Church discipline doesn't work in an age of authenticity

There are much better ways to accomplish the three things church discipline is designed to accomplish.

According to church order Article 78, discipline has three purposes:

1. “to restore those who err to faithful obedience to God and full fellowship with the congregation,

2. to maintain the holiness of the church, and thus 

3. to uphold God’s honor.”

It’s the role of ministers to “exercise admonition and discipline” (Article 12). The elders, too, “shall oversee the doctrine and life of the members of the congregation and fellow officebearers” and “shall provide counsel and discipline” (Article 25b). Confessing members, though not baptized members, are responsible for “mutual discipline of the local congregation and the universal body of Christ” (Article 59). 

Discipline against officebearers is called special discipline, as opposed to general discipline, which is for all confessing members. Officebearers can be subject to special discipline for three reasons:

1. “if they violate the Covenant for Officebearers, 

2. are guilty of neglect or abuse of office, or 

3. in any way seriously deviate from sound doctrine and godly conduct.” (Article 83)

Special discipline is what Chad Werkhoven called for against Larry Louters at Synod 2023. After Louters, an elder delegate from Neland Avenue CRC, gave a speech about the difficult place Neland was in, Werkhoven introduced a motion to bring special discipline against Louters:

“It’s with incredible sorrow in my heart that I move that Synod begin special discipline against elder Larry Louters.”

The chair ruled that out of order; the chair was then challenged; and the chair was sustained. If the chair had not been sustained, then the special discipline would likely have begun a process that would have removed Larry Louters from office.

Special discipline and the Committee 8 majority report

The Committee 8 majority report essentially asks the same thing of officebearers who file a confessional difficulty gravamen. The chair and reporter have said as much: that what they’re asking for actually isn’t novel. They claim what they recommend is essentially what the church order already lays out:

“Based on the process laid out in Church Order Supplement, Article 5, B, 1, a council has six months, or until the next classis meeting, whichever is greater, to provide the necessary information and/or clarification being sought. If the CDG is forwarded to classis, classis shall have six months, or until agenda items for the next synod must be submitted, whichever is greater, to provide the necessary information and/or clarification being sought. If the CDG appears before synod, synod’s decision will be binding and the subscriber will have until the end of that calendar year to either (1) affirm the standards, (2) file a confessional-revision gravamen, or (3) resign from office.” (Agenda for Synod, p. 543)

What does Article 5, B, 1 say?

“Ministers (whether missionaries, professors, or others not serving congregations as pastors), elders, or deacons shall submit their “difficulties” to their councils for examination and judgment. Should a council decide that it is not able to judge the gravamen submitted to it, it shall submit the matter to classis for examination and judgment. If the classis, after examination, judges that it is unable to decide the matter, it may submit it to synod, in accordance with the principles of Church Order Article 28-b.”

Finally, here’s what Article 28-b says:

“A major assembly shall deal only with those matters which concern its churches in common or which could not be finished in the minor ­assemblies.”

Basically, it’s saying that any confessional difficulty gravamen is a matter that concerns “churches in common” and thus needs to be sent to synod.

The practical effect will be special discipline for officebearers who do not or cannot in good conscience agree to Synod 2022’s interpretation of the word “unchastity” in Q&A 108. Unless they can convince a future Synod to change the interpretation of a confession, such officebearers will be asked to eventually resign or be deposed.

Sincerity culture

For much of the CRC’s history, especially at the edges of the Circulatory System, both general and special discipline served a clear purpose. The culture in these times and places made it possible for discipline to be effective. 

Here is an illustration of this. Last week, Clayton Libolt, Paul Vander Klay, and I had a long conversation about the current moment in the CRC. Of Lynden, Washington, Clay said:

“You were Christian Reformed because you were born Christian Reformed… and you had roles. You went to church twice on Sunday, you sent your kids to the Christian schools, and if you didn’t, you were going to get a visit from the elders…. You did your role well, and whether you did your role well or not is the judgment of the community. Not your judgment. Are you a good father? Are you a good mother? Are you a good church person?”

In a similar vein, Carl Trueman writes in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self of his grandfather:

“My grandfather left school at fifteen and spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham… If he had been asked if he found satisfaction in his work, there is a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question… But if he did understand, he would probably have answered in terms of whether his work gave him the money to put food on his family’s table and shoes on his children’s feet…. For my grandfather, job satisfaction was empirical, outwardly directed, and unrelated to his psychological state.” (Trueman, Rise and Triumph)

In these contexts, you have a role in society, not of your choosing, and you derive your meaning and sense of self-worth based on how well you perform this role in society. This is called sincerity culture, which Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio define as “a mental and social method of achieving personal identity based on sincere role enactment.” Sons were expected to take over their fathers’ farm or hardware store, care for elderly parents, hold certain political views, parent in certain ways, and participate in community life in all its forms—again, always in ways defined by the role.

