Anonymous Asks (325)

“Is it a bad sign when lots of people leave a church in a short period?”

You cannot judge the value of a cause by its worst day in the public square, and you cannot judge the spiritual state of a church by the number of people spilling out its doorways, never to return. A great deal more information is required to pass judgment intelligently than simply “people are leaving”. We need to understand why they are leaving, or else our conclusions will be mistaken.

Departures may be an indicator something is wrong with the shrinking church. Equally, departures may indicate serious spiritual deficiencies in those making their way to the exits.

Save Yourselves the Heartache

A critic of one of my favorite gatherings of God’s people in another community recently put up a website to tell new folks in town, “save yourselves the heartache” and “be warned that many saints have left this gathering”. Evidently, he supposed numbers taking the exit ramp tell the whole tale. If so, his argument may be persuasive to some.

On the other hand, I spent a week in the same church earlier this year, watching between forty to sixty people a night gather to study the Bible three hours at a time for five straight weeknights. A third of these were in the fifteen-to-thirty age range, and we ordinarily consider the regular presence of young people an indication of spiritual vitality. This critic failed to mention those numbers, though I’m confident he was aware of them. He also conveniently left out the fact that despite “dozens” of departures in the last few years (by his reckoning), the church building remains packed every Sunday morning and has an energetic regular midweek crowd gathering for prayer.

So then, to assess the significance of people leaving, we need to have some idea how many are staying and how many more are coming into fellowship.

All Deserted Me

John records a period in our Lord’s ministry when “many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him”. The apostle Paul writes to Timothy, “At my first defense all deserted me.” In the first case, the departing disciples found the Lord’s teaching did not suit their refined spiritual palates. In the second, Paul’s friends lacked courage to stand at his side, just as the Lord’s disciples ran for the hills when the soldiers arrived to effect his arrest. In each case, the former disciples and cowardly friends were the ones in error. The Lord had not changed. Paul had not changed. Only the weather had changed, and the fair weather friends bolted the moment the first cloud appeared in the sky.

Of the Lord’s own teaching, he said, “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” What would we conclude if all the families of Jesus’ disciples remained consistently united in their view of him, either pro or con? I hope we would conclude his mission had failed, since the metric he chose to demonstrate its success was polarization. This is what he prophesied, and this is what he led his followers to expect.

It is also exactly what happened. People have strong reactions to truth, especially when maintaining that truth comes at a cost. They either love it and will not be parted from it, or else they run the other way to avoid it.

Cautions and Qualifications

Now, I’m not saying all polarizing churches are equally spiritual, or that all are necessarily following Christ or the apostles in every respect. Truth is not the only thing that creates divisions. I’m definitely not saying that everyone who leaves a numerically thriving church leaves for the wrong reasons. You’d have to sit down with each family and get honest explanations from them in order to know that, not to mention some independent confirmation of the facts at issue in each instance.

So is “lots of people leaving” a bad sign? It entirely depends. Christians forsake the gathering of themselves together with other Christians for many reasons, stated and unstated. Unless we know all those reasons in any given situation and understand them in context, we cannot reasonably conclude anything from the fact that some believers elect to beat feet and meet elsewhere.

If their former pews are still empty six months from now, we might reasonably wonder why. In the meantime, however, I’d be inclined to reserve judgment until we see how their personal choices play out.