What Happens When a Christian Sins?

Handling Sin

“But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.”

Luke 15:20

What happens when a Christian sins — gravely, really sins? Every church must answer that question, and the answer it gives reveals what it believes God is like. Among Jehovah’s Witnesses the answer is a process: confession to the elders, a judicial committee of three, a verdict on the sinner’s repentance — and, if the verdict goes against him, removal, announced from the platform. From that evening the other Witnesses stop associating with him, and the rule reaches his family: a parent, a child or a brother outside his household is to limit contact to what family business requires. He has usually lost, in a single evening, nearly everyone he knows.

The Catholic Church answers the same question with a sacrament. Confession is private, often anonymous, and sealed — no committee, no announcement, no record — and it ends in absolution, usually within minutes. The two systems are compared on this page, and the sharpest edge of the Watchtower’s system, shunning, is tested against the Scriptures cited for it.

In 2024 the practice changed, though less than the announcing of it suggested. The Governing Body retired the word “disfellowshipped”: “Previously, we referred to unrepentant wrongdoers as being disfellowshipped. But now we simply use the Bible’s wording and refer to them as being removed from the congregation.” A removed person is now welcome at meetings, where he “may be greeted by Jehovah’s Witnesses,” and he may ask the elders to visit him. What did not change is the announcement, the loss of ordinary friendship, or the instruction that a Witness does not socialize with him.

So the question has two halves, and the second is the sharper. The first is whether Scripture requires the practice at all — whether the passages cited say what the practice needs them to say. The second is raised by the change itself. This rule has been relaxed, tightened and now renamed across seventy years, with Scripture given as the reason each time. Commands from God are not usually so responsive to review.

Let’s take the texts first, and then the record, and ask …

  • When a Christian falls, does the Gospel prescribe a committee and an announcement, or a physician and a seal of absolute secrecy?
  • Does the New Testament tell a Christian to withdraw affection from his own mother, or does it tell the congregation something narrower that has been read far too widely?
  • And when the apostle who ordered a man expelled wrote back demanding that he now be forgiven and comforted, which of the two letters is being obeyed?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Watchtower View

Jehovah’s Witnesses hold that a congregation which tolerates unrepentant serious sin ceases to be clean before God, and that Scripture leaves no discretion in the matter. One who practices such sin and will not repent, or who renounces his standing as a Witness, is removed from the congregation, and the rest of the congregation stops associating with him. This is not presented as revenge or as abandonment. It is presented as obedience to a plain command, as protection for the flock, and as the discipline most likely to bring the person to his senses and back to God.

How Sin Is Handled

Serious sin in the congregation is a matter for the elders. A Witness who commits serious wrongdoing is expected to approach the elders and confess it, and one who learns of a fellow believer’s serious sin is expected to see that the elders learn of it; concealment would make him a sharer in it. If the wrongdoing is established and serious, a judicial committee — normally three elders — meets privately with the person to determine whether he is repentant.1

If the committee judges him repentant, he is reproved, and may lose privileges in the congregation for a time. If not, he is removed: “The elders simply announce to the congregation that the person is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” A removed person who attends meetings and demonstrates repentance over time may be reinstated, and a committee decides when. The arrangement’s stated purposes are to keep the congregation clean, to protect Jehovah’s name from reproach, and, where possible, to restore the wrongdoer.2

What They Affirm

Scripture commands removal in so many words. Paul dealt with a man in the Corinthian congregation living in immorality and directed that the congregation “stop keeping company” with such a one, “not even eating with such a man,” and closed the passage with a command: “Remove the wicked person from among yourselves” (1 Cor. 5:11–13).3

And commands the withholding of greeting. John wrote that anyone who does not remain in the teaching of the Christ is not to be received into the home, and that one must not even say a greeting to him, since “he that says a greeting to him is a sharer in his wicked works” (2 John 9–11). The apostle who is called the apostle of love drew this line himself.4

A little leaven spoils the whole lump. The reason Paul gives is preservative: sin tolerated spreads (1 Cor. 5:6). A congregation that keeps an unrepentant wrongdoer in its fellowship tells its own young people that the standard is negotiable, and loses the moral distinctness that makes it worth joining.5

The discipline is meant to restore, and it works. The loss of association is not the end of the matter but the means to an end — it lets the person feel the weight of what he has done, which comfortable words would not accomplish. Thousands have returned and been reinstated, and the Society regards each as evidence that the arrangement is what it claims to be.6

Family affection does not override God’s command. Relatives living in the same house continue their normal family dealings; the marriage bond and the raising of children are not touched. Relatives outside the household reduce contact to what family matters genuinely require. Christ Himself said that whoever has greater affection for father or mother than for Him is not worthy of Him (Matt. 10:37).7

