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1. DefinitionDown to the present day, in Protestantism  church  discipline – also  moral discipline,  congregational discipline, “brotherly/sisterly admonition” – has served as a collective term for various measures (in the setting of pastoral care and ecclesiastical oversight) intended to maintain the church’s doctrine and order, and to restore a manner of life that is not contrary to Christian norms. (On questions of discipline in the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches, see Ecclesiastical law.)The purpose of the church’s disciplinary measures …

1. General1.1. DefinitionUntil well into the 20th century, the term church order always referred only to the legal systems of the churches in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire in which the Reformation had been established, negating any continuation of canon law (Ecclesiastical law). Quite recently the term has also been applied to texts composed between the 2nd and 5th centuries that deal with questions of how life should be ordered in the Christian communities [3].To date there has been no agreed definition of the legal documents called church orders in P…