In my previous essay, “Telling your pastor you’re leaving,” a reader’s pastor brought up “the steps you need to take before you leave the church.” I found another pastor’s list of these steps, and thought I’d discuss them. He recommends six things, which I summarize this way.
- Pray about it.
- Talk to your pastor.
- Take a serious look at your reasons for leaving. Does God approve of them?
- Fix any broken relationships.
- Is there any evidence God is working in this church?
- Be humble: Give the church the benefit of the doubt.
If, after all these things, you still decide to leave that church, he tells people to make sure they don’t divide or disrupt the church on the way out. Pray for them, forgive them, resist the temptation to gossip, and be gracious as you go.
Okay. Time I commented on them.
Leaving your church, or the church?
Before I even touch upon the list, I should be clear: Christians need to go to church. No exceptions. It’s not optional. If you’re gonna follow Jesus, if you’re gonna be in God’s family, you need to interact with God’s family. So find a branch of God’s family, and go to church there.
If you’re leaving one branch of the family, and your intent is to join another branch of the family, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with switching churches per se. Let’s say you’re going to a Baptist church, and you’ve decided you’d much rather go to a Lutheran church, or a Methodist church, or an Orthodox church, or even a different Baptist church: That’s fine. No matter what denomination it is, or even if it’s no denomination at all, if the church is following Jesus, it’s part of the family. (If it’s not following Jesus, it’s not in the family, but I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you picked a Christ-centered church.) Going to a different branch of the universal Church of Jesus Christ does not mean you left Jesus’s church. You only switched branches.
If you’re leaving one branch, and never intend to join another—because you are done with the church—that’s not fine. Okay, you might have been in a dysfunctional church. I certainly have. There are plenty of dysfunctional churches. (Stands to reason; the body of Christ is made out of sinners. Forgiven, but still sinners.) Having a rotten church experience does not grant you a get-out-of-church pass. You need to go to church. It’s not optional. Find, or start, a good healthy church. Go there.
Now, as I said, there’s nothing wrong with switching churches per se. Some Christians will argue there’s plenty wrong with it. That’s because they only trust their church to share Jesus accurately. They don’t trust any of the other churches to do it right. Bluntly, they don’t trust Jesus to save you without them.
Switching churches is only wrong for one reason: You’re trying to dodge responsibility.
Dodging responsibility.
And dodging responsibility is a very wide category. The most common example would be how sometimes Christians don’t get along: Two Christians get into a disagreement about something or other. Might be an interpretation of the bible. Might be a difference of opinion about the church’s priorities. Might be that both of them want to get their way, yet only one of them will. Might be a casual comment which offended one of them, and they don’t want to forgive it. Large or small, it turns into enmity. And instead of forgiving one another, or working out our problems like Jesus orders us to, one of them either decides to quit that church… or, in some cases, push the other one out.
Sometimes the two Christians in disagreement are a church member and a church leader. The leader thinks the member is behaving inappropriately, and says so—and the member, outraged that anyone would dare correct them when they didn’t ask for any such correction, angrily leaves. Or the member thinks the leader is behaving inappropriately, and doesn’t say anything at all—abrogating our responsibility to warn one another away from sin (He 3.13) —and just angrily leaves. Or the member does say something—loudly, publicly, and lacking any sort of kindness, which of course the leader is gonna dismiss. Either, or both, could be sinning. In my experience it’s always been both: Neither party wants to be humble. Neither party wants to forgive.
Quite often I see the case where someone joins a church, hoping to take advantage of that church’s resources. Which is fine; that’s what the resources are for. But when they’re asked to contribute—when they’re asked for money, or asked to join a ministry, or asked to participate in any way—they balk. They’re at that church to take, not give. So they quietly go find another church which won’t ask anything of them.
Quite often I also see the case where someone joins a church, hoping to get quickly involved in that church’s leadership. They want authority, or recognition, or a title. They want to teach a class, or be recognized as a prophet, or get elected as deacon, or solo in the choir. They don’t want to submit their plans or ideas to anyone else, or seek consensus, or be hindered in any way; they just want power. When power doesn’t come quickly enough—or at all, because their immaturity is obvious to everyone but them—they go find another church which will recognize their talents. (And may God help that poor church.)
I could go on, but you get the idea: Christians misbehave. Christians sin. And people leave churches over it. It happens everywhere.
Back to the list.
I shared this pastor’s list with a fellow Christian. His response: “This pastor looks like a control freak. He’s just trying to keep people in his church. Why can’t he let them leave if they want to? Why do they have to talk to the pastor first? Or give the church the benefit of the doubt?—’cause who says the church isn’t in the wrong? What if it’s a church full of legalists, and the reason people are leaving is because the pastor’s trying to rule over every little thing his people do?
Let me first say I agree: Sometimes the church is in the wrong. I’ve been in churches that have gone wrong. When a church stops following Jesus—or when we suddenly realize, to our horror, it never really was following Jesus, and isn’t producing any good fruit at all—we can’t stay in it. Either we gotta fix it, or get out. In those cases, our only prayer would be, “God, do you want me to stick around, or shake the dust off my feet as I go?” And there’s little point in talking with the pastor, especially when the pastor is the chief antichrist.
But regardless of whether the church is in the wrong, we Christians have to look at ourselves. Are we, in any way, in the wrong? Are we leaving this church for the wrong reasons? Are we dodging responsibility, or leaving behind broken relationships which we could’ve repaired, or are so insistent on having our way that we can’t see how Jesus is having his way with this church?
See, this pastor’s list is really a self-inventory. Let’s pretend there’s absolutely nothing wrong with our church: Can, as we go, we find anything in ourselves which ought not be there? If we can, we need to be rid of it.
Because when we’re leaving a church for the right reasons, we’re gonna have no problem being gracious as we go. If we’re leaving a church whose faith is dead, we’re not gonna be angry about it; we’re gonna be sad. If we’re leaving a church full of heretics, or where the gossips and hypocrites and other misbehaving Christians have taken over: We’re not gonna be vengeful about them, and try to tell outrageous stories in order to scare people away; we’re gonna dispassionately and honestly inform people what they do and teach, and leave it to them to decide whether they want to get mixed up in that.
Likewise if we’re leaving a church under amicable circumstances. When we have to switch churches because we’re moving to a new city, or because we’ve been given an opportunity to minister elsewhere, or because the church’s services better fit our needs, or because God’s calling us to a new challenge—when we switch churches on friendly terms, we shouldn’t have any reason to bash our previous churches. We should be able to keep friendly relations with them. We should be able to recommend those churches to anyone who’s looking for that sort of church. After all, they’re family. And ideally, we should be able to do the same thing with every church we leave. Or should try to be able to.
We need to be honest with ourselves. We need to be humble. We need to figure out whether we’re at fault. And if we are, repent. Work things out. Accept our responsibilities instead of running away from them. And, in many cases, stay.
It’s not about the pastor being a control freak. It’s about following Jesus, instead of hiding from him in church after church after church.