Staying connected to the back door brigade

I guess that one of the questions that can go through the mind of a potential leaver is whether anyone will notice their departure or indeed will anyone care that they are leaving. Now I know that some people reach a low point where they think this is true and others use such a question as a ploy to get noticed. But I’m talking about those folk who might slip away quietly precisely because no one seems to notice and no one seems to care.

So what might change that point of view? What can make a person feel valued? Here are a few thoughts.

1. No one gets to leave the church building without someone checking in with them. It never ceases to amaze me how easy it can be to slip out of church without connecting with anyone else. I know that this is how some people choose to live, or not live, in a Christian community, but it should never happen because we never notice. If someone chooses to disengage then there is little I can do abuot that, but if I choose not engage with them, that is something I can address. So rule one is simply this: someone needs to be responsible for checking in. Depending upon the soze of your church this could be two or three people or may take a team of twenty, but it needs to happen.

2. Don’t just follow up absence. It’s too easy simply to check in with people who don’t come, but what about the people who are coming? In my previous church we began to introduce a pattern of taking the flowers to people who weren’t on the sick list. It was a simple way to say to someone, “We’ve noticed you’re okay and we want you to know that we’ve noticed.”

3. Say thank you. I try to say thank you to everyone who contributes on a Sunday. I don’t always succeed, but that doesn’t make it any less important to do. Over our Easter weekend a number of people have worked really hard, they need to know that I’m aware of that and thankful for their efforts.

4. Do you what you can to keep the door open. I know that a lot of people don’t like email, but a quick, friendly email allows you to let someone know you noticed their absence. And if there’s no response to your email, you can send a card and/or plan a visit.

Leaving well: More thoughts about the back door

There are many reasons people leave the church. Some are positive, some are negative. The goal when a person or family leave the church is to help them leave well and leave graciously. The worst case scenario is that they leave negatively and in so doing do damage to themselves, to the church and to the leaders. Leaving well enables both sides to bless each other as they seek to follow God wherever he leads them. 

The first thing we probably need to recognise is that it will not always be possible to help someone leave well. Either through their choice (some people just want their grievances aired as loudly and publicly as possible) or because they are not ready to deal with the presenting issue that has precipitated their departure. Having said that, we need to get better at the leaving process and we should try as hard as we can to make it a positive experience.

The overriding principle must be grace. Grace on both sides. Where the issue is sin, then we need to be a gracious church, offering forgiveness and reconciliation wherever possible. We must endeavour always to leave the door open, offering an opportunity to return to the community of faith. Where the issue is pain for the leaver, then the leaver too must be gracious. The church is not a perfect place, the people are not perfect. 

The first step in leaving well is to establish the core reason for leaving. This will determine what next step needs to be taken. It will also help you identify whether there is the possibility for reconciliation or not. There can be a lot of speculation about the reason a particular person or family have chosen to leave. Establishing the core reason gives the leadership of the church and the membership of the church the opportunity to address issues surrounding leaving and leavers without all the speculation that goes with them.

When all is said and done, folk will leave the church and they will leave however they want to leave. Leaving well doesn’t just have to mean standing at the front and blessing the congregation and the congregation blessing the leaver. Leaving well is about knowing the reasons, leaving the door open, minimising pain and maximising grace.

What's my line?

One question that’s been wandering around my mind is this: Does our present focus on the minister as leader mean that we’ve devalued the minister as pastor?

Let me explain.

I wonder if we’ve reached a point where we recognise that the church needs strong, positive, enabling leadership and in order to have that we need to call people with leadership gifts to lead the church. But not everyone with leadership gifts has a pastoral gift too. Given that the vast majority of churches, certainly the vast majority in the UK, can only afford one full-time minister, what happens when you appoint a leader rather than a pastor?

I feel this acutely in my own ministry because I don’t see myself primarily as a pastor. I care about people but I’m not wired up as a pastor, or at least I’m not wired up to do what I perceive a pastorally wired person would do. I hear this same self-description from others at gatherings of ministers over the 17 years I’ve been in ministry. I can’t comment on how much this reflects our process for accepting and training people for ministry because I didn’t train specifically for ministry when I attended college.

So where does that leave us? Well I think it leaves us in a place where we know that we need high quality pastoral care in our churches, but I also think it leaves not knowing how to implement that care because we don’t know who should be doing the care. We still have a system of ministry that presumes it’s the primary responsibility of the minister as pastor to do the caring, but if the minister isn’t wired for It how effectively can, and will, they do it?

If our new leadership model is more focussed on being a team, then the role of the minister is to lead effectively, delegate appropriately, and enable widely. But that also implies that we need committed and gifted partners to make this happen. It is no use delegating a responsibility to someone who never does the job!

Perhaps we have got it right, perhaps we haven’t lost sight of the duty of care. Perhaps we just need to work smarter at developing a 21st century model for fulfilling our core call as God’s family, recognising the gifts and skills of those we call to leadership and building effective teams around them.

Building good pastoral care is one factor in closing the back door of the church, that’s why it’s so important that we do it well. As to the role of the minister, there’s still much to do.

I remember a long time ago now, as I was thinking about my role as a leader in church, I happened to be reading through Leviticus. It’s not the book I’d normally choose to read devotionally, but it was on my reading plan so I read away. In Leviticus 6 as I recall it describes the duties of the priests. One duty was simply to keep the fire burning on the sacrificial altar. That picture has stayed with me as I see part of my role as keeping the flame alight. 

