I would argue that a Biblically faithful congregation of believers MUST, if needed, rise to the occasion of applying discipline.
I was co-leading a youth group with a young Pastor I had followed all over the countryside calling on some of the most unlikely of people . . . This Pastor was the real deal, despite his youth and relative inexperience.
Our youth group was a typical cross section of the children of a typical community, so we had all sorts of behavior, good, bad, otherwise . . . One girl, a granddaughter of two of the four dominant families in the area (thus in the congregation) and also a great granddaughter of the other two, became pregnant (obviously out of wedlock and outside the moral standards of not only Biblical Christians but most communities at the time). The Pastor immediately expelled her from all activities in the youth group and called a special meeting with her and a deacon to address her behavior and its consequences as far as her membership. She remained unrepentant, and he forbade her to come back to the youth group until she would come and apologize to the congregation for her misconduct and ask for accountability and help in pursuing a Godly life from that point forward.
The deacons called him on the carpet and demanded that he apologize at the next Church session. Of course he refused and offered his resignation at that next session.
I did not return there for several years, but instead transferred my membership to another Baptist Church.
During those years, I encountered several of the other young ladies with whom I had worked in that youth group, only to discover that they had two things in common, unwed pregnancy and an immutable personal conviction that the Pastor had been wrong, had been rightly run out of the Church and had been completely outside the realm of Biblical Christianity by not accepting the pregnant girl as part of the youth group.
Obviously none of those girls, now women, are living for the Lord today or raising children who are even the least bit likely to do so. Their morals, if they had not already been corrupt before the Church failed monumentally in its duty to exercise discipline, were certainly corrupt after that failure. I would solidly argue that the Church's failure led to the first immoral girl corrupting the rest.
One of the young women actually told me that Churches needed to protect their members from Pastors who would alienate people by such offensive actions as preaching against unwed pregnancy and that she was proud her family had chased away the good Pastor for doing so.
I responded that if the Pastor must avoid the subject of unwed pregnancy for her sake and gender dysphoria for another family, what if a thief were in the audience? Must the Pastor refrain from counsel against theft?
What sins, if any, would be permissible to preach against?
She did not reply, but in doing so, I think she unwittingly gave me her honest answer.
