Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Plough Quarterly • Summer   Johann Christoph Arnold, born in 1940, is a writer and senior pastor of the Bruderhof communities. T o forgive on a personal basis is one thing; for a fellowship to pronounce forgiveness is quite another. Is it even necessary? Granted, in many instances a wrong committed can be put right by a simple apology. In community this should be a daily experience. But grave sins may need to be brought before the community or at least before a small group of trustworthy brothers and sisters. To use the New Testa- ment analogy of the church as a body, it would be unthink- able for an injury to one part to go unnoticed by the whole: the defenses of the entire body are mustered. So too the sin of one person in a church will affect every member. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, “A community cannot afford to ‘overlook’ one another’s sins because they have learned that sins are a threat to being a community of peace.” Members of a united community will “no longer regard their lives as their own” or harbor their grievances as merely theirs. “When we think our brother or sister has sinned against us, such an affront is not just against us but against the whole community.” Most churches today shy away from practicing discipline. Unfortunately, because of this, members who stumble and fall have little chance for repentance, let alone a new beginning. Mark and Debbie, members of the community I belong to, experienced this firsthand before coming to join us: “Over the years we wit- nessed the disastrous results of ignoring sin or secretly hiding it. We lived in a small urban community with several people, one of whom was a single man who had fallen in love with a married woman in our group. Some of us tried to tackle their affair by talking with them separately about it. Yet there was no way to really bring it out in the open–we had no mutual understanding or covenant, and no grasp of the authority Jesus had given to his church to Without discipline in the community, there is no way to experience clarity or victory. Photograph by cristovao / shutterstock.com Repentance J O H A N N C H R I S T O P H A R N O L D