Last week I posted about When to Leave a Church.
In the post I said, “When people ignore fundamental differences long-term, a culture of coping develops” in churches.
I was asked a great question by a reader, “If someone decides to leave a church, how should one search for another church?” If it’s a given that the new church will share the same theology, then here are a few thoughts on finding a church.
When it comes to belonging to a local church sometimes people work too hard to make what is not a fit become a fit.
Don’t get me wrong being a part of any local church has its times of difficulty (see New Testament for plenty of examples), but a lot of what people fight over in churches could be avoided by doing some honest evaluation.
If Paul and Barnabas had to part ways, then even the best of Christians will have to part ways at times.
Here are two evaluations to determine if you should leave a local church:
I like church conferences, especially those with workshops focused on ministry approaches, growth strategies, and best practices.
More than once I have attended a conference with a ministry team and come home convinced that we had discovered new tactics and strategies needed in our organization. And more than once our attempts to implement those discovered practices failed.
There is a partial-truth that is common among followers of Jesus: to be like Jesus, you have to be with Jesus.
It’s a partial truth because being like Jesus takes more than being with Jesus, you also have to go where Jesus goes.
The change that happened in Jesus’ disciples was not just because they were with Jesus, but because they went where Jesus went.
Jesus always went to the perimeter of society. He could have stayed at the center in the temple, but he moved to the edge.
At the perimeter of society you find people for whom the nice-neat definitions of life don’t hold up.
It’s at the perimeter that you find the pain.
I’m not just talking about socio-economic pain, like homeless and unemployment. There is relational pain, emotional pain, and sexual pain at the perimeter.
Jesus went to the pain.
As disciples, it’s easier to stay at the center and believe if people want Jesus they will come to us.
But if we want to be like Jesus, we have to go with Jesus to the perimeter.
Prison is a terrible place, but one thing prison offers is an institutional structure. Some inmates eventually cannot function outside of that structure. Referring to prisons, Craig Haney notes, “…institutionalization renders some people so dependent on external constraints that they gradually cease to rely on their own self-imposed internal sense of structure to guide their actions…” (p.41).
[pullquote]What church and prison can have in common is an unhealthy institutionalization.[/pullquote]Unhealthy churches can attract similar “saved inmates” who need a church culture that creates a structure of “external constraints” and removes the need for a “self-imposed internal sense of structure.” What church and prison can have in common is an unhealthy institutionalization.
[pullquote]I have nothing invested in my own opinions. I am just like inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty.[/pullquote]
Walter Brueggemann and Matthew Johnson
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Dr. Brueggemann you can go here for audio samples of his work including lectures and interviews. In short, Walter has made enormous contributions to our understanding of the prophetic and psalmist voices in the Old Testament. He has authored almost 60 books, including his 2013 new release Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture.
