When Church Members Leave (Pt. 1)
People leaving your church is inevitable. It’s going to happen! Many of Jesus’ disciples left Him. Many of Paul’s converts turned on him. It’s part of life and human nature. It’s going to happen to every pastor. But none of this changes the fact – IT HURTS! You can’t help but take it personal. It is hard to not take it as a personal rejection of yourself.
The pastor’s entire life revolves around the church. But for the average church member, church is but one small aspect of their life. For most church members, changing churches is like changing their favorite restaurant. It typically is not as big a deal to them as it is to the pastor. Because of this, many times they will just disappear, with no explanation and no goodbyes. It is hard to fathom that you can serve and worship with someone as part of your church family for years, and then suddenly, they are simply gone! But this is usually how it happens.
Why? In this blog I want to shed a little light on this. Why do church members leave and how should we handle it?
Church members leave because they get their feelings hurt.
This is probably the number one reason why people leave a church. Somebody hurt their feelings, and it is usually somebody in leadership. Many times, it is the lead pastor. You can “be there” for people 100 times, but the one time you drop the ball, you can be viewed as mud! They forget the previous 100 times you were there!
You don’t make that visit to the hospital, forget to return the phone call, don’t call and check on them when they missed two Sundays due to illness, forget their birthday, don’t recognize them for a service they did for the church, you send a deacon to pray with them before their surgery (but YOU didn’t go), and on and on and on. Every pastor reading this knows what I am talking about! Church members tend to have short memories. The old adage, “What have you done for me lately” definitely is applicable in church work.
One day you realize that you haven’t seen them in a while. You get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, but you think, “Maybe they are on vacation.” But then comes the discovery – yep, they have left the church. There are times you feel so sick, you think you might vomit. No goodbyes and no reasons given. They are just – gone. How do you handle this? What do you do? Do you call them? Do you try and get them not to leave? It is SO awkward! You hear through the grapevine that they got their feelings hurt because…(fill in the blank).
In my younger years, I would run after people like this pretty hard. Even if it was for a silly reason, I would eat crow, apologize, and do everything I could to try and keep them in the church. It usually didn’t work. It rarely did any good at all. Through the years, I chased after people like this less and less. There are two exceptions:
- If I found out that a family was considering leaving the church, I would reach out to them and try to resolve the issues. Once they have made the decision to leave, it is usually too late. But if you can get to them before they leave you have a better chance of salvaging the situation.
- If they would call me or come to me and tell me how I hurt their feelings, I would definitely try and fix the problem. I would attempt to explain myself or if I dropped the ball, simply apologize and ask them to forgive me.
But if they simply disappeared without a phone call or conversation, I learned to let them go. Why? Because chasing after them usually did no good, and I knew it was simply a matter of time before I hurt their feelings again. While there may be exceptions to this, a pastor cannot spend a ton of energy chasing disgruntled church members. We must focus our time and energy on reaching people who do not know Jesus and on believers who truly desire to grow in their faith and mature as disciples of Jesus!
Hurt feelings are usually the top reason people leave churches, but next week we will look at another reason why church members leave and explore how to handle it.