I am privileged to be someone who knows that God has called them to this work of ministry and leadership. I am privileged to have a group of people around who recognise that too and who reach into their pockets weeks by week, month by month, to make it possible for me to not to have work in order to minister. Because I don’t have to go to the office I can go before God and tend to the flame.

Why do people leave the church?

Ron Kallmier, who lead the Closing the Back Door seminar, pointed us towards Luke 15 and the three parables about lost things to think about why people leave the church. Three possible reasons:

1. Lost by accident. In other words they wander off and before you know it they’re lost and disconnected with the church.

2. Lost by the carelessness of others. They get hurt by someone or something that happens and they leave.

3. By personal choice. The prodigal son chooses to get himself lost. Some people leave church because of personal sin, ie choosing to leave rather than face the discipline that comes with being a part of a faith community.

A simple strategy

A simple strategy for processing the absent attender

If a person misses one Sunday:

Check with people who might know why.

Respond appropriately (visit, call, card or note, or no action needed)

If a person misses two consecutive Sundays:

Unless a known issue (eg hospitalisation, holiday) make informal contact via a call, a card or note, an email.

Follow up any response as appropriate

If no response then make a special point of checking on the third Sunday and if present, make a point of connecting with them and checking out why they’ve been away.

Respond appropriately

If a person misses four or more Sundays

Make contact specifically to ask why no attendance. Offer a clear opportunity to talk.

This strategy has to be adjusted dependent upon the frequency of attendance. So, for someone who is typically there every week, absence may be more critical than for someone who comes once a month.

What constitutes an appropriate response

If the reason for absence requires pastoral intervention, the pastoral coordinator needs informing and a plan of action established.

Otherwise a follow-up visit may be all that is needed.

Useful levels of contact include: A hand written note or card, either on Church stationary or plain stationary. An informal email. An informal ‘phone call. A text message. Flowers.

If something more formal needs to be arranged then an appointment should be planned. 

Some links to thoughts about closing the back door

A short web search on Closing the Back Door of the Church turned up a series of interesting articles that you might like to dip into if you too are considering this idea. Here are three:

When a friend leaves your church

Creating commitment to your Church

Can the church close the back door?

Interestingly most of the articles at some point raise the issue of "no one noticed" when someone left. I think it's more to true to say that someone probably noticed, but no one acted. Clearly the dynamics are different as churches grow. It has to be more difficult to be aware of changing patterns of attendance in a large church compared to a smaller church. This is why Rick Warren, amongst others, points to the vital role small groups fulfil in this area.

Perhaps the first step in a strategy is to determine that no one will leave without being noticed. Or maybe it should be that no one is absent without being noticed.

Even as I write that I realise that we live in a very different culture. A culture where, on the one hand, we run the risk of being accused of not caring and on the other we're accused of interfering. We do seem to want to be noticed and loved whilst maintaining total privacy!

Managing the back (and front) doors of the church

The seminar I attended the other day has got me thinking and maybe even a little inspired. 

Although it was not made explicit in the seminar, I take it that when we talk about the back door of the church we are using it as a metaphor for the exit strategy of those people who leave the church disgruntled or disengaged in some way or another. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. In fact, as the seminar developed through the day, it became clear that for some the back door was simply the exit used by anyone leaving the church.

This in turn generates some confusion because there are times when it is right for someone to leave their church, so why would we want to close the back door on them doing so? It seems to me that what we need to do is to manage the traffic that passes through the back door rather than approach it as the simple matter of keeping closed. I want to help people leave well if leaving is what they need to do.

So, I'm going to begin work on developing a strategy for how we manage our back door. Maybe this is, in part, a defence mechanism so that we can say that we've done everything we can to help a person to leave well, but it's surely worth having a plan. Even more so in our highly mobile and low commitment society where people move on with apparent ease. I've had a few thoughts that I need to get in some sort of order, but I'd be interested to know if anyone has a strategy that works well, or ideas about what might work well. 

As someone who has left a few churches over the years (that's because I'm a minister I hasten to add) I've had my share of good and bad experiences. I know too that it's just plain impossible to please everyone, so even the best strategy won't work for all leavers. 

To drop a pebble in the pond of your thinking, I suspect that the best strategy for managing the back door might just begin with our strategy for managing the front door, the entry point to our churches.

Closing the Back Door of the Church

Yesterday, March 6th, I spent the day at Waverley Abbey House for a seminar about Closing the Back Door of the Church. Overall, it was an interesting day but I think we got a bit side-tracked. The discussion was good, but my goals for the day were to think through strategies for helping the church deal with through traffic of people coming and going in the life cycle of church, and we didn't do that. much of the discussion was about the nature of church.

There are many reasons people leave the church, many negative and some positive. The question is not about whether people will leave but how they will leave. If people are leaving via the back door, one of the hard things to discern is when to stand in front of the door and when to hold it open!

I guess using the "back door" image implies that people are slipping out unnoticed and potentially uncared for or unchallenged. This raises issues with the way we do pastoral care and discipleship. What was interesting is that some people articulated the view that you should get a new attender involved in something as quickly as possible and other advocated a waiting period. To be accurate, the "waiting period" view mostly related to any significant role in the life of the church, whereas the "get involved in something" view focused on small groups and relational things.

All this needs more though and reflection.