Last Updated on February 5, 2022
A recent article about Christians who realize they dislike church seems to lump everyone into one little box with the same little problem.
Relevant Magazine recently posted an article titled “What to Do When You Stop Liking Your Church.”
Then, right below the headline, is this smaller headline: “We’ll make it simple: Grow up.”
If you’ve ever felt like you were beginning to dislike church, you might have bristled just then.
You’d be in good company.
The article, as you might imagine, jumps right into a criticism of people who engage in what the writer labels a “preference war” inside the church. He defines his “preference war” theory as a battle in which “everybody wants church to do things their way.”
It’s an interesting notion, but it seems to be a bit naive. People have different reasons for reaching a point at which they begin to dislike church.
Some of them, I’ll grant the writer, may just need to stop and think about it, perhaps add some prayer about it, need to realize everything isn’t all about them.
But the other side of the coin — and there’s always another side of the coin — is that some people know it isn’t about them. They want it to be about God. That is to say, they aren’t mad because the church is doing things in a manner they may not personally like but rather because the church doesn’t seem to be doing things in a manner that puts God first where He always should be.
I know of plenty of people who’ve made the difficult decision to leave a church they’ve attended for some time.
In one case, for example, a family that may actually have been founding members of the church raised concerns over a new pastor’s practices that seemed to include not taking the time to get to know any of the parishioners, even some he ran into on a regular basis, and some questions about financial matters and the way the church either was or was not addressing them. This family, a family I’d consider a very dedicated, devoted, Godly family, began to feel, as one of them put it, “the spirit of God was no longer with [that church].”
Their attitude — from the beginning — was that they loved God first, and loved their church second. Their “gripe” wasn’t that the church wasn’t doing things their way but that the church wasn’t doing things in a Godly way.
I happen to think that’s a perfectly valid reason to look for another church.
I know of another family that used to pastor a church in another state before moving to South Carolina. This family was dedicated and Godly as well. They attended a church here for some time before beginning to feel they were part of a church that was trying to implement some changes for the wrong reasons.
I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that every pastor is perfect and every pastor is always correct; but I would say that when a pastor feels a church’s change in direction isn’t going in the right direction, I might just give it some credence before assuming said pastor is just mad because it isn’t doing things “his way.”
Didn’t Jesus Christ Himself teach the Parable of the Lost Sheep about a shepherd who left his flock of 99 just to rescue the missing one?
Does a church attitude that is so quick to dismiss dissension as “sour grapes” sound like the kind of community that’d be willing to seek out a missing member with that kind of fervor?
My point here is this: you can’t group everyone who comes to “dislike church” and who then seeks to find a different church community as someone who’s just throwing a temper tantrum because they’re not getting their way.
If that’s what you believe, I might suggest the following:
You’re the one who’s being immature.
You’re the one who’s not listening to your community.
You’re the one who’s putting your desires ahead of others.
And you’re the one who might need to spend a bit more time in prayer to see what God tells you.
The article ends with this:
Are you mature enough to serve and invest in a community that doesn’t do everything the way you think they should? Or do things have to go your way?
Perhaps a valid third question might be this: Are you in a church community that is mature enough to actually discuss concerns when there is conflict, or is that community more likely to automatically ignore concerns based on the assumption that those who raise them just want it done their way?
A community that automatically assumes it is always right and that anyone who questions things is always in the wrong isn’t particularly “mature” in my book.
And if that type of attitude is prompting people to dislike church rather than to engage within it, they’re not serving God, either.
