If this is on your mind, I don’t blame you. Church can be difficult. It certainly isn’t a good time for you to feel guilty, or listen to people who might accuse you of being a bad Christian for feeling the way you do.
As a pastor of many years, and someone who’s attended church most of his adult life, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the growing number of people who simply can’t stand going to church anymore.
Many Christians in America, shortly after coming to faith, join a church. We might bee bop around for a bit until we find something that’s comfortable, but we ultimately settle in, commit on some level, serve, connect, etc.
Most of the time, we enjoy having this ritual at the end of our week.
After a while however, things begin to get boring, monotonous. Us long-timers get a good look “under the hood” of our community and see some of its unsavory parts. The sermons fail to hit home, and/or or the leadership fails to embrace things that we feel are important.
It’s easy to get to a point where it feels like it’s time to go.
Maybe it is.
Either way, if you’re considering leaving your church, take a simple step before you go. In any big decision, it’s important to open our minds to God’s perspective, should He decide to share it with us.
It makes sense to offer up two simple requests before you go.
These not only apply to the soon-to-be-leaving, they’re good for anyone in a tough relationship, or a community that feels like it’s gone sour.
Give Me Your Eyes
As St. Paul roamed the 1st Century world, talking about Jesus and convincing all sorts of people to follow Him, churches formed in his wake – lots of churches. As these unique communities grew, Paul wrote letters, commonly referred to as his “epistles,” instructing these fledgling churches on the basics of faithful living in light of the reality of Jesus.
Paul seemed to think that these churches were important, a movement of God, frequently referring to them, individually and corporately, as “The Body of Christ.”
While the Bible’s not replete with commands to go to church, it does paint the local church as something that belongs to God, something holy. In light of this, we’re compelled to ask, is church an invention of humanity, or something much bigger?
History suggests the latter. Us Christian folk, in all our myriad expressions, have been gathering for millenia to celebrate, honor, and do our best to corporately submit to God.
Some of us, when we’re ready to leave, say things like, “I’m done,” “I’m fed up,” etc., painting a picture of a church that nobody should attend. Church is a bad boyfriend, something we need to rid ourselves of.
When things sour, is it because things are truly bad, or are we unable to see the good parts, as God does?
Both, maybe?
If God could give you His perspective on your church, would you take it? If you could somehow look at the people of your church the way God does, would it change anything?
This is the best thing we can pray before leaving. Asking God to see your church, especially the people of your church, the way He does can help bring clarity and the always much needed dose of humility into your decision.
Not a Popular Question:
Almost without exception, the people that I talk to about leaving church have had a negative experience with the leadership, the people, or both, and it’s left them with some level of emotional trauma – commonly referred to as “hurt feelings.”
But we don’t like to talk about it when our feelings get hurt. It feels weak. Faithless. It’s much easier to vilify our perpetrators, making us the righteous, innocent victim.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to be part of any community that involves humans and not get hurt at some point (i.e., betrayed, let down, lied to, used, etc.), especially for those who commit to serve. It’s unavoidable. The deeper you go into this machine, the more likely you are to get hurt.
The perfectly mature, 100% sold-out Jesus follower dives into these broken places, doing everything in their power to reconcile, forgive, and have their character forged into the image of something that we’re all hoping to be.
But for the rest of us, this is hard, scary work.
Reconciliation requires a level of strength, courage, faith, and humility that most of us don’t carry around in our back pockets. And our culture doesn’t value things like forgiveness, humility, and healed relationships. The deck is stacked against us, so when bad things happen, as they always do in groups of people trying to be friends, we excuse ourselves from the arena.
And we suffer for it. If your goal in life is to become a spiritual zombie, refusing to deal with the hurts that you’ve accumulated in life is the quickest path.
These unhealed hurts make it nearly impossible for us to walk into Sunday morning services, sing the almighty’s praises, listen to another boring sermon, shake hands, drop some $$$ in the basket, then come back next week to loop through it all again.
If you’ve been hurt, and you haven’t done anything about it, church will feel bad to you. Wrong.
It’s only a matter of time before you leave.
I hear a lot of hurting people who’ve left church say, “Instead of church, I go for a walk and talk to Jesus,” or, “I go to a coffee shop with my Bible on Sunday morning and feel way better than I do at church.”
I get that. It will always feel better to distance ourselves from painful relationships. But the Bible frequently, and with great clarity, calls us to mend things, to reconcile, to avoid the temptation to run away. In some cases, it questions our faith if we refuse.
Before we leave, we’re compelled to ask God, not ourselves, if we’re hurt. If we try to do some DIY soul searching, or query our feelings, we’ll typically come up with the wrong answer. God is the only one qualified to plumb the depths of our spiritual garbage, filter out the things we can handle, and put them in our face.
If you pray the “God, am I hurt?” prayer, and the answer is “yep,” things can get scary. What’s required of us in the reconciliation process is super hard. Again, the forgiveness and courage that are called for in these arenas take a mountain of character.
Unfortunately, impossible moments are the only places where character can be purchased.
In all of the above prayers, it’s important that we open ourselves to answers we might not want to hear, which means that we’ll have to take steps we don’t want to take. In any big decision, all options need to be laid clearly on the table, and we need to be open to all of them.
Ultimately, sometimes, it’s appropriate to go. Our desire to transition to another church, or take a break, or leave corporate gatherings altogether might be coming from God Himself.
But because Christianity has a long history of doing church, and because our feelings and perspectives can be so misleading, it’s important that we involve God in our decision, and do our best to listen for an answer that might confirm what’s inside, or submit to a spirit that begs us to stay.
Oh how the Lord knew I needed this. Thank you.
Good! Me too…