Ministry to Missing Members

We call not to get people to come back to church; we call because people are in pain.
—John Savage

I was sorting slides I had used in an every-member canvass in my church. When I held some to the window, I was shocked. Pictured in the first three slides were three couples who had held key offices in the church my first year there. Now, four years later, those couples were totally inactive.

These people no longer attended worship, except maybe on Christmas or Easter, made no financial contribution, didn’t participate in the life of the church, and had a negative attitude about the congregation.

How could people move in just four years from active involvement to total inactivity? I wondered.

I thought of times I had visited inactive members and seen absolutely nothing happen. In fact, often they were more convinced to stay away after I made the call. I knew I needed to figure out how to keep current members active and enable inactive ones to return.

Anxiety-provoking events

I went to work on these questions as I pursued a doctorate and have continued to search for answers during the past decade.

I tried to find studies about the phenomenon, but I dug up nothing. So, with a psychologist and a theologian, I designed a research project. Thirteen trained pastors and I interviewed inactive members from four United Methodist congregations to find out what caused them to disappear from church life.

We found 95 percent of the people had experienced what we now call an “anxiety-provoking event”—an APE. Subsequent research showed these events usually come in clusters, several APEs compounding within six months to a year.

Anxiety is the emotional alarm system triggered when we’re in disequilibrium, when we’ve been hurt or feel that unless a change is made we’re going to get hurt. The inactive members we visited revealed high levels of anxiety, which when unresolved drove them from church membership. Gradually we saw their anxiety fell into four categories.

Reality anxiety. This anxiety is based on some real, historical event; you could have videotaped what caused it. Normally the event is a snub or an utter lack of church care when a member most needed it.

Suppose a pastor preaches his first sermon at a new church and someone says, “Pastor, we’ve had some lousy preachers here, but I think you’re going to be the worst.” That’s an anxiety-provoking event for a pastor, and it’s reality anxiety.

Awhile back I preached in a church in Vancouver. Two days prior, a family from the church had their home burn to the ground, and their two- and four-year-old children died in the fire. The father, in an attempt to save his youngest, dashed into the bedroom. The walls and curtains were on fire, as were the bedding and the child’s clothing. Leaning over to snatch the child out of the fire, severely burning himself in the process, the father tried to pick up his child. The child’s body fell apart in his hands.

How many people went to visit him and his wife? Maybe the pastor, but probably not many parishioners. Most would confess, “I wouldn’t know what to say,” as if they had to say something. A family experiencing the horror of this kind of tragedy would have a hard time returning to a church they felt let them down when they needed them. That is a reality anxiety-provoking event.

Moral anxiety. This next type is more difficult because it isn’t always as obvious. Moral anxiety arises when people experience in themselves or others behaviors they believe aren’t right.

A layperson called me once and said, “I understand you work with churches where people are leaving.”

“That’s true.”

“Well,” he continued, “our senior pastor has admitted having an affair with a woman in the congregation, our associate pastor confessed a homosexual affair with our organist, and we have choir members involved in affairs.”

That large church has lost more members over moral anxiety than most churches will ever have.

Moral anxiety can also be private, yet still drive people from the church. In Meetings At the Edge, Stephen Levine tells the story of a devout Christian nurse who cared for Evie, a woman who was given permission by her family to end her life because of the extreme pain caused by cancer. Helen, the nurse, refused to participate in such an act. Yet Evie persisted. She planned to take barbiturate-laced applesauce at nine p.m. Helen reluctantly agreed to arrive at ten and do whatever she could if Evie were not yet dead.

As Helen entered the house, Evie was crying. She was frightened and could not take the applesauce alone. She asked Helen to feed it to her. Helen said, “I cannot,” and walked out to sit in her car.

Ten minutes later, Evie hobbled to the door using a chair like a walker. She was vomiting. “Please come help me!” she begged. “I don’t want to be trapped in a coma and only partially die. Please come!” Helen walked into the house, fed her the rest of the applesauce, and held Evie until she died.

There’s a good chance Helen was not in church the following Sunday, and no one would know why. Her moral anxiety-provoking event was private.

Neurotic anxiety. The types get more difficult to handle as we go down the list. Neurotic anxiety is pain caused by the imagination. Someone may claim, “I don’t go to church because the pastor doesn’t like me.” If you check it out, the feeling might be based on reality, but the chances are it’s only in the person’s head.

A man goes into the hospital, expects you to visit, but doesn’t let you know he’s there. Then he gets angry when you don’t call. Months later when you do call, you may trace his problem to that hospital stay. The man is convinced you don’t care about him. That’s neurotic anxiety.

Even more frustrating than the fact that the person’s grievance is imaginary is that we can inadvertently foster it. For example, a pastor regularly calls on a couple who are potential members. He spends time with them and makes them feel important. All the time they’re thinking, Look at all the personal attention you get from the pastor around here! Then they join the church, and the attention they receive drops almost to zero. They wonder what happened. The pastor has accidentally encouraged unrealistic expectations, which give rise to neurotic anxiety.

