Why Are You Leaving? Is It Me?

Self-Differentiation as Pastoral Sanity

“We’re leaving this church.” Very few pastoral conversations are as painful as the ones involving those four words. They weigh heavy on the heart. Some versions, typically the ones that include, “We’re moving and we’re sad to go,” weigh far less than others, like the ones that include ecclesiological critique. And of course, the ones that include personal critique weigh heaviest of all.

Over the course of twenty years in local church ministry, I’ve had my fair share of these heavy interactions. They’re never easy and I’ve come to terms with the likelihood that they will never be easy. But I’m grateful that they’ve at least begun to feel a bit lighter. Aside from the grace of God, self-differentiation has been the key.

Edwin Friedman defines and describes self-differentiation in a number of helpful ways—“the capacity to take a stand in an intense emotional system,” “containing one’s reactivity,” “maintaining non-anxious presence in the face of anxious others,” “knowing where one ends and another begins,” and “taking maximum responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny rather than blaming others or the context.”

In essence, self-differentiation is the ability to bring one’s whole, integrated self into a situation without allowing the situation to fracture, disintegrate one’s self. This goes both ways. Not only does the self-differentiated individual distinguish the anxiety of others from their own anxiety, or lack thereof, they also maintain focus “on their own integrity and on the nature of their own presence rather than techniques for manipulating or motivating others.”

The church is family. When someone leaves, for just about any reason, it feels a bit like divorce. But three paradigm shifts have helped me self-differentiate amid the pain, carving a path to pastoral sanity.

Condemnation, Contempt, or Curiosity

For a long time, my initial response to “we’re leaving” was almost always condemnation, contempt, or both. There’s a concept in social psychology called actor-observer bias which describes our tendency to attribute our own challenging circumstances to external causes (e.g. “I didn’t get the promotion because the boss hates me”) while attributing others’ circumstances to internal causes (e.g. “She got the promotion because she plays office politics”).

Actor-observer bias allows us to either position ourselves over others (read: condemnation) or protect ourselves from others (read: contempt). At the root, both are tied to our own shame. As Curt Thompson describes, “The act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. [...] ‘Shamed people shame people.’ Long before we are criticizing others, the source of that criticism has been planted, fertilized and grown in our own lives, directed at ourselves, and often in ways we are mostly unaware of.”

Curiosity has been the antidote for condemnation and contempt. Whenever I’ve replaced “how could they?,” with “why do I feel the way I feel?” and “how could you?,” with “tell me more,” condemning, contemptuous reactivity has almost always given way to at least the early stages of empathy, compassion, and even love. To be sure, there are reasonable and terrible reasons to leave a church. And though pastors should lovingly shepherd, guide, and course correct when necessary, attempting to do so before recognizing and dealing with our own shame and condemning, contemptuous reactivity, will inevitably lead to unnecessary damage.

It’s impossible to be curious and condemning/contemptuous at the same time. Choose curiosity.

Illustration by Sébastien Thibault

My Ego or Their Formation

Not long ago, at a citywide gathering of several churches, a congregant who had once been quite involved at our church but hadn’t been around in recent months walked straight to me and said, “I’m not at WestGate any more.” During her initial approach, I’d assumed she was coming over to say she’d been traveling or busy with work and was very much looking forward to getting back into the rhythm of things with us. I was wrong. She’d left. And it sounded like she wasn’t coming back.

I was glad she felt comfortable enough with me to share further details but each little bit was gut punch after gut punch to my fragile ego. Everything from the size of our congregation to the lack of certain programming elements to shortcomings in my teaching to the difficulty of finding meaningful relationships—nothing was left off the table. According to her, our church had significant issues. I began to feel the tension in my neck and tightening of my stomach indicative of defensiveness taking hold. But then, by God’s grace and the memories of countless pastoral mistakes over the years, I took a deep breath. Our church does have issues and we’ve got plenty of room to grow. Then I asked the curiosity question. “Tell me more.” And she did.

As I attempted to listen with empathy, compassion, and love, at least as best as I could in the moment, her honesty, vulnerability, and longing began to color the conversation in a new way. She’d found a smaller church where one of her children, who’d struggled to find friends at our church, had begun to cultivate meaningful friendships. She’d found a small group led by a longtime friend, which had expedited her sense of belonging. God had been using the teaching life of this new church to form her in very unique and specific ways in this season of life.

The juvenile grumbling of my fragile ego began to give way to genuine gratitude for the newly invigorated life being breathed into this woman’s formation journey by God’s Spirit through this church that wasn’t our church. But even that was too narrow of a view.

This Church or The Church

Every now and then I’ll describe WestGate as “my” church. Most people understand. The “my” isn’t possessive. It isn’t “my” church the way the shoes I’m wearing today are “my” shoes. Even still, I typically refrain from using “my.” Most of the time I’ll say “our” church. But who I mean by “our” might still be a bit nebulous. “Our” could be the totality of our congregation, all those who call “our” church home. I guess some might hear it as a familial distinction, the place my wife, children, and I call home. Many church leaders understand “our” to mean our staff team. But all of it falls short.

Self-differentiation as pastoral sanity amid congregational loss requires an expansive view of the global, historic church. Though a person may be leaving this church or “our” church, so long as they continue to belong to the church, we belong to one another, bound up as family. Pastoral calling is an invitation to the overarching story of God written across the broad narrative of the church, not simply this or “our” church. “Our” congregation belongs to the great congregational cloud of witnesses. Christ has one church, not many churches. We are one body, not many bodies.

“We’re leaving this church,” need not be the end of our story together. Whether here or there, near or far, we continue to journey together as the church. As such, pastors can take deep breaths, pray deeper prayers, and rest easy in the peace of knowing that the church is deeper and wider than our losses, anxieties, and insecurities.