How the Arrangement Has Been Refined

The understanding has been adjusted as the light has grown brighter. The Society does not claim that its grasp of the arrangement has been static; it holds that the path of the righteous grows brighter as the day advances (Prov. 4:18), and the handling of removal has been refined accordingly. The procedure in its modern form dates from an article of 1952. A study article of 1974 cautioned against “going too far in the other direction, going from laxity to rigidity and hardness,” and left the extent of association with removed relatives outside the home to each family to decide. Two articles of 1981 set out the arrangement in the shape familiar since, directing that Christians related to such a person living outside the home “should strive to avoid needless association,” and applying the same announcement to one who disassociates himself. The adjustments of 2024 are the most recent.8

The word has been dropped in favor of the Bible’s own. In March 2024 the Governing Body announced that “disfellowshipped” would no longer be used. As the Society now puts it: “Previously, we referred to unrepentant wrongdoers as being disfellowshipped. But now we simply use the Bible’s wording and refer to them as being removed from the congregation.” The term is taken from the command at 1 Corinthians 5:13, and the change is presented as bringing the vocabulary of the organization closer to Scripture.9

And the treatment of removed ones has been softened. A removed person “is welcome to attend our religious services, where he may be greeted by Jehovah’s Witnesses.” He may request visits from the elders, “who will provide loving Scriptural counsel and warmly appeal for him to repent and return to God,” and elders are now encouraged to take the initiative. Talks marking a member for his conduct have been discontinued. The Society describes all of this as a fuller reflection of Jehovah’s mercy, not as a retreat from the command: the announcement is still made, and Witnesses still “do not socialize with someone who has been removed.”10

Endnotes
  1. On confession to the elders and the judicial-committee arrangement, see Shepherd the Flock of God (Watch Tower, elders’ manual), and “How Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Treat Those Who Used to Belong to Their Religion?” (jw.org): “If, despite repeated efforts to help him, he makes a practice of breaking the Bible’s moral code and does not repent, he must be removed from the congregation.” ↩
  2. The announcement wording is quoted from the same jw.org page: “The elders simply announce to the congregation that the person is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” On reinstatement, see the same page and Shepherd the Flock of God. ↩
  3. 1 Corinthians 5:11–13 is quoted here in the New World Translation, which renders verse 13 “Remove the wicked person from among yourselves.” See “How Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Treat Those Who Used to Belong to Their Religion?” (jw.org). ↩
  4. 2 John 9–11, New World Translation. The passage is cited in this connection throughout the Society’s literature, including Keep Yourselves in God’s Love (Watch Tower, 2008), ch. 3. ↩
  5. On removal as protection for the congregation, see “Propriety of Disfellowshiping,” The Watchtower (1 March 1952), the article that established the modern procedure. ↩
  6. On discipline as a means of restoration, see “Discipline That Can Yield Peaceable Fruit,” The Watchtower (15 April 1988), and the reinstatement provisions in Shepherd the Flock of God (Watch Tower, elders’ manual). ↩
  7. On relatives inside and outside the household, see “If a Relative Is Disfellowshiped . . .” and “Disfellowshiping—How to View It,” The Watchtower (15 September 1981), and Keep Yourselves in God’s Love (2008), ch. 3. ↩
  8. “Propriety of Disfellowshiping,” The Watchtower (1 March 1952); “Maintaining a Balanced Viewpoint Toward Disfellowshiped Ones,” The Watchtower (1 August 1974), which also states that “each family must decide to what extent they will have association with such ones”; and “If a Relative Is Disfellowshiped . . .” and “Disfellowshiping—How to View It,” The Watchtower (15 September 1981). All four are available in the Watchtower Online Library. ↩
  9. Governing Body Update #2, 15 March 2024, announced by Mark Sanderson, accompanied by the elders’ document “Adjustments to Handling Serious Wrongdoing in the Congregation” (S-395); the change was set out in The Watchtower (August 2024). The wording quoted is from “How Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Treat Those Who Used to Belong to Their Religion?” (jw.org). ↩
  10. All quotations in this paragraph are from “How Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Treat Those Who Used to Belong to Their Religion?” (jw.org). The discontinuance of marking talks was announced in The Watchtower (August 2024). ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church also takes sin seriously, and has always claimed the authority to discipline — so the argument here is not that discipline is unchristian. It is that the two systems answer the same question in opposite ways. When a Catholic sins, even gravely, he does not face a committee. He meets a confessor. And the discipline the New Testament actually describes is a narrower thing than shunning, aimed at a different target, and answered in the same apostle’s next letter by an order to take the man back.

