Wallop?

With a mixture of scriptural references and anecdotes from his experience, the author seeks to unpack the need for, and the exercise of, church discipline. His opening chapter, exposing the factors that make church discipline a thorny issue, was helpful, as is his desire to show church discipline in positive as well as negative terms. The following chapters then seek to unpack the biblical basis for correction and discipline with a number of case studies from his experience of local church life. I confess to not finding it easy to grasp the biblical flow for all that was said, nor the relevance of the various quotes with which each chapter started. Any writing about church discipline will be affected by church background. That is true of this book and may limit its usefulness. Perhaps the most helpful statement is ‘that church discipline is a difficult issue fraught with all sorts of complications ... we need the wisdom of Solomon’.

Jonathan Prime