The Tipping Point - Leaving the Church

There's good and bad in everything, and it is no different with the church.  As long as the good outweighs the bad, people will stay and survive... and even thrive.  But if a tipping point is reached where the bad outweighs the good, their reasons for staying will be outnumbered by their reasons for leaving and they will stage their own personal exodus.  It is often calculated and pre-meditated, since there is usually painful fall-out that comes with it.  The inevitable loss of lifelong friends is one of the most painful consequences.

Staying

There are a lot of good reasons why people will stay in the institution.  For many, it is a family tradition that is comfortable and familiar and their is no good reason to quit.  For others, their social and emotional needs are met by the company of good friends and like-minded birds of a feather.  Others find common ground in doctrines and dogmas that make sense to them ideologically.  They may like the political platform of the church.  Many will attend to get close to God and enjoy the kindred spirit of corporate worship.  And the list goes on.

In my opinion, when people feel happy and safe in the church environment, they should continue as long as they can...  for a lifetime if possible.

Leaving

There are also a lot of good reasons for leaving the church, and many of them have to do with the reverse of everything good.  If they don't fell safe there, if their emotional and social needs are not being met there and there is no sense of community, if they don't have friends there, if they take issue with the doctrines and dogmas there, if they can't feel close to God there, and so on, they have good reason to leave.

Why would anyone want to keep attending a club where they are not welcome?  Why would they continue to contribute to an organization whose values are not consistent with theirs?  What if they are made to feel like a misfit or an outcast, should they keep going for the sake of the institution?  What about abusive situations where they are being condemned or guilted into submission by domineering leaders or doctrines?  

I would not recommend that anybody continue in a setting where they do not feel safe, where their spirit is continually broken by destructive teaching and demeaning doctrines which give overbearing leaders a license to lord it over their people.

On the other hand, some may quit out of simple burnout.  Do you realize that if you attend the church three times a week plus board meetings, potlucks, and camp meetings, you will have been there 10,000 times by the time you are 50?  For some, that's more than enough!  Everything just starts to sound like the same old same old.

My Tipping Point

I attended and was embedded in the church for the first 60 years of my life, and was blind-sided when my own tipping point arrived.  I did not expect it and would never have predicted it.  I was a lifelong volunteer and leader in the organization.  My dad, my brother, and my son-in-law and several of my friends were pastors.  I was happy and thriving, even though I was at odds with some of the conservative platforms of the denomination and the local body.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was an ideological one:  I woke up to the fact that my church and I were no longer moving in the same direction, and I had to decide whether I would continue to contribute to and perpetuate a religious organization whose values were different than mine.  I maybe had a few years left of life and didn't want to waste it kicking a dead horse, as it were.  I would have to tolerate a lot of cognitive dissonance.   (Also, there were critics who were openly pointing out my non-compliance and urging me to shut up or get out of the way.  Birds of a different feather are often ultimately kicked from the nest.)

I chose my own spiritual and emotional well-being over the that of the institution.  I quit.    Here's to health and freedom!

But it's not as simple as that.  There were major contributing factors that led up to my exodus.  I have written about them extensively in other posts, but I'll briefly touch on a few of them here:

Pacifism.  From the age of 18 I was a pacifist in keeping with Jesus' teachings to love your enemies.  I kept quiet about it for most of my life, but -  even though my denomination had roots in Anabaptist and Mennonite pacifism  -  the church has become increasingly political and militaristic in the last twenty years and my dissidence has grown correspondingly.   I view the separation of church and state as a good thing (not to mention constitutional).  The rise of nationalism in the church is anti-Christ.

Women's rights.  It seemed to me that if the church could dismiss the Biblical grounds for slavery as no longer culturally relevant, it could just as well ignore Paul's teachings on the submission of women by removing all limitations on women as leaders in the church.  I lobbied for it unsuccessfully.  In my (former) denomination, it will be a long time coming.  It will happen, but not in my lifetime.

