Dale Partridge - July 28, 2020


When is it okay to leave my church？


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

155.75438

Word count

383

Sentence count

15

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When is it okay to leave your local church? is a question that has been on our minds for a long time. Many Christians hop from church to church, seeking for a place that meets their personal preferences and that meets the needs of their families. But since we ve turned the local church into a place for people to entertain and be entertained, instead of a place to belong and be edified, many Christians find it hard to leave.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 If we understood the local church, how the Bible defines the local church, we'd see that this
00:00:12.480 question is almost the equivalent of asking, when is it okay to leave my family? I mean,
00:00:18.960 that's how weighty and robust this question truly is. But since we've turned the local church into
00:00:24.480 a place for people to go and be entertained instead of being a place for people to belong
00:00:30.520 and be edified. Many Christians just hop from church to church seeking for a place that's going 0.95
00:00:36.760 to meet their personal preferences. The style of worship, the kids program, does the campus have a
00:00:42.820 coffee shop? Do they have a good online service? Is it located near my house? When in reality,
00:00:50.780 the only valid reasons we should ever leave our local church, in my opinion, is because of either
00:00:57.720 major doctrinal heresy that's being preached or possibly weak or very watered-down preaching,
00:01:03.860 or if you genuinely feel the Lord is moving you on to a different community of believers
00:01:08.720 where you and your family could serve and be edified more fruitfully. Now, in both cases,
00:01:16.040 this should not only be slow, but heartbreaking. If leaving your local church feels like
00:01:23.680 leaving your local gym for another fitness center, then you're not experiencing the biblical
00:01:29.300 definition of Christian fellowship. The people of God, your brothers and sisters in the local church
00:01:34.660 should be deeply entrenched into your life. So just keep that in mind. But to wrap up my answer,
00:01:42.860 I would say it'd be good to study John 17 and Ephesians 4 to get a rich understanding of how
00:01:48.480 unified and close Jesus expects his children to be. I would also seek counsel from mature
00:01:54.580 believers who won't just agree with you because they like you, but will examine why you're
00:02:00.820 considering leaving. Are you running from something that's hard, or if you're simply
00:02:04.960 being unwilling to labor in relationship with others, or if you really do have a biblically
00:02:09.180 grounded reason to move on. So take it slow. Seek not only your own interests, but the interests of
00:02:16.820 others. And ultimately, I would just say take the time to get into the Word of God and into prayer.
00:02:24.200 And I think through that experience, the Lord will give you your answer.