I am studying 1 Corinthians for my devotional time and came across this definition of the church in a sermon by S. Lewis Johnson that struck me. We have struggled as a church how to faithfully implement church discipline in the American context, specifically our context, our elders having discussed it several times in the last year. Johnson gives us a definition of the church from the reformers: "Reformers defined the essential features of a Christian church as a group of people who meet regularly in one particular place for the observance of the ordinances, for the ministry of the Word of God, and for church discipline or discipline under the officers of the church. In fact, the Reformers insisted that if there was not discipline, the practice of discipline, the provision and practice of it, that one did not have a Christian church (italics added)."
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