Gospel.com Blog

How does your church react when a member of the congregation leaves?

Gordon Atkinson, longtime pastor (and blogger) has written a thoughtful essay describing the importance of gracefully listening to the “parting shots” of departing church members… even when what they say isn’t what you want to hear:

Most of the time when people leave our church, however, they just disappear. We notice their repeated absence after some weeks have passed. If I can track them down, they’ll often give me their parting shot, a short, abbreviated explanation of why they are leaving. These parting shots can be difficult to understand. Sometimes people are angry over a real or imagined slight. Some people cannot honestly address why they are leaving the church, so they convince themselves that they’re “just not being fed,” or they need a place with more music or better music or different preaching. Sometimes people just lie—they don’t want to admit that they’d rather attend a large church where no one notices when they sleep in on Sunday morning, so they point a finger at a theologically wayward Sunday school teacher, or at my sermons…

Being in the ministry requires us to develop a thick skin. We need to learn to spot the bull and let it go without wasting too much emotional energy on it. But we also need to cultivate the ability to hear what people are really saying by listening to what is behind their words. However painful it may be, we must listen to the parting shots of those who leave, because there is truth buried there—below the anger and the scapegoating and the general dishonesty. My advice is to ignore one person’s opinion of you or your ministry, and to watch for trends and patterns.

I imagine that’s much easier to say than to put into practice; it can’t be fun listening to people tell you that they dislike your preaching so much that they’re leaving the church. If you’re a pastor, I’d be interested to hear how you handle these “parting shots,” and if you’ve learned to dig beneath the words to discern what’s really being communicated.

But since I’m not a pastor, my interest in this topic is more in how I, as a typical churchgoer, should act when I feel called to leave a church. I’ve never left a church out of anger or theological dispute; it’s always been something more mundane, such as moving to a different city. But reading Atkinson’s article makes me regret that I have rarely sat down with the pastor or leadership of a church to explain what I’m doing and offer a (friendly and positive) parting shot. Many employers conduct exit interviews with employees who are leaving the company; surely there’s valuable information to be gained from an informal interview with a departing churchgoer.

Pastors, how do you respond when you learn that a church member is leaving the church? And fellow churchgoers, have you ever delivered a “parting shot” upon leaving a church, and how did it go?