I understand the panic. But panicking and freaking out won’t change a thing. It doesn’t bring anyone back to the pew. More often it pushes people further away, because they can tell when they’ve become a project instead of a person.
We’re not alone in this. The General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics and Research reports that since 1965, about 47 million people have been Adventist members, and at least 20.29 million of them have left. That’s a net loss rate of 43.17%. More than four in ten. If someone you love has walked away, you are in very large company.
So what do we do? We stay in relationship. We keep calling. We keep inviting them to birthday dinners and holidays. We keep listening, even when what they say is hard to hear.
And we remember that God hasn’t stopped working with them, any more than He’s stopped working on us. Paul wrote, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6, KJV). That promise doesn’t expire when someone stops attending church.
Sometimes people come back. Think of the prodigal son. His father didn’t chase him down the road with arguments. He waited, and he watched, and “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20, KJV). The door was open the whole time.
Sometimes people take a different path, and God is still with them there too. That’s hard for some of us to accept. But He loves them more than we do.
I’d like us to be more intentional about keeping a loving relationship with the people who leave than about trying to coax them back. A steady, warm friendship is more persuasive than pressure. It’s also a lot more like Jesus than insisting on denominational alignment.
Keep the porch light on, and keep loving them.
Photo: Clément Proust / Pexels (https://www.pexels.com/photo/18372855/)
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