Chapter Eight — Reasons That Require Leaving

Chapter Two was about safety in the moment. This chapter is about the decision that follows.

Some things do not call for weighing. They call for leaving, or at least for stepping away until safety and truth have been restored.

Dear friend, God does not ask you to sit in the dark to prove that you love Him.

Abuse, and the hiding of it. When a leader abuses people, sexually, physically, emotionally, financially or spiritually, and the church protects him, the church has failed at the most basic thing it exists to do.

When a church learns of abuse and hides it, it has made itself a partner in it.

"Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but rather expose them." (Ephesians 5:11, NET.)

John wrote that "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5, NET). A church that keeps abuse in the dark has stopped walking in His light, whatever it says on Sunday.

And Jesus' warning about causing little ones to stumble (Matthew 18:6) is not a warning that can be weighed against a church's reputation.

The conviction of this book: a church that hides abuse is not a church family you are bound to. You may leave it.

Get away from the people who hid it. Tell the truth about why to those who need to know: the authorities, if a crime has been committed, and a trusted person outside the church.

If the church repents, removes the abuser from any place of trust, cares for the victims, and lets the truth be known, it may become a true church family again.

That is for God and time to show. It is not yours to wait for.

For a Catholic or Orthodox reader, getting away from a parish or a priest who hid abuse is not the same as leaving the Church.

You can go to another parish. You can take what happened to the police and to the bishop, or above the bishop if he is the problem. Chapter Two names the doors.

Whether to leave your Church is a separate question. Your tradition answers it, and Chapter Four says how.

Unrepentant abuse by a leader. Some churches remove an abuser and then, after a short time, put him back. Some let him keep leading while the matter is "handled internally."

Scripture sets a higher bar for leaders than for anyone else, and it does so for the sake of the flock: "The overseer then must be above reproach" (1 Timothy 3:2, NET).

A man who has abused those in his care has shown he cannot be trusted with them. A church that restores him to leadership has chosen him over the people he harmed.

Coercion and control. Some churches do not abuse in ways that make the news. They control.

They tell members whom to marry, where to work, whom to speak to. They discourage members from reading anything the leaders have not approved. They demand that members confess to leaders, and then they use what was confessed. They use threats about salvation, family or friends to keep people quiet and in place. They punish questions.

Some traditions teach openly that leaving them is grave. Teaching that is not control.

But when any church's teaching about leaving comes with threats to your family, with cutting you off, with watching you, or with a leader claiming to speak for God about you, it has become part of the pattern, however openly it was taught.

Chapter Two named the marks of this kind of control. If you see them in your church, you are not in a family. You are in something that has taken a family's name.

And if you cannot tell, that is reason enough to tell someone outside.

Shunning those who leave. A church that cuts off a person for leaving, forbids members to speak to him, or tells his family he is under God's curse, so that no one else will dare to go, is ruling by fear.

Several traditions practice church discipline, including excommunication, for serious unrepentant sin, and they ground it in Scripture (Matthew 18:17; 1 Corinthians 5:11–13). That is a different thing, done in the open, aimed at restoring the sinner.

A church can call shunning "discipline" and still be using it to control. If you were cut off for asking questions or for telling the truth about harm, that was not the discipline Scripture describes.

There is one hard case to name honestly. Some Anabaptist communities shun a baptized member who leaves, openly, and hold it as Scripture's discipline.

The conviction of this book: cutting a person off only for leaving is not what Matthew 18 describes. Your tradition may answer otherwise, and you should hear it from your elders.

But if that practice is used to keep you silent about harm, it has become part of the pattern.

What to do next. If any of this describes your church, here is the order.

The friend in God's house. There is a particular grief in being wounded by people you worshiped beside.

David knew it:

"Indeed, it is not an enemy who insults me, or else I could bear it; it is not one who hates me who arrogantly taunts me, or else I could hide from him. But it is you, a man like me, my close friend in whom I confided. We would share personal thoughts with each other; in God's temple we would walk together among the crowd."

— Psalm 55:12–14 (NET)

Dear friend, if that is your grief, Scripture has already given it words, and Chapter Eleven is for you.

The God who heard David hears you.

Leaving a church that harms people is not a failure of love for the family of God. It is love for the family of God, including the members of that church who are still being hurt.

The gentle words elsewhere in this book about staying, and putting up with one another in love, were written for families.

They were never written for this.