Don’t Waste Your Departure
This week’s author is Chuck Huckaby, pastor of First Reformed Church of Fulton, IL.
In 1997 a large evangelical mainline church in a conservative part of the country left its denomination for the same reason similar churches are leaving their mainline denomination today.
Having finally reached the tipping point where the pronouncements of their General Synod became a never-ending string of blatant blasphemies, the leadership decided they could no longer be identified with the multitude of heresies they saw proliferating before their very eyes.
After building up the momentum to leave, rallying their congregation, and debating the pros and the cons, finally, a congregational vote was held, and they made good their escape.
Finally, they were FREE!
Life could return to what they knew as “the good old days.”
Twenty years later, when the senior pastor who led the charge to depart was retiring, a consultant was brought in to survey the leadership on what they were looking for in a new pastor.
He asked “what if a candidate believed in ___________?” It was one of the very same hot-button issues that caused the church to leave its former denomination 20 years before!
What do you think they said?
Did they stand up and shout, “We left our denomination over that very same heresy! There’s no way we’d ever accept that!”
To the chagrin of the retiring senior pastor, the staff, and at least a few leaders, a significant number of the “leadership” said, “we don’t know.”
“We don’t know?”
Suffice it to say, the church had wasted its departure.
They had gone on as before in blissful ignorance while the people for twenty years were “discipled” more by the surrounding culture than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The resulting church body might have been confused with one of the seven churches of Revelation because they had certainly lost their first love and were obviously compromised and lukewarm.
It would be easy to condemn what happened there if it weren’t the very same danger most churches leaving the mainline face today.
Your church is still in danger of wasting its departure. We all are.
With all the emotions that come with finally deciding that the denominational declension is too much to tolerate anymore, rallying the congregation, wrestling with the classis, doing the paperwork to leave one denomination and join another, voting at leadership and congregational levels, sustaining any questions at classis, and then FINALLY entering a new fellowship of churches… it might seem like a church or pastor had actually “done something” by leaving a mainline denomination.
And that would be mostly wrong.
As a butterfly emerges from its cocoon, it struggles mightily against the enclosure. Its only purpose in moments of struggle seems to be to “escape.” Having escaped, though, it has its whole life cycle ahead. The escape is the BEGINNING of the butterfly’s life, not its END.
A church wastes its departure when it assumes the struggle to emerge is the END of the problems it faces, not the beginning of finding lasting solutions to those problems.
Changing the church's affiliation does nothing to address the problems the congregation had before.
Personal and corporate “besetting sins” aren’t automatically addressed by voting to leave.
The lack of discipleship isn’t remedied by new initials on the church letterhead.
The lack of evangelism isn’t solved because the unchurched in the neighborhood was waiting for you to leave the mainline before they would flock to your building.
One legitimate criticism leveled against churches departing the mainline is that they were merely “culturally conservative,” not really “sold out” to Jesus.
And for the churches that wasted their departure, that’s probably true.
Leaving the problems of the mainline behind only has value to the degree that the process of leaving becomes a process of entering into a new depth of discipleship.
Our hope is not merely in shedding the sinful associations of the past, as necessary as that is. Our hope is in putting on Christ afresh as a congregation. A new appreciation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a purposeful quest to remedy the ills that beset our departing churches are in order.
So don’t waste your departure. There’s too much at stake.