Letters From Leavers

I have been a part of a Church where the pastor suffered from a midlife crisis, wanted a different life but was afraid to say so. The church shrunk in size, moved to a smaller building, saved their extra possessions in a larger semi-truck trailer for a year or so. When the church could not afford to pay for storage of their extra possessions the trailer was returned and all of the possessions were left out in the rain until they became worthless. We learned that wealth, and stability are very temporary.

I have been a part of a Church where the pastor went in seclusion and prayed for God to clearly articulate his vision. When God reviled his vision to the pastor this vision was brought before the church leadership and they responded by saying we have no doubt that God has clearly spoke his vision to you but you must not share that vision with the people here, it is not for us. Not everyone wants to here from God.

I have been a part of a Church where an old church closed and a new church started in its place. Many of the members of the old church did not even seem to notice that their old church had died, as they kept showing up every Sunday morning. The building was filled with the same faces. Routine as a focal point of church life is very empty.

I have been a part of a Church where a pastor planted a new church according to the denominational tradition. After doing things according to our quarter of a century old tradition for several years this community was absorbed into another that had been doing the same thing even longer. The pastor decided we couldn’t exist as a “church”. Failure to reinvent ourselves causes death.

I have been a part of a Church where after years of leading a congregation in a manner that was at one time considered to be revolutionary or at least evolutionary. The pastor heard from God about doing something else with his life. He asked the church if they wanted to continue in the fashion that they had been working but with a new pastor. Two-thirds of the congregation decided that it would be better to have nothing at all. So they dissolved. It is good to know when a group of people has run their course together.

I have been a part of a Church where we led a group of people who were bound together sometimes by a common distain for church life and sometimes with a common interest in seeing what God wanted to do next. We met together, we ate, we shared our lives, we looked at the message of Jesus sometimes in new ways but most of the time we sat around and recapitulated beliefs that others had given to us. We started to see beyond ourselves for a moment and into serving the world around us. In the beginning they were walking behind us. In the end we were pulling them away from their old traditions.
This was our beginning of our new church and we left them. We had become the program that we tried to escape and our leadership became the product that others used.

Some Churches that we attented disolved right out from under us wille others were a faint shadow of what the next generation of church and community might look like. It is clear that the institutions that we have created for the last several hundered years are now failing us. Now the challange is to find a new way of connecting ourselfs to eachother so that that we can acomplish the goals of the church without many of the social and instutional trappings we have created for ourselves. The new church may exist far outside of the buildings and social structures we come from. A new form of church may look more like they types of communites that are created when people link to eachother through blogs and myspace pages.

Maybe the future of church will be more like yeast in flour.

Matthew 13:33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with (Greek: “hid in”) three measures (21 kg enough to feed over a hundred people) of flour until all the dough had risen.”

Maybe the Kingdom is the ever present indwelling of Christ in our network structures. Maybe the church appears where connectivity between each other appears.