What do you do about a couple who disrupts the services of the church?
Question:
What do you do with a brother who walks disorderly and who threatens others and his wife disrupts every service? If this couple is allowed to stay everyone else will leave as some have already. Can you offer any suggestions? We are to the point where we are planning on calling the police to help with this matter. This is a family of bullies. They even brought one of their sons to service to confront the minister.
Answer:
"Reject a divisive man after the first and second admonition, knowing that such a person is warped and sinning, being self-condemned" (Titus 3:10-11).
If the family continues to interrupt services after being withdrawn from by the congregation, then have a restraining order issued against the couple. Harassment is against the law. If a person will not heed the brethren, then there is nothing left but to use the services of the government.
Problems like this should not need to go before non-Christians. "If then you have judgments concerning things pertaining to this life, do you appoint those who are least esteemed by the church to judge? I say this to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you, not even one, who will be able to judge between his brethren? But brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers! Now therefore, it is already an utter failure for you that you go to law against one another. Why do you not rather accept wrong? Why do you not rather let yourselves be cheated? No, you yourselves do wrong and cheat, and you do these things to your brethren!" (I Corinthians 6:4-8). This passage is sometimes used against the righteous to say they ought to take whatever a wicked person dishes out. But notice that this couple thinks someone in the church did wrong. The church judged otherwise and this couple, instead of accepting the wrong that they claim exists, instead turned to sin to force their way. This is not the type of situation that Paul was discussing in I Corinthians 6. They are forcing the matter, not the church.