Tithing.  There is no New Testament mandate for the collection of a 10% tithe to be given to the church.  Yet, it is perpetuated as an expected discipline, even a compulsion of the believer.  That is un-sanctified hogwash.  Unholy crap.  (My apologies to the swine.)

Amazing Grace.  Though the evangelical community is founded on free grace and every speaker gives it a cursory nod, ironically, much more attention is given to the need to work for one's salvation.   Mine is a more generous orthodoxy that makes much of redemption and little of sin.  If you want to know, I think Jesus could be said to be "soft on sin".  He was called the "friend of sinners" after all.

That Damned Hierarchy!  There are many other points at which I have been a dissenter for a long time, but the granddaddy of all false doctrines that pervade almost all denominations is the teaching of the hierarchy, an idea which Jesus expressly banned in his teachings to his disciples. (Matt. 20:25-26)

It was the church leadership's unwavering adherence to the doctrine of submission-to-authority in the church that ultimately blew up my local congregation and precipitated an exodus of 2/3's of the constituency about six years ago.

Though every organization has its structure, the church has spiritualized its logistical framework with a contrived doctrine that ends up giving license to domineering leaders and abusers and compels the good people who believe it to do bad things.

I see the doctrine of the "God-ordained" hierarchy in the church as one of the most dangerous and destructive ideologies that have poisoned the church for the last 1700 years since Constantine implemented it in 313 A.D.  It has destroyed a lot of people.

Now here's the thing:  We need to differentiate between the institutional church and the Body of Christ, the True Church, which is all believers everywhere.  In the Body of Christ, all the parts of the body are answerable directly to the Head which is Christ. (Eph.4:15)  There is no multi-level echelon or chain-of-command.  We submit to Christ and to one another out of love (respect) for one another.  All have equal standing; no one has rank.  (Think you have automatic spiritual authority because you were appointed to a position in the church?  Think again!)

I'm Done

It's probably quite evident from this, that I no longer fit in the evangelical church.  My ideologies have become too honest, too Christlike, too purist to accommodate the way things are in the man-made institution called the church.

When my local parish blew up as a result of a destructive decision made by church leadership, I helped launch an appeal to the next level up the chain of command.  Though it was a legitimate step that was provided for in the by-laws, I was confronted in a lengthy and venomous reprimand and labeled as rebellious.  My "spiritual leaders" worked to smear my reputation behind the scenes.  They made sure we all knew that "no individual is as important as the institution."  (More institutional BS)

At the time, I marveled at protestant leaders telling other protestants that they shouldn't protest.  Huh?  Protestantism was born out of protest against church doctrine and hierarchy.  If protestants who protest are "rebelling against God" they are in the good company of reformers like Martin Luther and other church fathers.  Questioning is essential to sound doctrine.

Still, I could have forgiven all that carnality (maybe somebody was feeling a bit threatened?) and stayed on to feed the machine.  No tipping point there. (Read more about that church blow-up here.)

But ultimately is was ideology that was my tipping point.  I could have searched for a more liberal church, one with a more generous orthodoxy, but I have emotionally run out of gas.  I'm tired of the whole thing.  I have joined the "Dones", a growing multitude of exiles who, for one good reason or another, have come to their own tipping points and are just...

Done.

Backyard Baptism - The House Church Way

  My friends baptized their kids in a backyard swimming pool this afternoon and in my mind I couldn't help seeing visions of ancient New Testament believers being dunked in fountains and reflecting pools and rivers all across the middle eastern world as the gospel quickly spread across the region two thousand years ago... minus the cell phones and pocket cameras snatching their digital images instantly uploaded to the Cloud (gives new definition to the "cloud of witnesses").

A circuit-riding house pastor oversees the baptism of 2 kids by their parents in a backyard pool.

  But my visions were not only reminiscent of the past, for I also saw into the future as I was struck by the durability of the house church movement, the modern version being around since the 1800's but exploding with growth over the last ten years as the institutional church continues its God-ordained decline.

