Before You Begin

If anyone is in danger right now, stop reading and call 911 in the United States, or the emergency number where you live. If someone in your church is harming you or a child, or you are afraid of your leaders, or afraid of what will happen if you leave, go to Chapter Two now. You do not have to be sure it is abuse. The rest of this book will wait for you.

Dear friend,

This letter is for you if you are standing at a church door and are not sure which way to walk through it.

Maybe you are thinking of leaving. Maybe you have already left, and you are thinking of coming back. Maybe you have moved, and it is Sunday morning in a town where you know no one.

Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are grieving a church that changed, or a pastor who left, or a friend who turned away. Maybe you are in a church where someone is being hurt, and no one will say so.

You are not all in the same place. This book was written so that every one of you is safe reading it.

These things are written to you so that you may make this choice in the light, and not in fear.

This book will not tell you whether to leave your church. It cannot see your church. It cannot see your heart. That decision belongs to you, before God, with the people who love you. It will not tell you which church is right, and it names no church as a good example or a bad one.

But it does not pretend to have no view. Where it holds a conviction of its own, it marks it plainly: The conviction of this book.

Here is the heart of it. A church that is safe is your family in Christ, the believers nearest to you on the vine, and they are not something to trade in lightly. Most reasons people give for leaving are reasons to have a conversation first. The conviction is mostly about how to decide: slowly, after the conversation, never lightly.

It rests on what Jesus prayed on the night before He died, and on what His apostles wrote to the churches. It does not rest on numbers. No survey can tell you whether you should stay.

And this is held just as firmly: harm is never a difference to live with. Every word in this book about staying was written for a church that is safe. If yours is not, none of those words are for you, and the book will say so again wherever it matters.

Where others have counted something, the book says who counted it. The counting, with what it cannot show, is at the back, under What Has Been Counted. Where the book describes what a church teaches, it uses that church's own words. Scripture is quoted from the NET Bible, and every verse was checked against the NET text.

One more thing you should know. This book was written with the help of Claude, a machine. A machine can gather and draft and check. It cannot know your church or your family. It cannot pray for you.

People can. Do not let any book, and certainly not any machine, stand in the place of the people God has put near you.

The question in your hands is real. But it is not the first question. The first one has already been answered.

That is where we begin.