Chapter Nine — If You Stay (1 of 2)

Written for a church that is safe. If yours is not, go to Chapter Two.

The conviction of this book: staying is a good outcome. It is not a failure to choose, and it is not what people do when they lack courage.

For a believer whose church is still a true church family, the burden rests on leaving. You should not go lightly, and not before the conversation.

Often that means staying, and staying is often the harder road. It is easy to leave a church. It takes years to love one.

And love is what He asked of us: "I give you a new commandment—to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another." (John 13:34, NET.)

A church that hides abuse, or protects someone who harmed you, is not that kind of church, and nothing in this chapter is about it.

When staying is borrowed. Staying must be tested the way leaving was.

Fear can borrow a reason to stay. So can the dread of a hard conversation. So can the wish to keep your place, or not to disappoint someone. So can the plain comfort of what you know.

Ask yourself, What has to be true?

If you are staying because you love these people and believe God has put you among them, stay with your whole heart.

If you are staying because you are afraid of what would happen if you spoke, ask what you are afraid of. If it is a person who shames, threatens or controls, read Chapter Two first. If it is only the dread of a hard conversation, Chapter Six is where to begin.

If you are staying because you are afraid of what would happen if you left, read Chapter Two, and then Chapter Eight.

And if, after the conversation and a season of prayer, you find you are staying only out of fear or habit, you have found a reason to look again at going.

Staying is not holy because it is staying. Fear is not how love keeps its people.

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear" (1 John 4:18, NET).

Stay with your whole heart. Half-staying is its own kind of leaving.

If you decide to stay, decide all the way. Come back on Sunday as a member, not as a visitor waiting to see whether things improve.

Learn names. Sit somewhere new. Ask someone to lunch.

A church family is not a place you are in. It is a set of people you belong to, and belonging is done with your feet and your time.

"Be devoted to one another with mutual love, showing eagerness in honoring one another. Do not lag in zeal, be enthusiastic in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, endure in suffering, persist in prayer."
— Romans 12:10–12 (NET)

Serve. Few things change a person's view of a church like serving in it.

The person in the pew sees what the church does not give him. The person in the nursery, the kitchen, the hospital room or the choir sees what the church is.

Every member was given a gift "for the benefit of all" (1 Corinthians 12:7, NET). Ask your pastor or priest where you are needed. Then do it, and keep doing it after it stops being new.

Jesus washed His disciples' feet and said, "you too ought to wash one another's feet" (John 13:14, NET).

That is what love looks like in His family.

Love in deed. John, who heard Jesus say it, wrote it down for the rest of us: "Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue but in deed and truth" (1 John 3:18, NET).

Staying is where that sentence is lived. It is the casserole, the phone call, the ride to the doctor, the seat kept for the widow.

It is plain work, and it is how the family is loved.

If you inherited your faith. Some of you are happy where you are. You were baptized there, perhaps confirmed there, married there. Your parents' faith is in the walls.

And one day you realized that you do not really know what your church teaches, or what the Bible says.

You know the prayers. You know when to stand and when to kneel. But if someone asked you why, you could not say.

That is not a reason to leave. It is a reason to learn. (If your faith was handed to you and you are thinking of setting it down, read "When the faith was never your choice" in Chapter Six.)

An inherited faith is a gift, and Scripture honors it. Paul wrote to Timothy, "I recall your sincere faith that was alive first in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am sure is in you" (2 Timothy 1:5, NET). He reminded him "how from infancy you have known the holy writings" (2 Timothy 3:15, NET).

What was handed to you was meant to be handed to you. But it was meant to become yours.

John wrote to believers who had been taught from the start:

"As for you, what you have heard from the beginning must remain in you. If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father."
— 1 John 2:24 (NET)

What you heard from the beginning is meant to remain in you.

It cannot remain where it never went in.

You are not alone in this, and it is not one tradition's problem. In every tradition, people inherit a faith they were never taught to read. (What has been counted is at the back.)

Here is why it belongs in this book. When people leave a church, some say they found elsewhere what they never knew their own church had.

Many who have left the Catholic Church for evangelical churches say their spiritual needs were not met there, and many name the way their Church taught the Bible.

Some of what they went looking for may have been at home all along, unread.

Dear friend, before you go anywhere, find out what you already have.

Your own church asks this of you.

The Catholic Church, at the Second Vatican Council, "earnestly and especially urges all the Christian faithful ... to learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the 'excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ' (Phil. 3:8). For ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ." (Dei Verbum 25; the Catechism repeats it at paragraph 133.)

Since 2019 it has set apart the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time for "the celebration, study and dissemination of the word of God" (Aperuit illis). Every Sunday Mass gives three readings and a psalm, and over three years the Sunday Gospels move through Matthew, Mark and Luke.