A man stranded by himself on an island was finally discovered. His rescuers asked him about the three huts that they saw there. He pointed to the first hut and said, “This hut is my home.” Then he pointed to the second hut and said, “And this one is my church.”
“And what about the third hut?” asked his rescuers. “The third hut,” said the man, “That is my former church.”
Have you ever become so disillusioned with the church that you considered walking away? Maybe you already have walked away. You would certainly be in good company. According to recent data, 1.2 million Americans walk away from the church every year. That’s 3,500 people per day.
It begs the question, has the institutionalised church got it wrong?
It might seem wrong to bring it up… uncomfortable to talk about. I mean, the church in the Bible is referred to as ‘The Bride of Christ’ — the vessel through which God is supposedly bringing salvation, healing and blessing, and the restoration of life as God intended it to be.
In fact, renowned preacher Bill Hybels said:
“There is nothing like the local church when it’s working right. Its beauty is indescribable. Its power is breathtaking. Its potential is unlimited. It comforts the grieving and heals the broken in the context of community. It builds bridges to seekers and offers truth to the confused. It provides resources for those in need and opens its arms to the forgotten, the downtrodden, and the disillusioned. It breaks the chains of addictions, frees the oppressed, and offers belonging to the marginalised of the world. Whatever the capacity for human suffering, the church has a greater capacity for healing and wholeness.”
Sounds pretty fantastic, doesn’t it?
This image of the church becomes even more compelling when you dive into the Scriptures. The church in the Book of Acts is this unstoppable force. You see people selling all their possessions to care for each other, a whole welfare system developed to care for the needs of the poor, the orphaned, and the widowed. Then they’re persecuted, but they keep persevering. Jesus himself said, “I will build my church, and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it.”
There is no doubt about it: The church of the Bible seems to be this unstoppable force for good. Yet, if we are honest, our present experience of the church seems far from it.
In fact, it all feels pretty stoppable to me.
In fact, Bill Hybels’ own ministry would later unravel amid serious allegations, illustrating just how difficult it is for the church to live up to its own ideals.
Then the temptation is to put God’s character on trial because the church continues to fail. We say to God, “Why is it that your instrument of blessing this world sometimes feels like a let-down? God, are you so hopelessly devoted to this church thing that you’re blind to see its flaws? What is wrong with you, God!”
Have you ever driven to church wondering whether this might be your last Sunday?
Leaving Church Doesn’t Always Mean Leaving Jesus
If you’ve reached the point where you’re wondering whether to walk away from church, I don’t want to dismiss that lightly. Sometimes Christians can make it sound as though leaving a church is always an act of rebellion or spiritual immaturity. In reality, people leave for all sorts of reasons.
I know people who have left because they were hurt. I know others who left because they were exhausted. Some couldn’t reconcile what they were hearing on Sunday with the character of Jesus they encountered in the Gospels. Others slowly drifted away after years of feeling like spectators rather than family. There isn’t one story. There are thousands.
Sometimes leaving isn’t a failure of faith at all. Sometimes it’s an act of survival.
The irony is that many people who leave church don’t stop loving Jesus. They continue to pray. They continue to wrestle with Scripture. They continue trying to live lives marked by compassion, forgiveness and generosity. Their disappointment isn’t with Christ. It’s with those who claimed to represent him.
I understand that. In many ways, I share it.
The problem begins when our disappointment with the institution leads us to believe that we no longer need Christian community at all.
That conclusion feels understandable, but it would have puzzled the first followers of Jesus.
When you read the New Testament, it’s hard to escape the fact that the Christian life was intensely communal. People didn’t just turn up for an hour of worship before disappearing into their own lives again. They knew one another. They ate together. They carried each other’s financial burdens. They prayed for one another, argued with one another, forgave one another and, somehow, kept finding their way back to one another. That was simply what following Jesus looked like.
Here’s a little experiment. Open a Bible app and search for the words “one another”. You’ll be scrolling for a while. Before long you realise something rather obvious: almost everything the New Testament imagines Christians doing involves somebody else.
Perhaps that’s the distinction we’ve forgotten. Leaving a particular church may be necessary. Walking away from Christian community is something else entirely.
The Early Church Was a Mess Too
Before anyone misunderstands me, let me say what I’m not saying. I’m not saying you should go back to the church that hurt you. I’m not saying every church is healthy or that every pastor deserves your trust. Some churches become so controlling, manipulative or abusive that leaving is the wisest thing you can do. Sometimes walking away isn’t a lack of faith. It’s the first step towards healing.
Neither am I thinking that saying Christianity only counts if you sit in a particular building at 10 a.m. every Sunday. The New Testament doesn’t seem nearly as concerned about the form as we are. The first Christians met in homes, courtyards and wherever they could find each other. They certainly weren’t trying to recreate what most of us now call “church”.
What I’m questioning is something else.
I’m questioning the idea that we can follow Jesus while removing ourselves from Christian community altogether.
Those aren’t the same thing.
In fact, one of the things that keeps me from giving up on Christian community is the realisation that it has never been as polished as we imagine. It’s tempting to imagine the early church as some golden age that we’ve somehow lost. We read Acts and picture perfect harmony, overflowing generosity and unshakeable faith. Then we look at the modern church and wonder where everything went wrong.
The problem is that Acts isn’t the whole story.
Keep reading into Paul’s letters, and the picture changes rather quickly.
The church in Corinth was deeply divided. Christians were suing one another. There were power struggles, sexual scandals, class divisions and public arguments over almost everything imaginable. At one point Paul even has to rebuke them because wealthy believers were arriving early to communion, eating all the food and getting drunk before poorer members had finished work and arrived. Imagine turning up to church and discovering the communion wine was gone because someone had already polished it off.
If there was ever a church that deserved to be abandoned, Corinth would have to be somewhere near the top of the list.
