What Keeps People From Coming Back to the Church?

coming back to church.001All churches have people leave.  But it should break our hearts when people leave. It certainly does the Lord when people leave Him (Luke 15).  Yet people don’t have to remain gone!  They can come back and we should do everything we can to encourage their return to the body.  In order to do this we need to understand what is keeping people from coming back to the church.  I want to share five things that are reasons people use for not coming back. [This information came from a survey done by Focus press a couple of years back, Dale Jenkins FHU lectures in 2014, a Wednesday night Bible class, and my own thoughts.]

  1. A lack of close friendships and family relationships in the church. The early church was a “one another” people.  The book of Acts especially in the early chapters illustrates their closeness and deep friendships.  Today, a lack of connections keep people away.  They feel the church is filled with cliques, and they are an unwanted outsider.  Many live away from family, and thus do not have the family ties that motivate church attendance.  Some statistics show that 82% of church members who do dropout do so in the first year.¹  It is imperative of churches to work to get people connected in the first six months of their membership.
  2. A lack of doctrinal convictions.  Many are not interested in coming back to the church because they do not see the doctrinal necessity of the church.  They have bought into the world’s belief that organize religion is hypocritical and greed-filled.  They do not hold to strong doctrinal convictions about worship, salvation, and the role of the church in the world.
  3. A lack of perceived relevancy of the church.  Following up the last point, not only do they not have strong doctrinal convictions which motivate involvement, but they do not have a practical motivation for involvement.  They do not have a “why” for being involved.  People are very consumer-driven and are consistently asking what is in it for me.  I included the word “perceived” because I believe the church is the most relevant and important work and body on God’s earth.  As I wrote about in a previous post the local church is the hope of the world.  
  4. Bitterness toward the church.  Bitterness invades the heart and influences the perspective of someone tainted by it.  Bitterness often proceeds from legitimate mistreatment.  A confidence may have been violated or a church leader acted shamefully toward them.  They could have been ostracized or neglected.  Sometimes it comes from plain excuses and selfishness.  But bitterness will build a wall that causes people not to repent (see Esau – Heb. 12:14-17).
  5. Sin in their life!  This last one is the main one and runs through all of the above.  Satan is attacking and people give into sin when they leave the church.  I would divide the sin into three categories that keep people from returning to the church:  pleasure, habits, and lifestyle choices.  The church has lots of things competing against it in today’s culture.  Just think about the business of Sunday and the strong temptation for people to be somewhere else besides church.  People also develop habits, which become deep ruts, and are hard to break free from in order to return to worship.  Finally, some have made major lifestyle choices which have taken their life down a road of sin.  Sometimes people are so entrenched in the sin, they are not willing to give up their sins.

It doesn’t matter the reason, any reason is something that is keeping a child of God away from His body and His work.  We need to try to understand the reasons, so we can better minister to them as a church.  We often need to validate their feelings, come along side them in their struggles, and help them see the joy in repentance and the blessing of a church family.  

What other reasons would you give for what keeps people from returning to church?

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¹  See Gary McIntosh and Charles Arn book – What Every Pastor Should Know.

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