Find Your Place and Stay There
Why you shouldn't leave the Church even if you leave your local church.
Over two decades ago, a wise female elder of the Church said to me words she felt were prophetic. She had no idea my husband and I were contemplating leaving our local church. No idea how discouraged we were by a church split and the loss of friends and like-minded individuals from the community I had been a part of through my junior high, high school, and half my college years.
The woman, a guest speaker, said: “Take your place in the Church and stay there. Just stay there. Don’t let anything deter you.”
She referenced the apostle Peter’s metaphor for the growing family of God: “And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple,” each stone a precious rock “growing” up in its salvation as the entire family does too.1
“God found you in a quarry,” she continued. “He picked you out of it and placed you in his wall, with stones of all sorts of shapes and sizes, and put you exactly where you belong.” If I left, she said, there would be a hole.
Like Peter’s, the rest of the New Testament is filled with descriptions of the beautiful, healthy Church of Jesus Christ. It describes the glorious assembly of all believers past, present, and future. But while the New Testament is filled with this beautiful vision of the Church, it’s also filled with story after story of how Christians fail at being the Church, how Christian leaders fail the people they lead, and how Christians sometimes embrace and teach heretical doctrines that stunt their growing up into their salvation.2 As we read from Matthew to Revelation, it becomes clear that Jesus’ Church is caught up in the tension between what it looks like right now and what it will be.
The speaker’s words have burrowed deep into my brain over the last 26 years for the sole reason that I have wanted to leave and give up so many times—because I’ve seen so much dysfunction and experienced so much disappointment in local church settings. But there’d be a hole in the wall if I left the “capital-C-Church.”
That the Church has been dysfunctional for the last two thousand years is not an excuse for its dysfunction. You, as I have done, may need to leave a toxic local church if there are no signs of health returning.
If your leaders have sinned against you, I’m sorry. If you’ve been ripped apart by gossip and criticism, if you’ve been made to feel as if you are not a welcome stone in the wall, I’m so, so sorry.
But I also know this. If you have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, then you, too, are a part of the Church, and you can’t get out of it. God’s Church needs the healthiest, most Jesus-like version of you. To live as if you aren’t part of it is to, in a sense, dislodge yourself from the wall. And when a perfectly fitted stone is removed from a wall of perfectly fitted pressed-together stones of all shapes and sizes, the wall weakens and other stones slip away too, and pretty soon you’ve got a wall that’s not holding up so well.
I want to urge you like that wise woman urged me so many years ago. Take up your unique space in the wall. I’ll go even further by mixing my New Testament metaphors: Don’t just be a stone in the wall. Be the hand, the foot, the eye, the ear, the belly button, or left elbow Christ made you for his body.3 And stay there. Just stay there. Don’t let anything deter you.
Thanks for reading. I’m a book-obsessed pastor, seminarian, podcaster, author, and life and leadership coach. For essays and podcasts that come straight to your inbox, subscribe to this Dear Exiles newsletter in the subscription box above. Fun fact: I’m also the author of Dear Boy:, An Epistolary Memoir and the host of the Your Pastor Reads Books podcast.
1 Peter 2:2,5
1 Peter 2:2
Eph 4:15-16