How to Discern: Stay or Leave

Today's Reading

Read Matthew 18:15-20 — the Lord's own protocol for handling sin in the church: a private word, then a word with witnesses, then the body, then, only as a last step, treating the unrepentant as outside. Then Hebrews 10:23-25: "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering... not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another." Add Proverbs 15:22 ("Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed") and James 1:5 ("If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God").

Reflection

We have walked, over nine days, through some of the hardest territory the New Testament addresses. Paul's grief over a divided Corinth. The love test of 1 Corinthians 13. The narrow door of Galatians 1, where the gospel itself is at stake. Augustine's mixed body of wheat and tares. Calvin's reformation as tragedy. Bonhoeffer at Barmen. Spurgeon at the Down-Grade. Diotrephes and the protocol for confronting elders. The unity Jesus prayed for, which is not uniformity but love across difference.

Today is for putting these strands together — not as a flowchart that automates discernment, but as a set of honest questions to bring before God if you are genuinely weighing whether to stay or to go.

There are three options, not two. There is faithful staying. There is faithful leaving. And there is faithful drifting, which is not actually faithful at all. The temptation, for many believers in our moment, is to think that as long as we have not formally joined another church, we have not really left. We just slowly stop showing up. We tell ourselves we are taking a break. We watch sermons online from elsewhere. We tell our friends we are "in between churches." Two years pass. Five. The Hebrews 10 warning — "not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some" — applies to us, and we have stopped hearing it. The question this final day asks is not just should you stay or should you leave? It is also whichever you are doing, are you doing it on purpose, in faith, before the Lord?

So here are the questions, drawn from the days of this plan.

1. Is the gospel itself at stake, or are your preferences?

Galatians 1 set the standard. The hour of necessary departure is the hour at which the church has begun to teach a different gospel — a Christ replaced or supplemented, a salvation made dependent on something other than grace through faith in him. If that is what is happening, departure is grave but real. If what is at stake is your preferred music, your preferred politics, your preferred preaching style, your preferred small-group structure, your preferred building, your preferred age demographic, your preferred personality of leadership — that is preference. Preferences are not nothing. They are not the gospel. Confusing the two has produced more wreckage than any honest assessment of the gospel ever has.

The honest test: could you write down, in two or three sentences, the gospel-level error you believe your church has fallen into, in language a thoughtful Christian outside your context would recognize as a gospel-level error? If you can, you are in Galatians territory. If, when you try, what comes out is a list of grievances about leadership style and music selection and the way the announcements are run, you are not.

2. Have you brought your concerns to leadership through the proper channels?

Matthew 18 still applies, even — perhaps especially — when the offense is structural. Have you spoken privately with the leader you are most concerned about? Have you, where the issue persists, brought it back with a witness? Have you, where it still persists, raised it formally to the appropriate body — elders, presbytery, denomination? Have you done this in writing, where appropriate, so that the matter is on record and can be addressed?

Most modern leavers skip these steps. We tell ourselves the leadership is not approachable, or that we have already complained in conversation, or that everyone knows the problem so a formal step is unnecessary. These are usually rationalizations. The Matthew 18 process is hard. It is supposed to be hard. It is the Lord's mercy to leaders who might repent and to bodies that might be healed before they fracture. To skip it is to deprive the church of the chance to address what you have seen, and to deprive yourself of the moral standing of having tried.

3. Have you given time for repentance and change?

Spurgeon did not leave the Baptist Union the week he wrote his first Down-Grade article. He wrote, pleaded, called for reform, and only after the Union refused — over months — did he withdraw. Bonhoeffer's Confessing Church did not form the day Hitler took power. It formed only after the German Christians had repeatedly imposed their heresy and the older church structures had repeatedly refused to repent. Faithful leaving has, almost without exception, been preceded by faithful patience.

How much time is enough? There is no universal answer. But there is a recognizable pattern: the leaver who has waited long enough is usually the one who, when she finally goes, can say in good conscience that she stayed longer than her own desires would have wished, and went only when continuing to stay would have required participating in something she could not in conscience participate in.

