Blog Series: Reasons Not to Leave a Church

Over the next weeks, I intend to blog the reasons not to leave a church. I'm challenging Christians to be fully engaged in the life of the local church that they're a part of. There are at least five reasons for this:

1. The culture we live in encourages people to 'check things out' to make sure it's a good 'fit'. While I understand this approach, it can't be an indefinite one. People who remain in the "checking it out" period indefinitely will eventually find something that turns them off, offends them, disappoints them, etc. Can you imagine if that happened at a gym? Manager: "Sir, you've been exercising here every week for the last six months. I'm afraid if you don't join us as a member, you can't keep using our facilities" User: "Come on! I'm still checking it out!!!"
2. I'm reading books by a lot of guys in my generation encouraging people to drop out of the "institutional" church and do the more 'biblical' thing which is to start a house church. While I have nothing against the house church movement per se, I have a lot against much of the dichotomizing between the "Church" (note the really big 'C', which is the same letter as Jesus' last name, meaning it's really important) and the institutional "church" (note the small, insignificant, easy-to-offend-with-no-consequence 'c'). People are being encouraged to leave their churches for any and every reason, and that's not cool.
3. A lot of our culture believes that formal church membership is a human invention of later Christians, rather than a deliberate practice of the early church.
4. A growing disillusionment with the church, rooted in an assumption that Constantine's legalizing of Christianity is the reason the church went south, such that there were two periods of church history: the Early (i.e., uncorrupted, denomination-free) church, and everything since.
5. The celebration of authors referred to in #2 as prophetic. "Prophetic"!? Seriously? 

Before I do, I fully admit the following qualifications:

1. I've left a church in which I was very heavily involved. Not all of my reasons for doing so were God-honoring, but some of them were. We'll talk about that later.
2. Leaving a church isn't necessarily a sin. I think it can be, and often is, but even then, it isn't the unpardonable sin. 
3. Lots of churches are messed up - and there are lots of reasons for that. Most of the time, it's the people leading it. Nevertheless, not all churches are worth saving. It may be that a local church's dysfunction is Jesus' way of saying "Ichabod: the glory of the Lord has departed" (a la 1Sam 4:21) and Himself shutting it down, so that it cannot do any more damage to the watching community.
4. Lots of us have been hurt - sometimes deeply - by people in the church. Sometimes pastors have been the cause of some of the deepest offenses. When you're hurt at church, by people who should know better, it's hard to get over. Not impossible. But hard. I get that.