For starts: I believe in a church following Matthew in church discipline.
Ransom, you explained that your church does not allow a member to avoid discipline by letting the member resign/remove themselves from membership.
For the sake of accuracy, in double-checking my Bylaws, I discovered this
was the case. My paper copy of the constitution says, "It is important that the restoration ministry involved in church discipline, once begun, can be completed. To prevent the expedient resignation by a Member who attempts to avoid church discipline procedures, a request to withdraw from Membership until the disciplinary proceedings are finished, unless otherwise agreed to by the Board."
But nothing in our
present by-laws explicitly says a member under discipline may not be permitted to resign his membership. My paper copy is dated 2013, and they review them about every 10 years, so I believe it must have been changed about two years ago.
I maintain it's a reasonable safeguard against a member trying to get out of discipline, and I think it can be also reasonably inferred from the members' covenant, in which we agree to submit to the Bylaws regarding church discipline.
Is this a practice adopted from (now closed) G3 ministries? Is it common among Reformed Baptists? I am not familiar with this approach.
My paper Bylaws are older than G3 Ministries, so certainly no.
As for the Reformed Baptists, we are neither formally Reformed nor Baptist, so I can't comment on their regular practices. I checked the Web sites of a couple RB churches (a local one and Jarvis St. Baptist in Toronto) and couldn't find copies of their constitutions. So it's a mystery.
