Things at church have been going quite well. That’s pastor talk for "New people are coming and the ones who are here seem to be happy and growing." In the ebbs and flows of ministry there are times when new people come and other times when people leave. At both times… there is a lot of self-examination and examination of what is going well or isn’t going well.
Today a curious thing happened. A new couple with a young child came to
church. (Actually, there were several new couples… this is the
experience of only one of them.) This is exactly who we think we will
be reaching! Their experience began exactly as we hope and design. (A
proud moment actually!) People from the congregation greeted them,
naturally. A staff member helped them connect their child to KidsTown, on and on.
But about 20 minutes into our service I noticed that this couple got up and left. To my knowledge they didn’t come back.
A failure
This always feels bad when you see someone new get up and leave. (OK, it feels the same even if they aren’t new!) I
mean… it’s not a good thing! We have no way of following up with them
and no way to find out what went wrong. Somehow they were prompted by
the Holy Spirit to check us out and something happened. From a very
human-to-human perspective I care deeply about why they didn’t stay. I wonder what their expectations were prior to coming, what they talked about as they got up and got ready to come to church, and what they talked about as they left.
Not a failure
As I reflected about the service prior to their departure, I’m not
ashamed. I could run through a list of things we did right. We greeted
them warmly. We told them about our kids ministry. We introduced them
to our service. They heard our heart to reach the lost and our heart to
connect them to a small group. We did about everything the best that we could. There have been opportunities in my time in ministry when this happened and I thought, "Man, we dropped the ball." This wasn’t one of them. So, this wasn’t a good thing and the staff will likely talk about it a lot, but I don’t think it was a failure either. It was, however, something to learn from. How can we handle it better next time? How can we make it so that no one would ever want to leave our service?
I’ve actually done this
There was a time when Kristen and I didn’t make it very deep in a service either. I can actually think of 2-3 churches that we once checked out and left during the greeting or the worship time or some other time when everyone was standing. I remember one time when we were visiting a church and left… they had just lost their pastor and Kristen and I just weren’t feeling the weirdness associated with that. We slipped out at the greeting. I can think of another time when the music was so dreadful we just headed out as the second song began.
So, I don’t know why it happened today. Heck, maybe they got a phone call and had to run home because their house was on fire? We may never know. But I will never be ashamed of telling people who we are and what we’re about. In f act, I hope that we actually do get contacted by them so that we can figure out just what went wrong. You never know, maybe it was God stirring them?
What about you? Have you ever bolted during a visit to church? If so, what was happening there?
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