Letters From Leavers

I use to go to a church which was very large, about 10,000 people attended their every week when the church was at its peak. It was the largest church in my town and I had gone there since I was three, before it had become that. I had grown up, made friends, made enemies, tried to make girl-friends all in that church. For 15 years, along with the rest of my, I was a loyal member of that church.

It was probably around my freshmen year in high school when that started to change. The church, spurred on by the book purpose driven church, started to make changes. At first they weren’t big and if you didn’t know the main leadership of the church you wouldn’t know anything was going on. That is where I was in life, just going along, blissfully unaware of the harm that was coming. It wasn’t long before the worship pastor was fired and left to go to another church, with many of the congregation behind them.

Soon after that the church started to cut ministries that didn’t follow along with or questioned the master plan of the church. Those cuts and changes did take long before they trickled down to the youth group. By the time it had gotten down to us I was in the band and very involved with the youth group leadership. The changes started slow, a little bit less of a talk and a little more games at the beginning of the service, but it wasn’t long before the main push was for numbers. A ministry was measured by how many people it drew in, the more people the better it was reaching out.

A few of the students started to feel forgotten, the ones that where most involved where the ones who the church had forgotten. We started to notice the change when the church started to take control of everything in the church, and if someone didn’t comply or questioned the pastors it was an easy fix they would just be thrown out of the church. In less then a year 3 of the main 9 adult leaders where asked to leave the church. As the students grew more desire to learn about God the leadership of the church grew more instant that everyone fall in line behind them.

The church soon got rid of everything that wasn’t teaching what they wanted, and if someone tried to start something out side the church they were asked to move on from the church. When I expressed my dissatisfaction over this the youth group leadership turned its back on me, and treated me like the plague, only coming near me long enough to run back to the other on lookers and say “see, I talked with him, I ministered to his needs”. Any time anyone would ask for something deeper then the church was giving they would start to give the same response. If you weren’t asked to leave you were forced to by the actions of the pastors.

It was March in my senior year that I left that church and moved on to another and a few months after that I went on to a Bible school for two years. The pastor that was leading the high school group has been let go as a scape goat for the rest of the people in the youth group, sacrificed so that the church could continue its drive to become a seeker driven church. To seek and save the lost while forgetting about those already found.