Baptist communities in late-eighteenth-century Massachusetts were significant social institutions. Church membership was not merely a spiritual matter; it was a form of community belonging that carried economic and social implications. Withdrawal of fellowship was a public disciplinary action, recorded in church records, and it meant exclusion from the community networks that church membership provided.
The specific reason for the discipline — the attempt to enlist in the army under a male alias, the collection of an enlistment bonus, and the subsequent exposure — represented a cluster of behaviors that violated the norms the church was organized to enforce: honesty in dealing, conformity to expected gender roles, and the kind of social respectability that community institutions required of their members.
The withdrawal of fellowship made her position in Middleborough significantly more difficult. Combined with the public knowledge that she had attempted to pass as a man and had collected and returned an enlistment bonus, the church discipline made her standing in her home community considerably lower than it had been. The decision to travel to Uxbridge for the successful enlistment, rather than attempting again in Middleborough, reflects in part the reality that Middleborough was no longer a community where she had social cover for another attempt.
After her service and honorable discharge, her relationship with the Middleborough Baptist community was apparently eventually restored to some degree, though the details of how and when that restoration occurred are not documented with specificity in the sources available here. Her subsequent marriage and family life were centered in Sharon rather than Middleborough, which suggests that even after the war, the Middleborough community was not the primary context of her adult life.