When You Are Tempted to Leave

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 13 in full. It is the chapter Paul places, deliberately, in the middle of his argument with the Corinthians about spiritual gifts and church order. He is not writing a wedding poem. He is writing a diagnostic for a divided church.

Then read Philippians 4:2-3: "I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life."

Add Colossians 3:12-15 ("bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other") and 1 Peter 4:8 ("Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins").

Reflection

There is a quiet, decent-sounding voice that often shows up in the heart of a Christian thinking about leaving a church. It says: I have tried. The leadership is fine. The teaching is fine. I just don't feel fed anymore. I'm not bitter — I'm just done. This voice rarely lies outright. It is too sophisticated for that. But it almost always edits.

1 Corinthians 13 is what you read before you trust that voice.

Paul wrote it, remember, to a church that was tearing itself apart over which spiritual gifts were most prestigious, which teacher was most refined, and which faction had the deepest revelation. To them — to people who had every reason to feel theologically superior to their neighbors in the next pew — Paul says that without love, the most impressive prophet, the most articulate teacher, the most generous donor, even the most willing martyr, is nothing. Not "less than ideal." Nothing. A noisy gong. The point of the chapter is not that love is sweet. The point is that love is the only currency that converts in the kingdom of God, and a church without it is metaphysically empty no matter how full its programming is.

Now apply that to the question on your heart.

"Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful." Many of the reasons we mentally rehearse for leaving a church begin to look strange next to that list. I am tired of the worship style. — Is that a love judgment, or a preference judgment? The pastor's sermons aren't deep enough for me. — Possibly true; also possibly the language of a heart that has begun to insist on its own way. I just don't connect with anyone there. — Have you tried? Has love borne with the people who tried with you? They have hurt me. — That is a heavier matter; we will get to it. But even there, Paul writes, love "is not resentful," and "endures all things."

The love test is not designed to shame us out of leaving. It is designed to expose what is actually moving us, so that whatever we do — stay or go — we do honestly.

Bonhoeffer, who lived through the worst kind of church trouble, said something pastors and members alike have quoted ever since: "He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial." The trap, he saw, is not bad faith. It is the idealized faith of the disappointed perfectionist who came to the church carrying a vivid mental image of what a "real" church should look like, found that the actual congregation does not match it, and then concludes that the actual congregation must be the problem. Bonhoeffer's diagnosis is severe: that person becomes a destroyer, no matter how sincere. Because they cannot love a real community while in love with an imagined one.

This is why Paul's word to Philippi is so striking. He has two women — co-workers, fellow laborers in the gospel — who have fallen out. Euodia and Syntyche. We do not even know what the dispute was about; the Spirit chose not to record it, perhaps because it does not matter as much as we think it does. But Paul names them, by name, in a letter that would be read aloud to the whole church. He does not say split the church between Euodians and Syntycheans. He does not say one of them must be more in the right. He says, twice, "I entreat" — and then he calls a third party, the "true companion," to help them. The first move is not separation. The first move is the painful, public, communal work of reconciliation.

Tim Keller, who pastored a Manhattan church through more than one season of conflict, often pressed his congregation to reckon with how cheap our exits have become. Pre-modern Christians, he liked to point out, did not have a hundred churches to choose from down the road. Their loyalty to a local body was tested by the absence of alternatives — and that very absence was a school of love. Modern Christians can leave so easily that we never have to learn the disciplines of staying. We export our problem to a new building and import our same hearts. The result is not deeper Christians. It is shallower ones, scattered more widely.

None of this is an argument that you must never leave. It is an argument that the love test must be applied honestly before you do — and that the New Testament is unembarrassed about asking it.

So set your reasons down. Hold them next to 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. Some will survive. The teaching has departed from the gospel of grace. That survives. I have raised serious concerns about a leader's conduct and been silenced. That survives. My family is being formed in a culture of contempt that I cannot in conscience pass on to my children. That survives.

But some will dissolve. I'm bored. I don't like the music. They didn't ask me to lead anything. That family rubbed me the wrong way at the picnic. These are not the language of love bearing all things. They are the language of preference exhausted by the friction of real bodies in real rooms.

Going Deeper

Bonhoeffer, in the same chapter that warns about the dream community, also writes that Christian community "is a gift of God which we cannot claim." That is the harder pastoral move. We tend to treat the church as a service we are buying, and dissatisfaction as the natural language of a customer. The New Testament treats the church as a body to which we have been grafted, and love as the natural language of a member.

Before you pray about leaving, pray to be able to see the people in your church as members of a body to which Christ has grafted you, not as features of a service you are evaluating. The view from inside the body and the view from outside the building are very different views. Most leaving decisions are made from the wrong one.