I’m always intrigued to see lines like “as an Episcopalian we don’t kick people out” or “we don’t excommunicate people.” Sure we do — even if a parish doesn’t do it formally we do it in more subtle ways. Lots of folks don’t feel welcome in our churches...

When we look around our churches we can clearly and plainly see that there are people who, for whatever reason, are not worshiping with us. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for folks to self-select but our “All are Welcome” signs aren’t entirely accurate.

Every Church and ecclesial community is like this — they have explicit and implicit norms that are often lacuna in our perception of who we are and how welcoming our parishes are.

As to the more formal ways of excommunicating people — notorious and grave sin is our standard for that. Encouraging people to live as witnesses to Christ means that we encourage them to not live scandalously. Each Church has its own ethical and moral standards.

Those standards reflect the way each community seeks to serve Christ. They also reflect each priest’s role as a pastor. It is not in someone’s spiritual interest for their priest to pretend everything they do is just fine if what they do is a scandal.

This is especially true if that way if life actively harms other people or denies their humanity in some basic way. So yes, virulent racists or those who act in ways that bring grave harm would be candidates for being encouraged to step away from the Sacraments.

This is as much for the sake of their soul as it is for the sake of Sacramental coherence and Church unity. Those who act in gravely harmful ways should not be seen (nor understand themselves) as being “in Communion” with the Body of the faithful.

Each Church and priest (in consultation with their Bishop) must prayerfully adjudicate these boundaries. But a community without boundaries is a community without standards and a community without standards is not a community it is a social network.

The Church exists as a Body that seeks the Kingdom. The Kingdom will, necessarily, have limits on what is permissible. The abuse and degradation of others is not part of the reality of the Kingdom and thus should not be part of what we view as being “in Communion.”

The standard of our Church is that this sin be grave and public — so we don’t apply this to garden variety sins of which everyone is guilty. But we must apply it to those things that are a scandal to being a Christian community — a scandal to Christ.

Our modern understanding of the word “scandal” is not necessarily helpful here — it doesn’t mean embarrassing if discovered. It means a thing which causes grave and lasting harm to our witness and to the self-understanding of the person and the community of right and wrong.

Churches fail again and again to hold themselves, their leaders, and their communities accountable for grave, public, and notorious sins. This leads understandably to the view that we are hypocrites. This is true. Part of dealing with that hypocrisy must be living faithfully.

This doesn’t mean we run around excommunicating people — it does mean that we exercise that authority as we would any other authority — in a way that protects the dignity of every person and that seeks the deepest kind of healing, repentance, and amendment of life.