The Confessional, Not the Committee

The Gospel shows the scene. A woman caught in adultery — offense established, witnesses assembled, sentence prescribed — is dragged before Jesus, and He declines the role of tribunal. When her accusers have gone, He is alone with her:

Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again (John 8:11)

The sacrament of Reconciliation is built to hold both halves of that sentence together — the mercy and the command. Its authority is the risen Christ’s commission: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:22–23), a sending that requires the sins to be heard; and the apostolic church already practiced it: “confess your sins to one another” (Jas. 5:16). In practice: a Catholic confesses privately to a priest, often anonymously behind a screen, receives counsel and a penance, and hears absolution — usually within minutes, repeatable for a lifetime. There is no panel judging the quality of his sorrow, no announcement, and no record. The seal of confession is absolute: a priest is bound “under very severe penalties to keep absolute secrecy,” a secret “which admits of no exceptions” (CCC 1467). Priests have accepted prison and death rather than break it.

None of this makes sin casual. Grave sins must be confessed at least yearly (CCC 1457), amendment is required, and absolution can be withheld from the unrepentant. But the system assumes what Scripture asserts — “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8) — so the line for the confessional includes everyone, and no one records who stands in it.

Two Purposes

The systems differ because their purposes differ. The Watchtower’s stated aims are protective: the congregation kept clean, Jehovah’s name shielded from reproach. The confessional’s aim is the sinner himself: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick … I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13). The difference shows up in the incentives. Where confessing triggers a committee, an announcement, and the loss of every friendship at once, the strongest incentive a sinner has is concealment — the system taxes honesty. Where confession is private, sealed, and answered with absolution, honesty costs nothing but humility, and the way back is measured in minutes rather than months.

The Letter That Answers the Letter

Now to the texts behind shunning, and the case begins at Corinth, so it should end there too. Paul ordered the immoral man expelled — “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved” (1 Cor. 5:5): aimed at his salvation from the first sentence. Then comes the second letter, about the same man. The punishment “is enough”; now “forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow”; “reaffirm your love for him” — and the reason: “to keep Satan from gaining the advantage over us” (2 Cor. 2:6–11). Discipline pressed past its purpose is not called rigor or loyalty; it is called the devil’s opening. Here the address is read while the household goes unvisited: a practice that takes the first letter as a standing command and the second as an exception has not read Paul, but half of him.

“Do Not Look on Him as an Enemy”

Paul glossed his own words. Telling Thessalonica to “have nothing to do with” the disorderly man, he adds at once: “Do not look on him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (2 Thess. 3:14–15). Warning a man as a brother requires speaking to him — the one thing shunning forbids. Whatever Paul meant, he did not mean a silence lasting years, and the relationship that survives the penalty is named: not enemy, but brother.

What 2 John Is About

The letter names its subject two verses earlier: deceivers “who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7) — traveling teachers, who lived on the hospitality of the households where the church met. “Do not receive him into the house” means do not lodge him, fund him, or hand him your congregation; the greeting withheld is the formal welcome of a teacher in good standing. To read it as a rule requiring a mother to refuse a greeting to her son is to take a text about heretical missionaries and apply it to the person least like them.

The People Paul Refuses to Judge

The chapter that grounds the whole practice also limits it: “What have I to do with judging outsiders? … God judges those outside” (1 Cor. 5:12–13). A person who resigns is, by his own act, an outsider — and it is precisely on those who leave that the modern rule falls hardest, the departure itself treated as the offense. The chapter cited to justify shunning those who walk away expressly declines authority over them.

The Commandment That Is Not Suspended

“Honor your father and your mother” is one of the ten, repeated in the New Testament without any clause about religious agreement (Eph. 6:2), and Paul is blunt: a man who fails his relatives “has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). Christ ruled on this exact maneuver — the korban rule that let a man dedicate his goods to God and escape supporting his parents: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition!” (Mark 7:9–13). A rule that tells a daughter she may not sit at her mother’s table is the same maneuver, made for the same reason.

What Excommunication Is, and Is Not

The Catholic penalty is worth stating plainly, because it is often assumed to be the same thing. Excommunication bars a Catholic from the sacraments and from office — that is its whole content. Nobody is told to stop speaking to him, eating with him, or loving him; his family owes him exactly what it owed him before; no announcement invites the parish to withdraw; and he is encouraged to keep coming to Mass. It is medicinal, lifted the moment he repents, under a law whose final canon makes the salvation of souls the supreme rule. The censure touches communion at the altar and stops there, because natural affection was never the Church’s to confiscate.

