Book Review: Exit Interviews: Revealing Stories of Why People are Leaving the Church
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) PostsOriginally written September 2002
I once saw an editorial on our denominational web site in which Rev. William Smith, a Presbyterian minister in Louisville, Mississippi, described the church growth movement as one whose strong suit is description and whose short suit is prescription. Exit Interviews is a work which, I believe, proves that opinion. For years we have been told what “unchurched” people like and don’t like, and we’ve been made to believe that if we don’t tailor everything we do to those likes and dislikes, the church will go the way of the Studebaker.
Exit Interviews exposes what I call the church growth movement’s “dirty little secret,” which is this: by trying not to look, sound or feel like “church” (for fear this would turn off the “unchurched”), the church has failed to be what the world knows, expects, and needs the church to be. This book is full of stories of people with deep wounds, people who turned from a superficial world to the church, only to find the church just as superficial (if not more so). We have assumed (or we have been made to believe) that we should present “Christianity lite” in order to be attractive to the world. That has meant that anything with depth or with ties to the past must be avoided.
What we see from these stories of people who have left the church is that they desperately needed to feel that they were a part of a larger story, the story of the universal communion of the saints. In other words, people turn to the church for that which only the church can give them, yet this is precisely what the church has denied them. It was especially interesting to me to note what people who had left the church were saying about worship – those who were dissatisfied with worship in Evangelical churches did not seem to be calling for more “entertainment value”, but rather for more participation. Could it be that the conventional church-growth “wisdom” regarding near-zero-participation in worship (for example, as described in Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church) stems more from the desires of those designing the services than from the needs of those who will attend those services?
Exit Interviews also reveals the “Willow Creek” model of “doing church” to be the back door to apostasy, as churchgoers are conditioned to judge a church on its entertainment value rather than its soundness of teaching and its ministry to the real needs of its people and community. When the luster fades from one “seeker service” they find a church that does it up bigger and better, until the inevitable day when they realize that no church can compete with Hollywood or Broadway, so they stay home or find something more entertaining to do on Sundays. People may leave “traditional” churches for the thrill of the “seeker” church, but when they leave the “seeker” church, they don’t find a different kind of church. They don’t go anywhere.
Exit Interviews is a reminder to the church to be faithful rather than fashionable, to do what no other organization on earth can do: be the church.
Oder print editions.