Moeller and D'Ambrosio elaborate:

“Under conditions of role-based sincerity, identity is achieved by conforming to ‘external powers’ as manifested in pre-established relationships, norms, and customs. Identity value and moral credit… is generated through ‘obedient service’ in the form of compliance with social expectations and role-based interactions with others. ‘Inner reverence’ refers to a commitment that aligns one’s thoughts and feelings with one’s roles, eventually resulting in a ‘heroism of dumb service’ that fines glory in complete role submission… One should not only act in accordance with one’s roles but also endorse one’s actions psychologically. In this way, one honestly identifies with one’s role. In this view, moreover, it is generally assumed that if everyone does so, harmonious interactions and social stability follow.” (Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio, You and Your Profile)

This exactly describes the culture of second-, third-, and fourth generation Dutch immigrants in many parts of the CRC.

From our current vantage point it looks antiquated. But sincerity culture served at least two (or more) vital functions in the Christian Reformed Church.

1. First, it made physical survival more likely, particularly within first- and second-generation immigrant enclaves. In these places, everyone needed to fulfill their role for the sake of group preservation. Those who didn’t put everyone at risk. We romanticize such communities who set out from places like Pella and Orange City for places like Hull, North Dakota or Corsica, South Dakota, and points beyond. Many of these places existed on a knife’s edge of viability. Many others didn’t make it. (We all know people from Pella and Sioux City, but nobody knows anyone from Zenith, North Dakota, because the Dutch immigrants nearly starved to death and had all left by the 1920s.)

2. Second, it preserved group cohesion by ensuring doctrinal cohesion. As immigrants interacted with the non-Dutch around them, it became necessary to draw clear lines that demarcated acceptable beliefs and practices. Adherence to your role in sincerity culture functioned as a form of signaling: I’m in this community. We can trust each other. We’ll survive this. (A hypothesis: the worldly amusements debates of the mid-twentieth century were a last gasp at preserving such cohesion.)

Church discipline makes sense in sincerity culture

Church discipline emerged from sincerity culture. The threat against officebearers against their ability to, quite literally, fulfill their role, was a strong incentive to behave in certain ways and profess certain beliefs (at least publicly). Moeller and D'Ambrosio write that “if identity can be found only in successful role fulfillment and community relationships, then a denial of role recognition is perceived as catastrophic.” (You and Your Profile)

Sincerity culture works among isolated immigrant communities. But it stops working when those communities integrate into broader culture.

The end of sincerity culture and the rise of authenticity culture

Sincerity culture, where meaning is defined by and derived by one’s ability to perform their role, has been replaced by inward search for meaning. It’s now defined by a search for authenticity, which, according to Carl Trueman, is “found through public performance of inward desires.”

Here’s Charles Taylor on the rise of authenticity culture:

“Each person has an original way of being human… Before the late eighteenth century [or perhaps early twentieth century in Dutch CRC immigrant communities] no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s…. It accords crucial moral importance to a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature, which it sees as in danger of being lost, partly through the pressures of outward conformity, but also because in taking an instrumental stance to myself, I may have lost the capacity to listen to this inner voice… Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own.” (Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity)

What about the roles one held in the community? Taylor writes:

“The primacy of self-fulfillment… generates the notions that the only associations one can identify with are those formed voluntarily and which foster self-fulfillment…” (Taylor, Sources of the Self)

Your role is no longer chosen for you. Instead, you choose your role.

In many parts of the CRC, sincerity culture ended with the question of evangelicalism: “Are you saved? Do you have Jesus in your heart?” Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1990s, “Your Christianity is not just going to church on Sunday. It needs to be authentic.”

You need to make your faith your own. (If you’re nodding your head to this and saying, “well, obviously,” then congratulations: you are part of authenticity culture.)

These are the questions of authenticity culture, not sincerity culture.

The solution is not to go back to sincerity culture.

It’s easy to lob criticism at authenticity culture. If you’re finding meaning by turning inward, by searching within yourself rather than outside yourself, then this is individualism at best and selfishness at worst. A community filled with truly authentic people will degrade. 

