Corporate Excommunication

The excommunication of an individual in your local church should never be done easily or lightly, but sometimes it needs to be done for the love and purity of the church. Done rightly and carefully it exposes false teaching and unrepentant immorality and may have the blessed function of being the means of repentance, reconciliation and the bringing of brothers back into the fold.

This has got me to thinking ...due to the doctrinal chaos, immorality and outright rebellion now obvious in evangelicalism, I have thought about whether excommunication could be done on a corporate scale... that is, the excommunication of a church, group of churches of or a ministry. This would have to be done on a scale sufficient enough for everyone to take notice. And even if such an excommunication is not recognized by those excommunicated, it would have the blessed effect of making clear delineation between truth and error, life and death. I know that creeds and confessions served this purpose in the early church and after the Reformation but it seems, if evangelicalism is to have any future, that something like this needs to take place soon. Again it must be done with the utmost care and much be done with pain and difficulty, but that should not stop us for something so important as this. In this day and age, even among those who are theologically conservative, it would probably take a miracle to even agree among ourselves, but if we submitted ourselves to prayer, that miracle just might take place.