I agree. However, the part I do not agree with is the “having nothing to do with him”. The way this is being practiced in a church back home is that all communication is cut off completely until the individual “repents”. However, the poor individual does not really understand what they are doing wrong. As such, this becomes complete social isolation, not just “do not feed the trolls”.

…which has been mentioned above, I see. Oh well, I still feel proud of my clever self for having thought of it.

For some reason I feel the need to emphasize that I am an atheist – just not one who likes anything, including the Bible, to be taken out of context. (Actually, putting the Bible into context was what trashed my faith. Might write about that later.)

And I think that’s exactly what’s happening here in churches like your dad’s. If the churches of Titus’ time were small, home-based communities, it wouldn’t take much for someone to take over if he wanted to. And if the person’s reasonably intelligent/pious/charming/sociopathic, he could quite easily get at least a few people on his side and begin to wreck havoc.

But, ultimately, a “divisive person” would actually have to try to divide the church, or act in ways which could lean toward those ends, before that title could be bestowed upon him.

A parallel situation could arise, though. Even without the presence of formal leadership, a person who’s already an established member of a group could be able to influence the church body towards ends similar to what you’re talking about – casting out a single person for a pittance. One could only hope that someone has the guts to stand up to the accuser, but that might cause even more division in the end.

Now, a personal note: I was in a network of house churches before deconverting. The average life span of any single church in that network was about 3-5 years, and primarily for reasons of discord like this. The alternative to overusing this verse is collapsing, but using Titus can hasten that collapse. There’s no winning apart from strict authoritarianism, as far as I can tell.

There is a puzzle contained in here that I still cannot grasp.

Actually, in our treatment of trolls, we’ve basically agreed to be more strict than the writer’s telling the church to be. I’m not disagreeing that the way this verse can be used is cruel, but only saying that there’s a proper context for everything.