I finally got around to reading Mark Dever’s excellent little book, What is a Healthy Church? I’ll have a post up on the whole book soon, but I wanted to put up a couple of things he had to say. First, “If you’re thinking about leaving a church.”
Before You Decide to Leave
1. Pray.
2. Let your current pastor know about your thinking before you move to another church or make your decision to relocate to another city. Ask for his counsel.
3. Weigh your motives. Is your desire to leave because of sinful, personal conflict or disappointment? If it’s because of doctrinal reasons, are these doctrinal issues significant?
4. Do everything within your power to reconcile any broken relationships.
5. Be sure to consider all the “evidences of grace” you’ve seen in the church’s life – places where God’s work is evident. If you cannot see any evidences of God’s grace, you might want to examine your own heart once more (Matt. 7:3-5).
6. Be humble. Recognize you don’t have all the facts and assess people and circumstances charitably (give them the benefit of the doubt).
If You Go
1. Don’t divide the body.
2. Take the utmost care not to sow discontent even among your closest friends. Remember, you don’t want anything to hinder their growth in grace in this church. Deny any desire to gossip (sometimes referred t as “venting” or “saying how you feel”).
3. Pray for and bless the congregation and its leadership. Look for ways of doing this practically.
4. If there has been hurt, then forgive – even as you have been forgiven.
Great words of advice from a pastor I really respect. Over the years I have seen families move on to other churches for good reasons and bad reasons. Back in 1992 I blew it myself. As a young Christian I left the church through which I was converted for another church that was more doctrinally oriented. The specific reasons for moving on were sound, but the manner in which I left was not considerate. I just up and left without notice. After a few weeks the pastoral staff called and inquired how I was. I told them I decided to move on to another church. We eventually sat down over lunch where they were gracious to me, but explained that as a member of the church I should have been been more considerate of my church family. The advice I was given then was very similar to what mark has written above.
I am the Lead Pastor of Redeemer Fellowship; husband to Jen; Dad to Katherine, Elias, Madeline, and Kilian. If you're in town you can probably find me in the local coffee house or running through the neighborhoods.
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Thanks for this word. We just recently left a regional SBC mega after 12 years for a local non-denom. Since I had some leadership responsibilities, I discussed our searching for God’s will with some other leaders and mentors. This came down to a simple desire to be more missionally minded in our own community. Once we saw God’s will, we set up an exit time of two months to give leadership time to make adjustments and ensure no hard feelings. We somewhat correctly did most of the other things you mentioned, with a glaring excpetion. We had close friends in ministry (think you and Steve) that live almost as close to our new local church as us, and to be honest, we really wanted them to come with us as well, so we were more critical of the mega methodology than we should have been. We’ve since ceased and desisted. God is using them where they are. In his providence they may join us, or they may not.
Even though I talked with the pastors at our old church when we left 6 months ago, I’ve not yet gone through the administrative process of removing our names from the membership roll (why is that difficult for me?!?).
So in a desire to help you SBC folk keep it real, just subtract 6 from the 16 million.
I left a church once. But for a practical reason. My wife and I moved to the opposite end of the city when we bought our first (and so far only) home in which we live and just couldn’t afford the gas so we joined a closer church with the blessings of our former church. Leaving a church isn’t always because of negative issues. Sometimes it’s because of a blessing.
How interesting that God brought me to this site! I was asking some questions to Joe over the weekend about the website design, and happened to read this article about leaving a church. As it turns out, I meet with a guy every other week for coffee and accountability, and this week he told me he and his wife are wanting to change churches (ours is pretty big, and they feel a little lost). I was able to point him to this article, and I hope that he follows through on the advice that you gave. God certainly moves in ways we never would realize on our own, but I’m sure His hand was in bringing me to this site and leading me to this article. Thanks!
Hi Joe, I throoughly and blatantly stole this article and put it up on my site.
Thank you!
Joe -
Thanks for posting this excerpt – finding it this afternoon proved timely and most helpful. For several months, my wife and I have been attending a newly-created church (merger of two previously independent local non-denoms). This new entity lost a lot of what made our old church good and while we are confident in our justification to leave, we have struggled greatly with exactly *how* to leave…
I think I’ll have to pick up Dever’s book as we begin a new – and challenging – search for a more healthy local church.
Thanks again!
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