  My own exodus from the church is only four years old, but I am already aware of some of the long term benefits that the backyard festivities today brought to mind:

Freedom Reigns

  By far the most dominant characteristic of the movement outside the walls of the church is the freedom that dawns so brightly as the sun comes up the morning after another church refugee leaves the empire.

• Freedom from denominational dogma.  Liberated believers are free to shed the traditions and ordinations of the church.  There's no licensed legalist to tell them not to practice communion and baptism without an ordained minister on hand (although many house churches are attended by an abundance of former pastors).  I've even seen Mountain Dew and Ding Dongs used as communion sacraments and I don't think Jesus was the least bit upset about it.  Denominational doctrines are up for discussion in the home group.   It's just us, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit... and the internet.  No credentialed big shots telling us what we must believe.  If we want exegesis we go on line and read the latest blog from the scholars at Asbury or Moody or Wheaton.  In an instant we can learn and evaluate doctrines from the great theologians... if we care to know what any high-minded stuffed shirt thinks (because many of them don't seem to know much about grace).
• Freedom from condemnation.  Although it can take many years to purge the legalism and guilt out of one's soul, most freedom exiles start to loosen up as soon as they realize that there is nobody looking over their shoulders with a pointing finger or a disapproving  look (that is, after the fallout from the initial explosion has subsided a bit.  There is an inevitable sifting of friends and family members that follows an exodus, but it subsides with time).  Grace is the pervading attitude in the home group.  Non-condemning, nonjudgmental, let-me-be grace.
• Freedom from liturgy and protocol.  Would you like to have church at the ice cream shop?  Our group has done it several times.  We have also met at the park where we went for a one-hour run/walk before sitting down and dialoguing.  We don't meet on Sunday mornings, and we don't have worship time if we don't feel like it, and we don't have prayer before or after the offering... because there's no offering.  People get up and leave the discussion for more coffee or pizza and then come back a few minutes later... if they're not in the back yard leaning over the fence talking to the neighbor.  The institutions of the church vanish into the distance over time.  And the altar call?  What is that?
• Freedom from rhetoric.  Pious platitudes are a thing of the past.  The talking head (the sermon) is long gone.  Seminars and conferences don't exist.  We are all about conversation.  When's the last time you tried to interrupt your pastor's sermon with a question from the floor?  How did that work out for you?  It happens all the time in the home group.  Oh, the freedom of it all!

  A few years ago I heard a critic of the emerging church predict that the movement would be dead inside ten years.  The only problem with his statement was blind ignorance of the facts.  Recent studies indicate that it is the institutional church which in fact is declining and at faster rates every year.  Last month I heard a researcher report that the number of believers outside the church now outnumbers those still attending.

  Demonizing the movement won't stop the trend.  God will stop it when he wants to.  For the time being, it looks as though he wants to keep it going, perhaps until enough of us have been dumped outside the salt shaker and into the world where we he can finally do some good with us.

  

And the Band Played On...

  While the Titanic was sinking the band kept playing, even though there were people needing assistance getting into the lifeboats.  So it is today in the institutional church.

  My suggestion to my friends still playing in the band is to leave your post and help somebody escape.  Do it in small increments at first if you need to.  Miss church on one Sunday per month and hang out with a neighbor.  Go boating or fishing with a fellow employee at work.  Take your family on a Sunday adventure at the arcade or the movie theater.  Take a sabbatical from daily devotions for a month.  Give yourself a break from the fixtures of the institution.  Baptize your kids in the swimming pool.  Serve Mountain Dew and Ding Dongs (are they back on the market yet?) for communion at your next home Bible study.  Do something unconventional.  

  And just see if you feel a bit freer.  If not, go back to what you were doing if you want.  No problem.  No worries.  No condemnation.

  The work of Christ is freedom (Gal 5:1).  I love you, and I want you to be free.