When and Why to Leave Your Church (Part 2)

In my last post I began a consideration of why people leave their churches, which came from a recent Voices of Faith question. I identified three general categories of reasons, Economic, Theological, and Personal. We had gotten through the first two but need still to deal with personal reasons people leave churches.

Personal

These are almost always the least well-supported reasons for leaving a church.
Before getting too deep into this let me identify two main types of relationships that people have with their home churches today.
One is the traditional relationship in which you bind yourself to a congregation by the taking of membership vows and voluntarily place yourself under the spiritual authority of a local body and its elders.
The other is the laid-back 21st century American non-committal type of church relationship. Many churches, especially non-denominational churches simply don't have a membership, or the idea of membership is very loose. People come and go as their appetites change, and the leadership of the church does not pay too much (if any) attention to it. And church discipline is not even on the radar. A comparison of these two will have to wait for another time. Let me simply say that the second option, as popular as it is, makes proper, biblical functioning of the church body and its ruling body nearly impossible. But lets return to people leaving their church. 
Once you have joined yourself to a congregation and placed yourself under the care of that church and its elders (assuming the first model of church membership mentioned above), it should only be for the most serious of reasons that you would be willing to break the vows you made when you joined, which fall into the two previous categories, economic or theological.
Unfortunately, we have stood this on its head in the church. Staying with or leaving a church for theological or doctrinal reasons rarely happens (most people have very little idea of what their church believes, unfortunately), and personal preferences become the most important things in people's minds.
And just what are these personal reasons that have become paramount in the thinking of many? Let me list just a few:

When and Why to Leave Your Church (Part 1) (VoF)

The question in our local paper's "Voices of Faith" feature this week was, "In your experience, for which reasons do people most often leave their place of worship?"
The real answer to that is obviously a complicated one. And one that is all the more difficult to answer for sure because most (almost all) people who leave do not tell the pastor or elders why, and the reasons that they give when they do share is often not the real reason. I think that many people have a sense that the reasons that people have for leaving churches are very often not good ones.
In my experience, which stretches now over ten years of ministry, there are three categories of reasons people leave a church. Economic, Theological, and Personal.

Economic

By economic reasons I mean people getting transferred to another part of the country, or having lost their job and being unable to find work, find that they need to relocate to another area to be able to support their family. Certainly this is a legitimate reason, and in many cases an unavoidable one. This is also a common cause today, especially in these difficult times in the midst of a difficult economy.

Theological 

The second reason is Theological. You are attending a church and there is a shift in a critical doctrinal teaching which you feel renders you unable to continue attending. Sometimes it is your church's leadership -- locally or denominationally -- that moves, or you yourself become convinced of one thing or another. And here I am speaking of serious doctrinal differences. Many people leave because they find out that their pastor is an "old-earth" or "young-earth" person. Or that their new pastor believes that Paul did not write the book of Hebrews. Those are not reasons to leave a church. However, if, as has happened in the mainline denominations over the years, the denominational leadership states that it is no longer important to hold to biblical inerrancy or full inspiration, or that Jesus need not be claimed as the one and only way to God, then you have reason to run to the exit.

I have personally experienced this. For years my wife and I attended a generic, non-denominational, Arminian, Dispensational church and were very involved in many areas of ministry. As I began to get more serious about studying the Bible and theology I began having more and more difficulty reconciling the teachings of my church with the teachings of the scripture in several important areas. I was discovering the "doctrines of grace," and a historic, biblical view of the scriptures that the church I was attending did not share, and in fact strongly opposed.

After a long time of studying and talking to people, including church leadership, I finally reached a point where I could not, in good conscience, continue there, and my wife and I began a search for another congregation. This was something we did not take lightly and that no one should. Though the spirit of the age seems to say otherwise, ones local church, the accountability that exists there, the relationships with pastors and elders and other congregation members are important aspects of our Christian lives, and contribute to our spiritual stability. They should not be quickly and easily rent, in the same way as you might stop going to a restaurant because you grow tired of the menu.
But theological reasons for leaving a church is certainly a legitimate reason to leave a church.

That being said, it is a rare reason. Especially today. Far more common is the third reason; Personal reasons. I'll pick that up in a separate post.

Pastor Gene