Maybe you're not leaving church, maybe you're finding it

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This is a companion to the video "Maybe You're Not Leaving Church: Maybe You're Finding It." It is for the person who loves Jesus and has started to dread Sunday morning. You show up, you sing, you shake hands during the greeting, and you walk out more alone than you walked in, and somewhere along the way you started to wonder whether something is wrong with you. It is also for the person still in the pew who has gotten good at looking like they feel what everyone else seems to feel. If either one is you, I wrote this with you in mind, and I want to say plainly at the top that you are in good company.

Here is how to use it. Watch the video first if you can. Then open your Bible and keep it open beside you, because I am going to ask you to check me. Read "The teaching" straight through; it carries the whole argument on its own. Then work through "The passages" slowly, with a pen, reading every quotation against your own Bible. Save "Questions to sit with" for last and answer them on paper, not just in your head. Paper slows you down, and slow is the point.

One thing before we start. Being right about what the word church means does not save anyone. Faith in Jesus does. I have friends all over the map on this, Baptists and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and house-church people, who love the Lord and love people well, and I am not asking you to leave anything or join anything. What I want to rid you of is guilt and muddled thinking, so that you can see clearly and follow wherever Jesus is leading you. If the text convinces you, be convinced. If it does not, stay kind, and keep reading your Bible on its own terms.

You are far from alone, and the numbers say so. About forty million American adults have stopped attending church over the last twenty-five years, roughly one in six of us, which works out to more than four thousand people every day. Most of them did not stop believing in Jesus. What you decide church actually is will decide whether that number reads to you as a collapse or as something else entirely. And it will decide what you do with the ache you brought to this page.