“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”
This is quite a frightening prospect, that the church has the authority over the eternal destiny of a man and this is the power that the Roman Catholic Church wielded absolutely in the past. The practice of discipline and confession flows from this authority.
We all know how much that degree of power had corrupted the people who wielded it, from the pope down to the priest.
On the other hand renouncing such power and leaving everything “in the hands of God” means the church is toothless and has little influence over the spiritual development of the flock except to teach and to love and even in these things it has not done so well.
It means someone like Ivan struggles on his own without a good support group to help him keep to his discipline as well as encourage him when he struggles. He also has little opportunity for wholesome fellowship with Christians that can inspire him to aspire to become a better man. I am trying to help him build a devotional life but he needs more than that: real people, real lives, real love and care, real spiritual examples.
The church meanwhile is focused on worship (singing songs really these days), fellowship (eating and chatting) and evangelism and is hardly involved with the important process of dealing with sin because it covers its own eyes to not see sin, confining it to the realm of privacy. All we tell people is “go to God”. Yet Jesus clearly tells us that dealing with sin is a priority for the church.