Chris Scott is a pastor and Mission Network Facilitator for Emerging Faith Communities. This post was originally published September 8 on his blog, Missio Menno.
There are people who left the church who are still looking for God. Is it possible the church misunderstands why they left?
Someone stops coming on Sunday, and we assume they stopped believing. We call it “falling away.” We say they “lost their faith.” Sometimes we act like heaven keeps an attendance sheet and God is sitting there wondering where they were last Sunday.
Maybe we could calm down. Maybe they didn’t leave God. Maybe they just got tired of having to climb over the church to get to God.
That’s a harder thing to admit. Especially if you’re the church.
Some people…
Some people left because they were told God couldn’t possibly love them because of who they loved. Some left because their questions were treated like rebellion. Some left because they discovered that “community” sometimes meant agreeing with everyone who already belonged. Some left because the church spent forty minutes talking about love and then spent an hour in the parking lot gossiping about someone.
Some left because they were grieving and got a Bible verse when what they needed was someone to sit beside them and listen for five minutes.
Some left because the church kept asking them to pretend:
- Everything is fine
- The sermon answered the question
- The institution matters more than the person standing in front of it
- The building is sacred
- No one inside is hurting
It is exhausting. And eventually, some people just can’t do it anymore. So, they leave. And then the church gets together and asks…
How do we get them back?
We make a plan. We form a committee, redesign the website and buy better coffee. We change the music, create a five-week sermon series titled “Come Home” and send postcards. We may even put a cool sign out front.
And somewhere in all of that, we forget to ask the most obvious question: What if they didn’t leave because they stopped looking for God?
What if they left because they were looking for God and couldn’t find God in us? That one stings. It should.
The living God
The church is supposed to be a place where people encounter the living God. Instead, sometimes we become very good at helping people encounter the institution.
Here’s the bulletin, the nursery schedule, the doctrinal statement. Here’s the membership covenant and the proper way to hold your hands during communion. Here’s the form you need to fill out and the committee you can join. Here’s what we believe, what you’re allowed to question and who belongs. Here’s who doesn’t.
And somewhere underneath all that paperwork, Jesus is standing there saying, “Come follow me.” Which feels a little inconvenient.
Jesus never seemed particularly impressed by religious institutions. Jesus kept wandering away from them. Into fields, across roads, around dinner tables. Beside wells and into people’s houses. Toward people the religious professionals had already decided were too complicated.
Jesus didn’t seem nearly as interested in protecting religious respectability as we are. Maybe that’s why some people who leave church still find God.
They find God in recovery rooms and hospital corridors. In grief, friendship, art and in the woods. In a stranger’s kindness and a child’s laugh. In silence after everyone else has gone home.
They find God while driving alone at night and in questions they were once told not to ask. They find God in the strange realization that love keeps showing up even when they aren’t sure what they believe anymore.
And maybe the church ought to be humble enough to say, “There you are. We didn’t know you were looking,” instead of the almost accusing, “Where have you been?”
Maybe we need to stop treating people who left church like prodigals who need to be brought back into the building. They could be pilgrims and they’re already on the road. Maybe God is already there.
And maybe our job isn’t to drag them back to where we are, but to follow Jesus far enough outside the walls to meet them there.
Because there are people who left the church who are still looking for God.
They aren’t necessarily looking for another worship service. They might not need another sermon or another Christian explaining why they are wrong.
They may simply need someone to walk beside them. No sales pitch. No theological pop quiz. No pretending.
Presence. Curiosity. Grace.
And hopefully we will rediscover something along the way. God was never trapped inside our buildings waiting for us to get the institution right. God was already out there.
We just got so busy running the church that we forgot to go looking.
