Here’s a big scary word for you: excommunication. I never think, “I really need to work on the excommunication policies for my church,” because we don’t really have those types of rules. Chapters 23-29 of the Rule of St. Benedict deal with just that, how to handle those in the community who have committed serious faults and when they need to be separated from the community. Don’t think that Benedict is advocating those who talk back to the Abbot once getting shown the door of the monastery; the rules are there for those who have been given second and third chances to make things right and still haven’t done the right thing. There are degrees of excommunication, too. Those who are guilty of lesser faults are excluded only from certain parts of the community life. It's not a once-and-for-all separation, either. Chapter 27 deals with the Abbot’s job in caring for these wayward monks and bringing these monks back into the community. The goal of all these rules is not to shame or get rid of those who have done hurtful things; the goal of these rules is to restore the community, and those who have hurt the community, to health.

There are horror stories about people getting kicked out of churches or shamed out of communities. Get enough church people together, and you’ll hear some story about some family in a church someplace getting subtly or not-so-subtly shown the door. I have no interest in being a part of a community that thinks its business is pinning scarlet letters on those on whom it has passed judgement. What I do appreciate, though, about Benedict’s rule is it takes seriously when someone has done something to hurt those in the community, and it takes steps to deal with the fault and to restore the offender to community life. I remember a friend telling me about a pastor who did something wrong. I don’t remember what it was; he embezzled some money from the church or had an affair with a church member, or something like that. He was caught, and he knew what he’d done was wrong. Before the news could get out, he typed out a resignation letter, signed it, and left it on the desk in the pastor’s office of the church and never came back. He basically left town in the dead of night, and that was that. Someone in the church responded, “He never gave us the chance to be the church.” I don’t know what a church does in a situation like that, how they share both mercy and take seriously the offense, but I do like how that church member was thinking, that a church should have a chance to be the church, to face what is wrong but also to deal with what has happened with maturity, mercy, and hopefully love and forgiveness, too.