A Tale of Three Cities: A Testimony of Grace Through Church Discipline
April 17, 2026
April 17, 2026
Abstract: Jeromy Blomquist recounts the story of how God used two churches separated by thousands of miles to display his grace in the lives of a couple that was previously living in an immoral relationship. This story of repentance highlights God’s sovereign grace in salvation, and it should encourage churches to practice the ordinary means of grace through preaching, discipleship, and church discipline.
Sabrina burst into tears as she sat on our couch. This was the first time my wife, Amanda, and I had Mante and Sabrina over for dinner. They had recently moved to Bellingham—a few blocks from our church. “What is the name of the church you were at in San Diego?” I asked moments before. “Are you going to call my pastor?” she asked fearfully, her voice choked with sobs.
As it turned out, Sabrina had been excommunicated by her previous church. While this was only the beginning of our journey with Mante and Sabrina, God had been orchestrating this beautiful story for years. This is a real-life example of God accomplishing his will through the ordinary means of grace in local churches thousands of miles apart. Several churches in different states unknowingly became “fellow workers” in caring for Sabrina and Mante (1 Cor. 3:9).
The first time they attended Legacy Church in the summer of 2023, they both had a thick ESV MacArthur Study Bible. They were living together, and we suspected they weren’t married—neither wore rings. The next Sunday, they didn’t return. Instead, they explored a few other churches in the area. To our surprise, they returned five months later. That’s when we invited them over to dinner. After dinner, we sat in the living room and asked them questions to try to learn more about them. They’d been dating for two years and had met in San Diego before moving across the country to Pennsylvania. While in Pennsylvania, they bought a bus and started converting it into a camper. They then drove cross-country to where we live in Bellingham, Washington.
Bewildered by these contradictory pieces of information, I asked why they came back to Legacy and what they were looking for in a church. Mante, a newly professing Christian, explained that he liked the other churches they visited because of their worship, but Sabrina, who seemed to have a healthy church background, convinced him that preaching the Bible was more important than the production quality of the music. They may not have known the right terminology, but they returned to Legacy because of expositional preaching and a culture of evangelism and hospitality.
We grappled with their incongruent choices, sensing God’s hand was at work. They knew what good preaching was, and they knew we preached the Bible. And both of them had theologically conservative Study Bibles. Yet they were living together while unmarried. How did Sabrina know what to look for in a church? Who taught her about expositional preaching? More to the point, wouldn’t they have known that we would confront them in their adultery? And why would they return to Legacy instead of attending one of the other churches that didn’t practice meaningful membership? They could have remained unknown with their sin unconfronted.
It was around this time that I asked the question about Sabrina’s previous church. The question clearly struck a nerve. After Amanda comforted her, Sabrina shared that she had attended San Diego Reformed Church (SDRC). The pastor had told her that she couldn’t be a member there any longer, nor could she share in the fellowship of the Lord’s Table with her beloved SDRC friends. In other words, she was excommunicated—the final stage of church discipline that Jesus taught about in Matthew 18:15–20. At this point in our relationship, we didn’t know why she was excommunicated, nor did we know if SDRC was a faithful church. What we did know is that the formal act of discipline stung Sabrina. After months of patient shepherding, she told us the story.
Back in April of 2021, Sabrina had become a member of SDRC, where she sat under the expositional preaching of Pastor Zack Gilman for more than a year. She was also being discipled by various women at the church and seemed to be growing in her faith. But Sabrina was in the San Diego restaurant industry, which was notorious for its sensual and immoral lifestyle. It was there that she met Mante, a scientifically minded atheist at the time, and Sabrina became the wandering sheep of Matthew 18:10–14. She seemed to have tasted the goodness of the Word of God, yet she walked away.
She formed a romantic and adulterous relationship with Mante, and several close friends confronted her. By that fall, she had confessed the relationship to her best friend, Janet, yet Sabrina refused to end the relationship. On January 11, 2022, Janet, along with Pastor Zack and another friend, met with Sabrina again to call her to repentance. After months with no signs of repentance, they were forced to “tell it to the church” (Matt. 18:17). In July, Pastor Zack sent a painful email to the members of SDRC in which he explained the next stage of discipline according to Matthew 18 and the responsibility of the members at their next members meeting.
At that meeting on July 17, Pastor Zack exhorted the church to commit to praying for Sabrina, and he urged them to call her to repentance. Sabrina recalls being bombarded with love. The members pursued her. They pleaded with her. They warned her. She said, “It felt terrible, like I was being stalked. I didn’t want to hear any of it.” The fleshly desires of the world pulled her away and hardened her heart to the calls of repentance. That August, the members of SDRC formally removed Sabrina from their membership as an act of church discipline.
