not tempted.” Third, the act of bearing “one another’s burdens” — which in context includes the burden of confronting sin — is identified as the fulfillment of the law of Christ. Church discipline, rightly exercised, is an act of love that fulfills the highest law.

Restoration as Prophetic Witness

Here is something that is easily missed when the subject of church discipline comes up: the restoration of those who have fallen is itself a testimony to the power of the gospel. When the church receives repentant sinners with the completeness of a father running to meet a prodigal son, it demonstrates to the watching world that the grace of God is real, effective, and transformative.

The New Creation community, in extending grace to the fallen, provides a foretaste of the complete restoration that the Kingdom will bring. The person restored from moral immorality demonstrates that the law of love can be written on a heart that once chose greed and contempt. The person restored from spiritual immorality demonstrates that divided loyalties can be healed and first love can be renewed. The person restored from sexual immorality demonstrates the power of those three past-tense verbs from 1 Corinthians 6:11: washed, sanctified, justified.

Pastor Russell consistently taught that the grace of God is sufficient for all sin — including immorality in every form — and that the community of the New Creation must be characterized by the same compassion and readiness to restore that God himself shows to the repentant. The grace extended to the fallen and the call to personal holiness are not in tension in this tradition; each requires the other. A community without holiness has no standard worth restoring people to. A community without grace has no arms with which to receive those who return.

A Final Word: The Table Is Always Being Set

We end this series where the New Testament so often ends: at hope. The same God who catalogues the forms of immorality with precise and unflinching honesty — moral, spiritual, sexual, and communal — is the God who runs to meet the returning prodigal. The same chapter of 1 Corinthians that names sexual immorality among the things that exclude from the Kingdom contains the sentence: “Such were some of you.” Were. Past tense.

That is not a footnote. It is the point.

The community of the redeemed is not a community of those who have never fallen. It is a community of those who have been washed, sanctified, and justified — and who are learning, together, what it means to live as people who belong to God. That community will encounter immorality in its midst. It will have to choose between the easy silence that passes for tolerance and the difficult love that holds truth and grace together. When it chooses well — when it confronts with gentleness, disciplines with hope, restores with joy, and gathers with constancy — it demonstrates something the world desperately needs to see: that the gospel is not a slogan. It is a power. It is sufficient. And it has not run out.

About This Series

This 4-part series explores Immorality as the Bible presents it — in four interconnected dimensions: everyday morality, spiritual morality, and sexual morality— and concludes with the Church’s responsibility. Each article is grounded in NASB2020 Scripture, the writings of C.T. Russell, the Herald Magazine, and the Harvest Truth Database (HTDB).

All Scripture: New American Standard Bible 2020 (NASB2020)