Existential anxiety. Existential anxiety is that feeling brought about by the thought that someday you may not exist, or that even if you do, your life may be meaningless. We hear the refrains, “The church has lost its meaning for me.” “The sermons don’t mean anything anymore, pastor.” “My kids are bored stiff in church school.”

I visited a family that had been active church members but had dropped out. As I talked with them, I learned that when they were preparing for marriage, someone from a church said to the bride, “I believe you’re a born-again Christian, but I’m not convinced your fiancé is. If you marry him, your first child will die.” I was talking with them months after their toddler died.

They experienced existential anxiety at its height. Twenty minutes into that conversation, the couple cried as hard as two adults could cry. Tears running down the cheek begin to say something of the nature of the pain encountered when visiting an inactive member.

Clustering events

Most often people who drop out have run into at least one of these four types of anxiety in clusters. For example, a man in one congregation lost his job, and the family income plummeted. His wife, under stress, ended up depressed. Soon after, this couple—active leaders in their church—were told they were doing an inadequate job as Sunday school teachers and then were abruptly dismissed. They became angry and quit coming to church.

When a layperson and pastor visited them some weeks later, the woman was reading a newspaper. She put it down, said hello, and picked it right back up. That’s called resistance. The visitors talked with her husband, and in about five minutes she slammed the paper into her lap. They had before them a red-faced, angry woman.

The first thing inactive people mention is usually the last event in the anxiety-provoking cluster. “We’re just as good Sunday school teachers as anybody else up at that church!” she informed her visitors. “If we aren’t good enough for that, we aren’t good enough for anything.”

It’s easy to assume that’s the sole or primary issue, but it’s not. The unresolved anxiety of the cluster of events has made this final event intolerable. Until we uncover and deal with the original pain of the cluster, even if it happened twenty years ago, people will likely remain outside the church.

The pastor and lay visitor talked for some time with these people. I heard they did come back to church and eventually accepted new leadership responsibilities.

Identifying conflict

Anxiety—of whatever variety—arises from some problem. The most common is intrafamily conflict. Husband and wife square off on some issue; parents and kids squabble. This kind of conflict is the most consistent characteristic of people who have left the church.

Conflict with pastors is the second most common problem, and the main cause is avoidance. When pastors avoid dealing with people’s anxiety, the people simply avoid the pastors and their churches.

Family against family, interfamily conflict, is the third arena. It’s the Hatfields against the McCoys; people don’t get along with one another.

Overwork, or at least the feeling of it, presents a fourth problem area. Volunteer church service, too much, too soon, or too long with no reward, will drive people from the church.

Suppose you discover a family whose members are having troubles at home, seem to be avoiding you, are feeling disappointed about the way other church members have treated them, and think they’re overworked and unrewarded. You will usually find they are experiencing reality, moral, neurotic, or existential anxiety—often simultaneously. Then you can predict the next stage: they cry for help.

Answering cries

If we learn to hear and respond to people’s cries for help, we can usually prevent their dropping out because most of those still crying for help will respond to our efforts to reach them. But cries don’t last forever. Some cry longer than others, depending on their bond to the congregation, but when the cry goes unanswered, eventually members leave. Then the damage is much greater and more difficult to repair.

So how does a cry for help sound? It comes in all forms, sizes, and intensities. A verbal cry for help may sound like this: “I don’t know if I want to continue coming to this church. If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s hypocrites!” Or it could be more subtle, such as the one I heard years back: “You know, all the men but me in our Sunday school class have had promotions at work.”

The cries for help are more numerous than we realize. At one large church, I asked people to listen at church for cries for help. Thirty-three people listened one Sunday morning. The fewest cries anyone heard was two. I heard twelve. The group was shocked by the scores of cries we tallied.

Pastors can respond to cries in one of three ways.

First, they can listen and respond to the pain the cry represents, and that can be amazingly beneficial.

Second, they can ignore the cry, not realizing how serious it is, until the cry moves into anger. The person gets more agitated and says, in effect, “Hey, what do I have to do around here to get you to hear me? Somebody help me! Can’t you see I’m about to leave the church?”

Third, they can shoot the person with the gospel gun: “Hey, Buddy, what’s the matter with you? You losing your faith or something?” That’s a mistake of confusing the symptom with the disease, the behavior with the cause. But surprisingly, even if we react to the immediate anger rather than the anxiety behind it, we’ll still recover about 80 percent of the people. Even hesitating steps in the right direction can help.

If we miss the verbal cries for help, we at least have a whole string of nonverbal cries to alert us to the problem. The cries for help become behavioral. The person either leaves or begins the process of leaving.

The first behavior change is leaving worship. Second, people leave major committees and boards. They either don’t show up or they begin to show up sporadically. Both of these indicators can be seen on an attendance graph. The one who was always there four Sundays a month drops to three to two to only rare appearances. Or the board member makes one or two meetings a year after nearly perfect attendance in past years.