The apostle Paul, addressing intolerable sexual immorality, told the church in Corinth to deliver a man “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (1 Cor. 5:5). He then went on to tell them “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother [or sister] if he is guilty of sexual immorality” (v. 11). The members of SDRC were to “cleanse out the old leaven” so that they might be a “new lump” (v. 7). Sabrina was the leaven, and the church was purified by excommunicating her. This act of discipline also communicated the judgment of God that she would receive if she did not repent.
If, on the other hand, the church hadn’t taken this step, Sabrina might have continued believing she was right with God, the church would have been infected with immoral behavior, and outsiders who knew that Sabrina was living with her boyfriend would be confused about what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
It was after being removed from SDRC that Sabrina moved to Pennsylvania. She had severed relational ties to the church and become hardened to the gospel. Mante, however, had started having spiritual conversations with Sabrina’s dad, Izzy, a long-time, faithful Christian. Mante had a scientific background and studied wildlife biology, and he was absolutely confident in the theory of evolution and the idea of a world without God. Yet these conversations challenged him.
“I was so sure in what I believed,” he said, “but Izzy was so sure in what he believed too.” Mante was perplexed at how this could be. “If he believed it so much, then maybe I should look into it,” he said. Izzy was able to apply biblical truth to real life in a way that struck a chord with Mante. He was becoming curious about the claims of Jesus Christ. The tables were turning.
While Sabrina was running from God toward Mante, God was drawing Mante to himself. Eventually, by God’s grace, Mante put his faith in Christ. And, by that same grace, Sabrina would later repent of the sin that she had been confronted with long ago by her church in San Diego.
Shortly after this, Mante and Sabrina got an itch for adventure and googled “most adventurous place to live in the United States.” That’s why they had moved to Bellingham, where they eventually found our church.
A month after bursting into tears on my couch, on Sunday, December 31, 2023, it became obvious that the Lord was at work in this couple as they approached me after the service. Mante began, fumbling as he searched for the right words, “We know that we are not honoring the Lord in our relationship. Can you help us?” It wasn’t supposed to be this easy. Where was the difficult confrontation about their sin? Where was the loving plea from other church members to repent and believe the gospel afresh? Unbeknownst to us, that work had already been done. The Lord had been at work through the faithful labor of the saints of San Diego Reformed Church.
I met with Mante and Sabrina later that week and walked them through the gospel and Ephesians 1–2. They wanted to start living a life that honored the Lord, but they didn’t know how. They didn’t want to simply “check the box” on marriage by going to the courthouse to make it “legal”—they wanted to repent!
But there was a lot to untangle. They lived together in a city where they had no family or friends, and they ran an Airbnb out of their home. This is where the members of Legacy Church stepped up. One member was in Brazil on a long-term business trip, and without meeting the couple, he gave Mante the keys to his house and let him live there until he returned. Another member, a mother of four, started discipling Sabrina through the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. Together, Amanda and I discipled them on what it looked like to live a gospel-centered life.
Before long, Mante joined the Army Reserves. Attending basic training for eight months was part of their plan to live faithfully. This time of separation was also a catalyst that propelled Sabrina to build relationships with other women in the church. Additionally, church members provided a place for her to live when Mante returned from basic training. Legacy Church was living out Christ’s love for Sabrina and Mante (Acts 2:42–47).
On May 12, 2024, Brian MacSwan, our lead pastor, preached a sermon on church discipline. This was an opportunity to follow up with Sabrina about how she had been disciplined by her previous church. She admitted that SDRC had done the right thing and that they had carried out the process faithfully.
Providentially, on May 19, 2024, right after hearing the sermon on church discipline, Sabrina had a trip to San Diego planned. We encouraged her to attend SDRC and reconcile with them, and she did. That Sunday she met with Zack and his wife, Taylor, for dinner. They wept tears of joy as they celebrated her repentance. On Sunday, June 16, 2024, Pastor Zack again wept as he reported her repentance to the church. He made it clear that Sabrina was in right fellowship with Christ and his body. The members of SDRC rejoiced alongside the host of heaven at this wandering sheep who had been found (Luke 15:3–7).
Earlier this year, Sabrina went through Legacy Church’s membership class while Mante was away at basic training. She was baptized into our membership on January 5, 2025, having realized her prior baptism as a child preceded her actual conversion.11 .The members of Legacy Church voted to affirm Sabrina into membership on December 1st, 2024, contingent upon her being baptized as a believer. On May 31, Mante and Sabrina were married. Then, on June 29, Mante was also baptized and welcomed into membership at Legacy Church.
This is a story of God’s extravagant grace and mercy displayed through the local church. However, we do not exercise church discipline because of stories like these; things don’t always turn out this way. Many congregations weep bitterly as those whom they have excommunicated never show signs of repentance. Rather, we exercise church discipline because the Bible commands it for the purity and witness of the church and for the eternal good of those who are excommunicated.
In the case of Sabrina, we rejoice! The joint work of two churches thousands of miles apart embodies Paul’s words to the church in Corinth. One church “planted,” another “watered,” but “God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6).