4. Are mature, godly believers in your life seeing what you are seeing?

This is the test that prevents both private heroism and private grievance. Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed. If you are alone in your reading of the situation — if every spiritually mature Christian who knows you is gently questioning your interpretation, while only the people who already share your frustrations are confirming it — that is significant data. Not necessarily decisive. Sometimes the lone voice is the prophet's. But far more often, in ordinary lives, the lone voice is the bitter heart confirming itself by talking only to its echoes.

If you cannot name two or three mature Christians outside your immediate orbit who, knowing the situation, agree that the gospel is at stake or that the leadership has failed in a way that requires departure, slow down. Not stop — slow down. Find them. Bring them in. Ask them to test your reading. If they confirm it, you have something. If they do not, you may be discerning your own frustration rather than the Spirit's leading.

5. Is your potential leaving driven by love or by frustration?

This is the deepest test, and the hardest to administer to oneself. Love wants the gospel preached, the body healed, the lost saved, the wounded restored. Frustration wants to be done with people who annoy us. Sometimes the two are dressed alike. Bonhoeffer's warning sits over all of this: He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter. If your departure is the act of someone whose dream of the perfect church has finally collided with the imperfect one in front of him, the next church will disappoint you the same way, and the one after that, and the one after that. The problem will not be solved by a move. It will be revealed by it.

If your potential staying is driven by fear — fear of confrontation, fear of disappointing leaders you should be confronting, fear of starting over — that is also not faithful. Faithful staying is staying for something, not avoidance of something. Faithful leaving is leaving toward the gospel, not away from people you are tired of.

A charge.

Those who have walked through this plan with us have been thinking, all along, about a particular church or a particular question. Some of you, on the basis of these meditations, will conclude that you are called to stay where you are — to keep showing up, keep loving the imperfect body Christ has placed you in, keep bearing with the people who irritate you, keep working through the conflicts at the level Scripture asks rather than at the level your impulses prefer. To you the word is: stay faithfully. Not gritted-teeth-staying. Not waiting-out-the-clock staying. The kind of staying that loves the actual people, prays for the actual leaders, contributes to the actual mission, and learns the slow disciplines of belonging. Calvin's mark of the church — the Word of God purely preached, the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution — is, mercifully, present in many more churches than our impatience tends to recognize. Where it is, that is a church of God. Belong there.

Some of you, having walked through these meditations honestly, will conclude that you are in a Galatians situation, or a Barmen situation, or a Down-Grade situation, and that staying is no longer possible without participating in what you cannot participate in. To you the word is: leave faithfully. With grief, not glee. After the Matthew 18 steps. After the time. After the counsel. With clarity about what is gospel and what is preference. Toward another church, not toward solitude. Bring your family with you to a place where the body is gathered and the gospel is preached. Do not weaponize your departure against those still inside whom you still love.

And some of you — perhaps most — are at risk of the third option, the one Hebrews 10 warns against and the one this plan has tried to name. Faithful drifting is not a category. It is a disguise for unfaithfulness. If you have been "between churches" for two years, you are not between churches. You have left, without ever doing the work of leaving, and you have not yet found, because you have not yet looked. The body of Christ does not exist online. It exists in rooms with chairs and bread and wine and people you would not have chosen and a Lord who chose them, and you, anyway. Whatever you decide — stay or go — decide. Then act. Then submit yourself to a body. Then love it.

The body bleeds when it is torn. It also withers when its members slip away into nothing. May the Lord give you the grace of either faithful staying or faithful leaving, the grief proper to either, the love that holds across difference, and the long obedience that will, in the end, find us in the assembly of the redeemed — singing, finally, with all those whose disagreements we did not resolve in this age, the unity that Christ purchased and that the Father, in the end, will give.

Going Deeper

Before you set this plan down, do one concrete thing. Pray. Then write a single sentence: In the next ninety days, by God's grace, I am going to ___. Fill in the blank. Not vaguely. Not with intentions. With an action. Schedule the conversation with the elder. Visit the church you have been considering. Write the letter. Have the meeting. Reaffirm your membership. Whatever it is, give yourself a date and an action.

Faithful staying and faithful leaving share one trait that drifting cannot imitate: they happen on purpose. Christ has prayed for our unity. He has died for the body. He has called you, by name, to belong. The next move is yours.