I have very mixed emotions after reading Quitting Church by Julia Duin.  On one hand, she provides a very damning indictment about the state of most modern-day churches.  Most churches are poorly led, overtly self-centered, and spiritually immature.

But on the other hand, she also laments many of the day to day struggles of the average churchgoer…and most of their “problems” are more “symptoms” of our society rather than deep spiritual deficiencies.

One of her arguments about why single mothers are leaving is that, like her, she has trouble balancing her work schedule and her role as a mother and she expects the church to meet her spiritual needs on Sunday morning.  But in an earlier chapter decries the short amount of music (15 minutes) and spiritually shallow teachings (45) minutes.  Duin longs of the days of her Charismatic communal living, but lacks the ability to inject that into her busy schedule.  She wants God to meet her, but on HER terms and schedule.

I was conflicted when I read Quitting Church, I wanted to fully agree with her suppositions that the church held nothing for her and the people she interviewed.

Honestly, she backed up many of her arguments with extensive research and factual data reputable sources from George Barna and Pew Research Center to Christianity Today and Charisma magazines.  With such overwhelming statistics, I began to wonder if I was not intellectually savvy enough to grasp the concepts being offered.

But in reality, I believe Duin, and many like her, has a desire for a deep spiritual transformation, custom fit for their exact season of life.  The church MUST provide deep theological instruction, as well as provide for all the needs of singles, single-agains, the young, the old, the elderly, the immature, the mature, the learning, the single moms, the college aged, the drug addicted, the disenfranchised, males, females, and children all within the space of a “not too long” or “not too short” service.  All this also allowing and encouraging a deep relationship with the entire congregation and a rich fellowship with the pastor.

The author recants many stories of her past, when she lived in a Charismatic community of believers.  They shared their lives, their paychecks, their homes…it sounded truly Utopian.   It seems that their quest is not for the perfect church experience, but to re-create the experiences of their memories.  Times change, situations arise, and I know that this is petty, but I wanted to ask, “If it was so great, why did it change?”  I would love to find out why those communities no longer exist.

It all seems very selfish to me.

Do I think that churches have failed in meeting many of the needs of their congregations?  Yes.  Do I think that they can do better?  Of course.  Do I think that people are leaving the church is massive numbers because they have just ‘outgrown’ the church? No.

Do I think that people (our society as a whole) are TOO busy?  Yes.  Do I believe that people need to stop depending on religion and institutions to meet all their needs? Yes.  Do I believe that many churches simply fail because of poor leadership? Yes.

But do we need to forsake the church as a whole? No.  The church is the Bride of Christ.  Instead of leaving or ‘quitting’ church, we need to find ways to make the church better.

I believe that every church leader needs to read this book.  It’s a wake up call: what we’re doing isn’t working as well as we had hoped.  It’s a rallying cry to focus more on BEING the church, instead of just DOING church.  Pastors, we have to wake up and realize that we no longer can phone it in, we have to roll up our sleeves and get busy doing the work of the Lord.

But I also believe that people in our society need to accept some of the responsibility for their life station.  You cannot choose a career and work all through your 20′s and wonder why you have no prospects for marriage or children.  My experience has revealed that many people, single and married, need to come to grips with some emotional and mental dysfunction instead of blaming the church for all their ills and misfortunes.

But unlike Ms. Duin, I don’t want to paint with a broad brush.  I don’t think that she intended to, but it was the result.

Quitting Church will frustrate you and make you angry.  It will also convict you and open your eyes to a growing problem in our congregations.  We have to grow up and so do our churches.

I’m a fan of Frank Viola and George Barna.  I really enjoyed Pagan Christianity, the prequel to Re-imagining Church.  I would highly recommend it to you.  You can read my review of it here.  It’s informative and very challenging…but nothing prepared me for Frank Viola’s solo tome,  Re-imagining Church.

Viola’s primary premise is that “many of today’s congregations have shifted away from God’s original plan for the church.”  I do not disagree with much of what the book says.  However, I grew very tired of the tearing down of each facet of the church.  I completely understood it in Pagan Christianity, but with a title of “Re-imagining Church,’ I set my expectations on  a book full of ideas and thoughts that would challenge me, and give me ideas to transform my modern day church experiences and ministries.  I had thought that Viola would spend less time tearing down other churches and building up the organic movement.  To me, Re-imagining Church just became a book of “this idea is good because this thing sucks.”

That is not to say that there weren’t ideas offered.  When I arrived at the last chapter, entitled “Where do we go from here?”, I was hoping for some answers to the previous chapters of church dissection.  Instead,  the first half of the last chapter was a complete evisceration of churches like Willowcreek, Saddleback, Vintage Faith, and Lakewood, although, he doesn’t exactly call them by name.  And Viola followed that up with a challenge to do away with pastors, church leaders, and anything that even resembles modern day church services.  I get it, I dig it, I even agree with most of it.  What I struggled with, especially in the end section of the book, was Viola’s “almost” contradiction.

Towards the end of the chapter, Frank recounts great men of the faith who have stepped out of occupational pastoral positions and started (and led) organic churches.  My question is this: so as long as the church is organic in nature, it’s OK for those guys to be pastors…but Joel Osteen is wrong?  Frank suggests that elders are only needed in times of severe church need, but he mentions the leaders of these other churches and even church planters…of organic churches.

I agree that Jesus needs to be the head of the church.  I agree that we need to have open dialogs and discussions within our church gatherings.  I agree that the modern day church structure is not EXACTLY what God ordained in Acts, but here’s my beef  – if no one person is “the leader,” who organizes the gatherings?  Who makes the phone calls or sends the emails?  Who makes sure that the gathering location is prepared for the gathering?  I believe that Viola would say, “The Apostolic Leader,” or the community of believers would rally and do it on their own.  And to that I would ask this one question:

What happens when that leader leaves?  By Viola’s own definition, the Apostolic Leader is not mean to stay put, he is meant to start up, train, organize, and then leave the church. to replicate another organic church.  I know that “the church” is supposed to support itself, but somebody has to to lead…objects (and people) who are at rest, tend to stay at rest, unless acted on by another force.  I just don’t believe that Jesus is going to send emails and make phone calls to organize people into a church.

I also struggle with Viola’s suggestion that the organic church is meant only for believers.  He spends very little time discussing the lost, while calling out other home churches and small groups as cliquish and sectarian, he paints a glorious picture of an organic church gathering.  It sounds very cliquish.  But who oversees that it doesn’t become a sect or cult?   I know, I know, Jesus, but again, someone has to lead, even after the Apostolic Leader/Planter moves on.

There is no right or wrong in this discussion, and I believe that Frank Viola is more right, than wrong, but what finally pushed me over the edge was the fact that I spend so much time trying to convince people to accept Jesus Christ and follow “The Way”, that it becomes even more difficult to convince someone to follow Christ, and then COMPLETELY forget everything that they know about church…it’s almost too much to swallow.

The good news of witnessing and bringing people into a Christian community, is that there is some familiarity with the basic tenets of what church is and isn’t.  The bad news is that there is even more familiarity with the basic tenets of what church should be, but isn’t.

If I had to choose between evangelizing Jesus Christ or organic church, I would opt for proclaiming the name of Jesus, which I am pretty sure I am called to do, more so that proclaiming the preferred Christian gathering style of the First Century Church.

If I were you, I would definitely read Re-imagining Church and decide for your own.