Third, people begin to leave Sunday school. This may vary from denomination to denomination, but most adults have their closest friends in their Sunday school class. Backing away from friends is a major change.

Fourth, the kids are pulled out of Sunday school. The parents decide they don’t even want to bring them, let alone come themselves.

Fifth comes the letter of resignation, and finally, interestingly enough, the pledge is dropped. That’s the final gasp for help, the last commitment to be given up in most denominations.

The sad thing is, these dropouts are hurting. They’ve experienced not only a private cluster of anxiety-provoking events, but now they’re also grieving the loss of the church from their lives.

Understanding skunks and turtles

In our original research, a full third of the inactive people we called on had tears running down their cheeks once we dug out the original cluster of pain. Uncovering that hurt caused them to cry before perfect strangers.

These people need desperately to be heard, and when they aren’t, helplessness overwhelms them. They begin to blame something external—the church or the pastor. We’ve nicknamed them skunks. When you call on these people, you get sprayed. It’s what happened to me when the woman slammed the paper into her lap and lashed out at me.

When these people drop out, they wait six to eight weeks and then psychologically seal off the pain and anxiety produced by the original cluster. They back away and by all appearances become apathetic. But the pain of that cluster remains in the unconscious and acts as the block to returning to church. In order to get the person to come back, we must deal with that pain. Otherwise we’ll hear every excuse under the sun for not returning.

After they seal off the pain, people reinvest their time, energy, and money in other pursuits. Half reinvest themselves in the family; they buy tents, trailers, and snowmobiles and go away on the weekend. You visit them and you hear, “Now our family is just as close to God up fishing on the lake as we were back at church with that bunch of snobs.” This family still consider themselves Christians. Guess who they consider unchristian? If we go to them in an attempt to save them, we’re in for the scrap of our lives, because they consider themselves more Christian than us.

The other 50 percent reinvest themselves in other institutions: hospitals, PTA, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Rotary. So if we call on them, they’ll point their fingers at us and say, “I’ve gotten involved with that volunteer ambulance crew. I’m a dispatcher on Sunday mornings. You know, we really help people now.” That’s a skunk speaking.

Another set of dropouts experiences a different emotion: hopelessness. It’s the antithesis of helplessness. It’s the sense of being incapable of generating any inner motivation. As a result, these people withdraw and become inactive. We call them turtles.

Turtles have incredible power to hook other people’s guilt. A turtle’s cry for help might sound like this: “I’m sure you could get Mrs. Green to teach the class. She would do a much better job than I could.” The turtle drops out, waits six to eight weeks, and seals off the pain, much like the skunk. But turtles point the blame internally, toward themselves.

Whether it’s skunk spray or turtle timidity, various cries for help can be addressed.

Reconciling the pain

So what do we do for these people? We need to teach ourselves and our laypeople to hear the pain of inactive people. It helps, too, if we learn how to intervene in the stages leading up to inactivity, before the people disappear from sight in a whirl of emotion.

One way we did this in a church I served was to take fifteen minutes at the end of every board meeting for the board members to report who, in their estimation, was crying for help. We collected those names and gave them to a team of twenty-four trained callers. Pastors can never do all the calling, so as a pastor I aimed for a corps of up to 10 percent of the congregation that I delegated to visit the inactives.

I also extended my secretary’s hours so she could stand near me at the door on Sunday mornings to listen for cries for help. She was good at picking them up, and I could inconspicuously indicate others for her to note while I managed the flurry of smiles and handshakes and small talk. By the afternoon, she would alert the calling teams, who would reach out to these people before their cries turned to the silence of absence. Prior to that, I’d often hear several cries on a Sunday morning but fail to remember or follow up on them.

When we call on an inactive family, or one heading that direction, the chances are strong we’re going to have to deal with anger. Turtle anger will make us feel guilty, and skunk anger will make us mad. Because calling on an inactive member is often painful, it’s easy to enter a cycle: People leave because they’re angry; I’m angry because they left; I punish them by letting them sit in their pain; they punish me by not coming back.

That’s where reconciliation must enter. Active members of the church go to an inactive member on behalf of the community. If we are willing to bear some pain with the inactive person, reconciliation will often occur.

Look at what God did. We wouldn’t listen to him, so he made a pastoral call to his inactive members. He sent his own Son, who called on us and suffered on the cross for us. That kind of self-giving love got our attention and enabled us to be reconciled to him.

We will not get inactive members back by avoiding pain. We have to take the initiative, go to them, uncover the anxiety-provoking cluster, hear and often bear their pain, and thus pave the road for them to return.

Ultimately, we have to remember we call not to get people to come back to church. We call because people are in pain. If they come back as a result of our ministering to their pain, that is good. But if they don’t, we have still reached out to them in the name of Jesus Christ.