Chapter Nine — If You Stay (2 of 2)

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese's family ministry says it simply: "Our families should read the Bible together, as well as individually."

And a Protestant church that confesses the Bible as its highest authority is asking you to read it.

Where to begin

Read a Gospel. John is a good place to start, and he says why he wrote: "these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31, NET).

Ask for the reasons, not only the answers. Your church's catechism or confession was written with prayer by serious people, and it tells you what your church holds. But it usually gives the answer without the road that led there, and it can read as a rule to memorize rather than a truth to understand. So read it with the Scriptures open. Ask your pastor or priest the question behind each answer: Why do we believe this? Where is it in Scripture? What did the church weigh before it said so? The Bereans examined the scriptures "carefully every day to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11, NET).

Ask for help. Ask your pastor or priest for a study, or join one in your own parish or congregation.

Learn with someone. Faith was handed to you by people. It grows best among people too.

Learning will raise questions. Take them first to your own church, where your faith was planted. The word on curiosity in Chapter Five applies here.

And remember what the learning is for.

Jesus said to men who knew the Scriptures better than anyone: "You study the scriptures thoroughly because you think in them you possess eternal life, and it is these same scriptures that testify about me, but you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life." (John 5:39–40, NET.)

The goal is not to know more about your church. It is to know Him, the knowing that John 17:3 calls eternal life.

Read so that you may come to Him.

Speak up, kindly. Staying does not mean keeping quiet. A family where no one says what is wrong is not a healthy family.

If something needs to change, say so, to the people who can change it, in the way Chapter Six described.

Paul calls it "practicing the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15, NET). Truth means you say it. Love means you say it to help, not to wound. Love says it to the person, not about him.

Once you have said it, let it be heard. You may not get the change you asked for. You will have done your part. Leave the rest with Him.

Staying is never silence about harm. If you stay in a church and learn that someone is being abused, or that leaders are hiding wrongdoing, staying does not mean living with it. It means doing what Chapter Two describes.

You can stay in a church and still be the one who tells the truth.

And if the harm is done to you, or the church is hiding it, you do not have to stay in order to tell the truth. Chapter Eight is for you.

Hold a difference without poisoning the family. Some believers stay in a church where they disagree about something real. They have talked it through, and they have decided the difference is one a family can live with.

That is a mature decision. But it has a danger: a difference held in silence can turn bitter.

Hebrews warns about "a bitter root springing up and causing trouble, and through it many become defiled" (Hebrews 12:15, NET).

If you hold a difference, hold it in the light, and hold it lightly. Speak of it to those who can change it, and to God, and to no one else.

Pray for the people on the other side of it. And remember that they may be holding a difference with you, with the same patience.

"bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if someone happens to have a complaint against anyone else. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also forgive others. And to all these virtues add love, which is the perfect bond."
— Colossians 3:13–14 (NET)

Seasons of dryness. Some who stay will go through a long dry season. The sermons do not move them. Prayer feels empty. Worship is going through the motions.

This is not always the church's fault, and it is not always yours. It is part of the walk, and the saints have written about it for centuries.

Do not take the dryness as proof that you belong somewhere else. Take it to God. Keep coming.

But dryness is not dread. If you feel fear and not flatness when you walk in, listen to that, and read Chapter Two.

A companion sermon, The Anchor Below the Storm, has one line for the dry season: "You are not required to feel it for it to be true."

The dry season ends. Some who stay through it find that the church was carrying them the whole time.

Remember what you were given. At the end of a year, or five, or twenty, a person who stays in a church may have something rare.

People who knew him when he was young and foolish. People who prayed him through a divorce or a diagnosis, who held his children at their baptism, and who will stand at his grave.

"Look! How good and how pleasant it is when brothers truly live in unity." (Psalm 133:1, NET.)

That is not a small thing. It is one of the great gifts God gives in this life, and staying is one of the ways He gives it.

Those who must move often, military families among them, can share in it too. Join quickly. Love hard wherever you land. Many who had to leave a church have found this gift again in another.