The Reply in Brief

Two systems face the same sinner. One convenes a committee, announces a verdict, and defends a name; the other sends him to a physician, seals what he says forever, and restores him the hour he repents. As for the texts behind shunning: the man expelled in the first letter is ordered forgiven in the second, lest Satan gain the advantage; Paul’s own gloss is “warn him as a brother,” which requires the speech shunning forbids; 2 John concerns traveling heretics, not mothers and sons; and Paul declines jurisdiction over the very outsiders the rule now falls on hardest. Against the practice stands a commandment the New Testament never qualifies — and the Gospel’s own picture of the moment after sin, which is not a hearing but Jesus alone with the woman: “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.” The father in the parable does not wait with folded arms. The son is still far off, still rehearsing his speech, when his father sees him and runs.

The full essay describes both systems from their own sources — the judicial committee from the Society’s publications, the sacrament of Reconciliation with its seal of absolute secrecy from the Catechism — compares their purposes, works through 1 Corinthians 5 and 2 Corinthians 2 verse by verse, sets 2 John beside the Didache on traveling teachers, traces the shunning rule from 1952 through 2024 in the Society’s own words, and asks whether a faith held on pain of losing one’s family is being held freely at all.

Summary

What happens when a Christian sins? Among Jehovah’s Witnesses: confession to the elders, a judicial committee, and — if the elders judge the sinner unrepentant — removal, announced from the platform, followed by the loss of nearly everyone he knows. In the Catholic Church: private confession to a priest, sealed forever, answered with absolution. The contrast runs deeper than procedure, and the scriptural case for the harsher system does not survive examination.

One system is a committee; the other is a confessional. A Witness’s serious sin goes before three elders, who judge his repentance and can end every friendship he has with one announcement. A Catholic’s serious sin goes to one priest, bound “under very severe penalties to keep absolute secrecy” (CCC 1467) — no panel, no announcement, no record, absolution usually within minutes, for a lifetime. The Gospel’s own picture is Jesus alone with the woman her judges condemned: “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again” (John 8:11).

The purposes differ, and the incentives follow. The Watchtower names its aims: keep the congregation clean, protect Jehovah’s name. The confessional’s aim is the sinner: “Those who are well have no need of a physician” (Matt. 9:12). Where confessing costs a committee hearing and possibly everything else, the system taxes honesty; where it is sealed and answered with mercy, honesty costs only humility.

The apostle who ordered the man expelled ordered him taken back. The expulsion at Corinth aimed at the man’s salvation (1 Cor. 5:5); the next letter says the punishment “is enough,” commands “forgive and comfort him,” and warns that pressing further lets Satan gain the advantage (2 Cor. 2:6–11). A practice built on the first letter that treats the second as an exception has read half of Paul.

Paul’s own gloss forbids the silence. “Do not look on him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (2 Thess. 3:14–15). Warning a man as a brother requires speaking to him — the one thing shunning prohibits.

2 John is about traveling teachers, not families. The letter names deceivers who deny the Incarnation (2 John 7), living on the hospitality of house churches. “Do not receive him into the house” is about lodging and funding a false missionary, not about a mother greeting her son. And Paul expressly declines to judge outsiders (1 Cor. 5:12–13) — the very people the modern rule falls on hardest.

Christ ruled against the family maneuver by name. The korban rule let a man dedicate his goods to God and escape supporting his parents — religion voiding a commandment: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition!” (Mark 7:9–13). Honoring father and mother is never qualified by their religion (Eph. 6:2; 1 Tim. 5:8).

Excommunication is not the same thing. The rare Catholic censure bars sacraments and office — nothing more. No one is told to stop speaking to the person; his family owes him what it always did; he is urged to keep coming to Mass; and the penalty lifts the moment he repents.

And a rule from God does not move like this one. Established 1952, relaxed 1974, tightened 1981, renamed 2024 — with Scripture cited each time, though Scripture did not change. For forty years 2 John was said to forbid even a greeting; now a removed person “may be greeted” at the Kingdom Hall. If the text forbade it, no update can permit it; if it did not, families were divided over a misreading.

In short: when a Christian sins, one system defends a name and the other saves a sinner. The discipline Scripture describes is medicinal, temporary, aimed at the congregation rather than the family, and closed by an order to forgive. The father in the parable is not waiting with folded arms. The son is still far off, still rehearsing a speech he never finishes, when his father sees him and runs.

One more word. If what you have read here has shaken more than your confidence in the organization — if you find yourself wondering whether God Himself was part of what you lost — the Atheism vs Christianity section was written for exactly that. Losing the Watchtower is not losing Christ. And if the fear of what leaving might cost is what weighs on you, Counting the Cost speaks to that plainly.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download What Happens When a Christian Sins? (.docx)