Yes, and the command is specific enough to be uncomfortable: the Bible tells Christians to stop sharing a table with a professing believer who persists, unrepentant, in serious sin — and it does not exempt pastors. “But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat” (1 Corinthians 5:11, KJV). Modern translations render the last clause “do not even eat with such people.” The instruction is the opposite of the counsel handed to anyone who raises concerns inside The Potter’s House — stay quiet, forgive, do not be divisive. Paul places the burden of separation not on the person who names the sin, but on the community that would otherwise normalize it. This article draws on a recent YouTube episode and takes up the one passage the longer treatment of what Scripture asks when religion is abused does not cover.
Whom does “do not even eat with such people” cover?
The passage is easy to soften by misreading its scope, so place it first. Paul is not telling Christians to shun sinners in general; he says so in the previous verse, noting that avoiding every immoral person in the world would require leaving the world (1 Corinthians 5:10). The command is narrow and aimed inward: it concerns “any man that is called a brother,” someone who claims the name of Christ while living in unrepentant, serious sin. For that person, Paul withdraws ordinary fellowship, down to the shared meal, which in the ancient world was the plainest sign of acceptance. The withdrawal is not vengeance and not hatred; it is the refusal to let the name of Christ cover conduct that contradicts it. Its aim, stated in the same chapter, is corrective — to stop the harm and to leave room for repentance, not to punish for its own sake.
Two features of the text matter for the case at hand. First, the list Paul gives is behavioral, not doctrinal: fornication, covetousness, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness, extortion. A man can affirm every article of a statement of faith and still land squarely inside it. Second, the command carries no office exemption. Paul does not write “unless he is a leader,” and the New Testament elsewhere holds leaders to a stricter account, not a looser one. A pastor who persists in the sins on Paul’s list is precisely the “brother” the verse has in view.
The dinner that makes the point
Here is where the principle stops being abstract. In-person gatherings are occasionally organized for former members of The Door, known as De Deur in the Netherlands. At a recent meetup, a former pastor mentioned in passing that before arriving he had shared a meal with the former pastor of The Door in Zwolle, a man his own church had removed over sexual misconduct, a case documented separately on this site.
The same culture that presses ordinary members to stay silent, to forgive without accountability, and to avoid “division” will, when a leader falls, quietly set aside the one boundary the Bible draws in plain words. Members who ask questions are told they are being unbiblical; a removed leader is welcomed back to the table as though 1 Corinthians 5:11 were never written. The burden of silence is placed on the whistleblower, and the burden of separation, which Scripture placed on the community, disappears. That is not the Bible applied unevenly. It is the Bible applied backwards.
“Isn’t table fellowship exactly where grace belongs?”
A thoughtful Christian will press back: Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, and a rule that bars a fallen man from the table looks like the opposite of grace. But Jesus shared meals with sinners who did not yet claim to be his, and the point was to call them in. Paul addresses the man who already claims the name and uses the claim as cover for unrepentant sin. Grace calls the outsider toward repentance; it does not let the insider evade it. The withdrawal 1 Corinthians 5:11 commands is itself aimed at repentance and restoration, which is why the same Paul, once a man in Corinth repented, urged the church to receive him back and comfort him (2 Corinthians 2:6-8). The command is not the end of grace. It is grace refusing to pretend nothing is wrong.
A second objection comes from inside The Fellowship: that raising any of this is divisiveness, and division is not of God. Scripture reserves the charge of division for those who split the church through false teaching and selfish ambition, not for those who name sin the Bible already names. Treating the person who applies 1 Corinthians 5:11 as the divider, while extending fellowship to the man it addresses, is the same reversal at work — the pattern by which the question is turned onto the character of the one asking it.
Where this leaves a reader
The verse does not ask a former member to organize a shunning or appoint himself anyone’s judge; the same chapter reserves final judgment to God and limits the church’s discipline to its own. What it does is settle a narrower and more practical question. When people insist that the godly response to a fallen leader is silence and an unbroken welcome, they are not standing on the Bible; they are standing against a specific sentence of it. The broader biblical case for confronting spiritual abuse, verse by verse, is laid out in the companion article. This one settles a single point. The Bible does draw a line at the table, and it draws it around the unrepentant brother, whatever his title once was.