Yet Paul never tells them to retreat into private spirituality. He doesn’t suggest that following Jesus would simply be easier on their own. Instead, he spends sixteen chapters calling them back to one another. Again and again, his answer isn’t to escape.
Seeing God Through Others
C.S. Lewis makes a profound observation in his book, The Four Loves.
Let me explain like this. Imagine I have a friend. Let’s call him Greg. Greg and I are good friends, close friends. I’d probably say I know Greg pretty well.
But here’s Lewis’ point: I can never know the whole Greg by myself.
Now imagine another friend comes along — let’s call him Mike. Mike brings something out in Greg that I’ve never seen before. They share a sense of humour that I don’t. Greg laughs differently around Mike. He talks about things we’ve never discussed. Suddenly I discover another side of my friend.
Then imagine Greg gets married. Around his wife, you see yet another side of him. The playful side. The tender side. The fiercely protective side. Parts of Greg that neither Mike nor I could have discovered on our own.
Lewis’ point is simple: it takes a community to know a person. Every relationship reveals something different. No single friendship is enough to uncover the whole person.
I think the same is true of God.
Every Christian reflects something of God’s character, but none of us reflects all of it. One person teaches me about grace. Another shows me courage. Someone else embodies generosity or wisdom or perseverance. The more I share life with other followers of Jesus, the more facets of God’s character I encounter.
Perhaps that’s another reason Christianity has always been communal.
Left to myself, I’ll almost certainly create God in my own image. I’ll gravitate towards the parts of him that come naturally to me and overlook the parts that don’t. Other people interrupt that process. They expose my blind spots. They reveal aspects of God I might never have seen on my own.
Maybe that’s one of the greatest gifts of Christian community. It’s not simply that we support one another. It’s that, together, we help one another see God more clearly.
You Can’t Become Loving by Yourself
I’ve often wondered why God didn’t make the Christian life easier.
Surely there was a better way.
If the goal is to make us more patient, more forgiving, more generous and more like Jesus, why not just give us a Bible, the Holy Spirit and a quiet cabin in the mountains? Why surround us with people who misunderstand us, annoy us, disappoint us and occasionally break our hearts?
Then it dawned on me.
You don’t learn patience by reading about patience.
You learn patience by living with really annoying people.
You don’t discover whether you’ve forgiven your enemies until you actually have enemies to forgive. You don’t find out whether you’re compassionate until someone else’s pain interrupts your plans. You don’t become generous until somebody needs something that costs you.
The uncomfortable truth is that almost every Christian virtue requires another person.
Perhaps that’s why community is so frustrating.
And perhaps that’s also why it’s so necessary.
Community doesn’t just reveal our strengths. It exposes everything we’d rather not know about ourselves, the very areas that we need to grow. Maybe Christian community is where the slow work of becoming like Christ actually happens.
If Not Church, Then What?
If you’ve found a healthy church where people genuinely know you, challenge you, support you and point you towards Jesus, then treasure it. Seriously. Those communities exist, and when they do, they’re a gift. I’m certainly not trying to persuade anyone to leave a healthy church.
But if you’ve reached the point where you simply can’t go back to the institution, don’t make the mistake of confusing that decision with a call to isolation.
Find your people.
For me, that doesn’t happen in a church auditorium anymore. Every day, I and a lot of believers all over the world meet to read the Bible, pray in the Holy Spirit and learn the word of God by the Holy Spirit
Once a year, at different locations all over the world, we hold a hangots and retreats where we eat together, tell stories, wrestle with Scripture, laugh a lot, disagree occasionally and pray for one another. Nobody’s trying to build a platform or pretending to have all the answers. We’re just trying to follow Jesus together.
For you, it might look completely different.
It might be a few friends around a dinner table once a month. It might be a house church. It might be joining a recovery group. It might even begin online. I’ve seen genuine friendships grow out of online communities where people have found a place where they can be really honest. Heck, I even run an online Christian community. Sure, digital communities have their limits, but they can still become places of encouragement, accountability and belonging.
The form matters less than we often imagine.
Whether your people gather in a church building, around a dining table, in someone’s backyard or online doesn’t seem to be the point.
The point is that you have people.
People who know when life is falling apart without you having to explain it. People who will challenge you when you’re wrong and encourage you when you’re weary. People who will celebrate your wins, carry your grief and quietly help you keep following Jesus.
That’s the kind of life the New Testament imagines. It isn’t built around an institution. It’s built around relationships.
The Kind of People Jesus Had in Mind
Perhaps the question was never whether the institutional church would succeed or fail. Every human institution eventually disappoints us because every human institution is made up of human beings. The first-century church discovered that, and so have we. The New Testament never hides that reality. Instead, it keeps inviting us to become the sort of people who can love one another despite it.
That is why I find it difficult to believe that the answer to a broken church is an isolated faith. Every meaningful relationship in our lives shapes us, and the people we choose to share our lives with will always influence the kind of people we become. Christian community is no different. It challenges us, exposes us, comforts us and reminds us of parts of God we would almost certainly miss on our own.
If you have found a healthy church where that kind of life is possible, I hope you never take it for granted. If you haven’t, I hope you keep looking. It may not look like the church you grew up in. It may be a handful of friends around a dinner table, a house church, a recovery group, or a small circle gathered around a backyard fire. The shape of that community matters far less than the willingness of its members to share life together in the way Jesus imagined.
After everything I have seen, I no longer believe the future of Christianity depends on bigger churches, better branding or more polished Sunday services. I think it depends on ordinary followers of Jesus who are willing to know one another deeply, carry one another’s burdens and learn, however imperfectly, how to love one another well. If we lose that, it won’t matter how impressive our institutions become. If we recover it, I suspect the institution will matter a great deal less.