So why don't you leave?

A few weeks back a friend of mine asked how our church was doing. She knew we had a new pastor (Well, he's been around for over a year now.) and so she thought she'd check in and see how that was going. I replied that though things were OK, I didn't feel like I was really being challenged and we were still struggling to grow in size.  (Not that I think numerical growth is a big issue in general, but our little congregation is so small, that we really do need to grow a bit just to get back to a respectable size.)  She looked at me in consternation and asked, "So why don't you just leave?"

To be honest, I was kinda floored by that. I know that other people wander from church to church looking for... I don't even know what. But I see church as a body (or a family). Romans 12:5 says, "we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." Leaving would feel like chopping off my arm and casting it aside. (Only, in this analogy, I'm the arm, not the body. They'd be injured, but whole enough to carry on. I'd just be an arm lying on the ground unable to do a whole lot.) 

This (and a subsequent discussion on "church" with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law) got me to thinking more on the topic of leaving a church/what is church/how do we "do" church. It's something I've thought a lot about in the past, so this is nothing new. But I thought it would be worthwhile to articulate my thoughts this time around. 

1) Church is not about what you get out of it. It's about who we are. To leave is akin to dismemberment, or perhaps some form of elective surgery. (There are times when we have to move, such as for work or school. But if you were actually part of a body, then you'll feel the tear when you leave.)  

The chief exception to this, I think, is when there are "churches" that behave more like a social club than the living organism that they should be (according to my reading of the Bible, at least). I've attended a social-club-esque church where the chief goals seemed to be finding a mate or a business partner, playing church, and talking a whole lot about community but then blaming the not-actually-doing-it on living in a transient society. Churches like this are very easy to join as well as to leave, in my opinion. They don't function like a body, therefore there's no (or little) pain when someone walks away. 

2) I've been a member of our current church since we moved to the area 8 years ago and from the get-go, I had the impression that the people in this congregation understand what I just said back in #1, even if they've never studied a single book on it, heard a single sermon on it, or ever bothered to articulate it. After having attended several churches in a row that talked a whole lot about community, it was almost stunning to end up in one that never once talked about it, but that seemed to understand and live it at a foundational level. Not only that, but we arrived just after several members had left and though some churches would blithely carry on after something like that, this church bled. Social clubs don't bleed. Bodies do. 

So, yeah, I'm not totally excited about where our body is right now.  I had high hopes as the new pastor was coming in that we'd really start growing. I suppose it's like the excitement you have at the beginning of the new year when you've made a resolution to work out every day. You're excited about what the all-new-you is going to be like. But then mid-January rolls around and you start to realize that though you might have done a little extra exercise the first week, you rolled right back into business as usual by the second. But just because I'm disappointed doesn't mean I'm going to chuck it all. You don't start cutting yourself just because you didn't exercise.  Instead, I think it's time to step back and recheck goals, rethink strategies, find partners who can help you to keep that New Years resolution, and continue to aim in the right direction even though you now realize it's not going to be as easy as you had once hoped. I'm still wrestling with what that means in terms of our relationship to our church. But it's worth wrestling with.  When you have a good thing, it's worth taking time to think out how it could be better, rather than chucking it in the trash.