Leadership Journal

After sifting through the "cheers and jeers" in response to my article "Six Ways I Quit Church," I found some themes worth exploring. Did I really quit? If not, what did I mean? And what does it mean for our ecclesiology and our personal holiness?

Here is further explanation of my "quitting" and what it meant for me personally and for the churches I have served. I also want to offer my three rules for engaging our culture.

Some people took the article quite literally. I received some kudos from people who dropped out of Christian community. Other readers didn't engage the tongue in cheek boat/fish metaphors at the level I intended, taking them too seriously, taking them beyond their usefulness, or not getting the spirit of the metaphors. What I offered as a winsome word picture some received with a vitriolic spirit, which probably makes quite a few people long to quit church for real.

Still other readers were steamed because they concluded that not only had I lazily and selfishly disconnected from church, but also that I was encouraging others to do the same. I wrote "I did not attend church on Sunday mornings with any consistency." To interpret that phrase to mean that I merely "attended Bedside Baptist and the Bagel Church" is a misinterpretation.

Another cause for alarm may have been the phrase, "We must find ways to disconnect from the church way of thinking, feeling, and living." I admit that this was a sloppy sentence that didn't carry the full meaning I intended. It was too easy to take literally, but it does touch on the first important theme for conversation: the church.

Ecclesiology: How do we understand the church?

Some readers wondered which church I quit. A reader in South Africa expressed a beautifully balanced concern: "Church is meant to be a real living relationship/friendship in Jesus with a community of friends who also trust, love and obey Jesus, not just a Sunday meeting. Did you stop being in friendship with other believers for four years or just stop attending a Sunday meeting?"

What a great description of what many of us are going through. We want church to be "a community of friends" but experience it as just "a Sunday meeting." My four years were marked by some time away from Sunday morning meetings, but never away from church as community. In fact, for the majority of that time I served a church that met on Sunday evenings for worship, Tuesday nights for discipleship and fellowship, and most Friday mornings for accountability. This atypical church allowed me to engage people who were out and about during the sacred 11 o'clock hour of Sunday morning, something I'd never been able to do before.

The impact on my life was a focused desire to help people connect to God and to one another—a mission bigger, better, and more biblical than (but not necessarily opposed to) getting people into a Sunday morning meeting. What I learned during those Sunday mornings away from church meetings had great impact on the church I served then ...