But sincerity culture has its own problems, too. Rather than finding meaning within yourself, you’re finding meaning by performing an external role not of your choosing, and as communities become more complex, these roles stop working. 

Here’s Moeller and D'Ambrosio again:

“The various roles of most individuals turn out to be, at least to some degree, incompatible. Such incompatibilities… have to do with differences among the groups that one belongs to–familial, political, religious, professional. Each of these systems has particular social structures and ethical expectations that do not fully converge with those of the others…. The paradox of ‘sincerity’ is grounded in the implied claim that social roles have some ‘intrinsic’ coherence that give rise to identity… However, the more we develop our identity and the more role relations we engage in, the more role conflicts tend to evolve… Eventually we may realize that the regime of sincerity itself–its norms and laws, social institutions (“the family”) and belief systems (ideologies and religions)--is a major factor in making life, and our identity, more complex, more difficult to integrate, and more ‘unnatural.’... This regime is… a social and psychological tool that forces us into all kinds of contrived social institutions, thereby generating–rather than resolving–often conflicting demands.”

Church discipline in the age of the authentic self

It should be clear by now that church discipline in general and the kind of discipline outlined in the Church Order of the CRC makes sense in a sincerity kind of world, where roles are defined and community boundaries are fixed.

But that is not the world we live in.

In the age of authenticity, it not only doesn’t make sense or achieve its desired ends of behavior or belief change, it’s something of a joke. In Friends, when a pregnant Rachel objects to another woman flirting with Ross, to whom she is not married but who is the father of her child, Phoebe says sarcastically, “The idea of a woman flirting with a single man—we must inform the elders!”

It’s a joke. They’re making fun of the role. There’s a laugh track.

In catechism class in the early 1990s, we learned about excommunication. It all made some amount of sense on paper, in the vein of you break the rules, you get kicked out. We read the forms in the Grey Psalter Hymnal. Then one of us asked our teacher, Mr. Senti, if he ever remembered someone at Third CRC in Lynden being excommunicated. He paused for a bit, and then said he had a memory from when he was a child, in the 1960s, of one of the elders informing the congregation from the pulpit that someone in the church was under discipline and risked excommunication. But that was as far as it went—as far as he knew, nobody from Third CRC had ever been formally excommunicated. 

With the rise of a culture of authenticity in places like Lynden in the 1960s, it wasn’t that people changed their minds about excommunication. It’s that excommunication only worked in a culture where deriving meaning from roles was primary, and the admonishment for not performing those roles was “catastrophic,” as Moeller and D’Ambrosio would put it. 

But in the world of the authentic, your roles are no longer defined for you. They are voluntary. You can change churches with minimal consequences. Or you can opt out altogether. These are easier options, and all consistent with deriving meaning by aligning your outward actions and affiliations with your inward, true self.

The challenge in the CRC is that, among our one thousand churches, some operate in sincerity culture, many operate in authenticity culture, and a few operate in the third place of profilicity culture (whereby people find meaning from their profile, their way of being in the world). Or, there are churches operating in all three of these cultures: there are places in the CRC where people find their primary source of meaning based on their ability to perform in their roles. And in others, people find their meaning in finding their true, authentic self. At Synod, we’re all together.

The problem is Synod is applying sincerity culture solutions to authenticity culture problems. This is why the right often describes discipline in general, and special discipline in particular, as “loving.” Remember, in sincerity culture, “if identity can be found only in successful role fulfillment and community relationships, then a denial of role recognition is perceived as catastrophic.” The possibility of discipline avoids this “catastrophic” outcome—and in sincerity culture, it can be perceived as nothing other than loving. But again: we’re not living in a sincerity culture. Now, “the only associations one can identify with are those formed voluntarily.”

Let’s go back to what the church order says about church discipline. It is designed to do three things:

1. “to restore those who err to faithful obedience to God and full fellowship with the congregation,

2. to maintain the holiness of the church, and thus 

3. to uphold God’s honor.”

My contention, aside from the fact that general or special discipline won’t achieve its desired ends, is that there are far better ways to accomplish the three things church discipline is designed to accomplish than to use church discipline itself.

I honestly don’t know what they are.

But I hope Synod 2024 takes steps toward figuring this out, rather than proceeding with the recommendations from Committee 8.

Thanks for reading,

Kent

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P.S. Many of the ideas above around sincerity culture, authenticity culture, and prolificity came from an email thread and subsequent 2.5-hour conversation with Clayton Libolt and Paul Vander Klay, which will be posted on Paul’s channel this weekend (I’m told). These concepts are from the book You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity.