2 Thessalonians 3:15
2 Thessalonians 3:1515Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.
The Watchtower cites ("stop associating with him") as one of the biblical bases for the disfellowshipping and disassociation policy — the practice of cutting all contact with a former Witness, including immediate family, until reinstatement. The policy applies not only to gross immorality (the actual scope of 1 Corinthians 5) but to doctrinal disagreement, unpaid questions, and quiet withdrawal from the congregation. Verse 15 is typically passed over quickly.
Read the very next sentence. Verse 15 in the NWT says: "And yet do not consider him an enemy, but continue admonishing him as a brother." The verse is the decisive counter to total shunning — in the same paragraph, in the same breath as the verse 14 instruction. You cannot "continue admonishing him as a brother" if you are forbidden from speaking to him at all. Paul's discipline is restorative, not excommunicative in the modern Watchtower sense.
The pattern is confirmed by , Paul's follow-up on the 1 Corinthians 5 case. The man repented, and Paul urgently instructed the congregation: "the punishment imposed on him by the majority is sufficient... so instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him... reaffirm your love for him." Paul treats discipline as brief, aimed at restoration, not as a multi-year reinstatement process in which repentant people sit in the back row being ignored by their own families. And tells the unrepentant to be treated "as a tax collector" — which Jesus himself treated by eating with them (Matt 9:10-11), calling one as an apostle (Matt 9:9), and being criticised as their friend (Matt 11:19). Following Jesus's own pattern with tax collectors looks nothing like the Watchtower's total-shunning policy.