People or projects: Lessons on connecting with missing members

"I am not a project!” the woman glow­ered at Samantha,¹ a member of our missing members ministry team. “Don’t bother me anymore!” With that, she shut the door. Samantha stood for a moment on the cold, concrete steps and then slowly walked away with tears in her eyes. Those same tears sprang up as she shared her experience with our group the next Sabbath after church.

Samantha replayed her encounter. “She asked me why people from the church were coming by each week. I explained that we formed a new min­istry called Project Love to reach out to members we haven’t seen in church and—” Then the lights came on. “Maybe the name of our ministry made her feel like a project. How could I have better handled this situation?”

Reaching missing members is a challenging prospect in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Some estimates indicate that there are well over one million former members in the North American Division alone.² Like Samantha, many pastors and mem­bers wonder how to better handle the hurdles of connecting with those who were once part of the church family. Not all doors are closed, some open up.

After Samantha shared with our group, we knelt and prayed for this missing family member and the local people on our church records who we had not seen in a long time. We also spent time discussing how to connect with those who quit coming to church. Since that time, I have learned a few lessons on why people leave the church and how to reach out to this extended part of our church family. Here are three factors to especially remember.

People are not projects

Samantha did not intend to com­municate to the woman at the door that she was a project. Yet we sometimes can unknowingly reach out in ways that are less relational and more objective. I love to be organized, and our ministry of touching missing members over a ten-week period was well planned. Flowcharts and handouts have their places, but these are no substitutes for having caring hearts for those who have chosen to stop coming to church. Ellen G. White encourages, “All who engage in this personal labor should be just as careful not to become mechanical in their manner of working.”³

Nobody wants to be a project. You cannot efficiently love others. Caring about people must spring from within and supersedes all the proficient, educated, and strategic plans. There is a place for systems, but methods sometimes get in the way of simply looking into the eyes of another and saying, “I care about you.”

Pastors and members with gifts of organization are reticent to set aside formulas for getting the job done, but I have discovered too often that people who no longer attend church can be wary of structured visits and are skepti­cal about ministries to “pull them back” into the fold. Relationships take time. As Don Gray, a minister and teacher on reaching missing members, used to say, the longer they have been gone, the more contacts you will probably need to make to reconnect.

If we are going to reach missing members, we must pray for hearts that genuinely care. We must guide our members to show sympathy in a way that does not attempt to “fix” members who are gone. We would do better to think deeply about how to effectively love others and not try to be efficient or successful. The latter focuses more on us. Self-sacrificing love focuses on the needs of others.

Whose problem is it?

I cringed as one of the members of my church spoke about reaching missing members. “Pastor, it’s a free country. If they want to leave, then that’s their choice. I think we should just leave them alone.” Negligence is one of the key problems in reaching backsliders. Christ certainly did not take this approach with those who left the fold (Luke 15:4). Paul wrote, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10, NKJV).

A simple exercise I have conducted during seminars on reaching missing members is to have people raise their hands if they know of a member who does not attend church. Almost every­one responds. Then I ask, “How many of you have family members who are not attending church?” It is common for more than 75 percent to raise their hands. Plenty of pain and concern exist in the household of faith. This is not just about theory—it is about family.

People in the church can sometimes look for tidy ways to explain why mem­bers leave. Many say it is for doctrinal or spiritual reasons, but this can be a form of reinforcing their own status. In other words, “I’m OK because I’m still in the church. They have a problem because they left.” But this self-serving explanation takes all responsibility off the member who stays and puts it on the one who leaves. It really makes us blind to what we may have contributed to the other’s leaving.

Though you cannot put every former member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church into the same box, there are patterns as to why people leave. Even though some missing members will tell you upfront that the reason they left was over some teaching of the church, there is often a hurt underneath.

These pains often come from typi­cal life events that just happen. People graduate from school, they move, they have children, or lose their jobs. The most common event connected to people quitting church is divorce. A broken marriage is messy and people do not always want to have to explain things to church members who ask, especially to members who want to probe. It becomes easier just to not show up at church. 

The relational reasons people leave church are most often not the fault of anybody at church, in an active sense. Occasionally, someone will blame the pastor or another member, often as a way to justify his or her reason for quitting church. The biggest way the church fails is in how people handle the person’s leaving. Some try to determine who they can blame for the person’s leaving; but that is typically a waste of time and energy. Others query returning members, which can come across (not intentionally) as judging them. But most who quietly slip out are simply ignored.

I once accidentally visited a young couple who had missed church for more than a month. I was the associate pastor of a large church and had not really noticed their absence. I happened to drop by and they warmly welcomed me into their home and “knew” the reason for my visit—to see why they were not at church. Actually, I did not know this until we sat down and started talking. They were frustrated that the nominating committee did not ask them to help out anywhere. They wanted to be involved but were overlooked. We immediately plugged them into a ministry that fit their gifts and passions, and they quickly became involved in the church.

We need to carefully assess our own motives for reaching out as well. We may not be aware of what is prompting us to try to connect with them. In the Arbinger Institute’s book The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict, the authors explain how a self-justifying spirit can make us unaware of how hurtful we can be toward others. “The deepest way in which we are right or wrong . . . is in our way of being toward others. I can be right on the surface—in my behavior or positions—while being entirely mistaken beneath, in my way of being.”⁴

Teach people to withhold state­ments and not bring up why they left. If people want to bring up the reason they left, let them on their own terms. Otherwise, simply show compassion for whatever they might be going through in life. People commonly drop out because of the loss of a job. This can be an embarrassing situation to most members, and a person can feel like a complete failure. Let us be sensitive to how we handle these life events when talking with former members.

The greatest skill

All the research on reaching missing members could be boiled down to one skill that trumps them all, and that is empathetic listening. While there are many other qualities we can learn about when connecting with members who have slipped away (how to find them, your first contact, when to invite them back to church, providing safe environments for them to grow), noth­ing is as important as listening with care. Try to put yourself in their shoes.

“He was not treated fairly!” a father of a teen once told me. The father was a nonattending member of our church who was angry and hurt when his son was kicked out of church school. “The principal just didn’t like him.” His wife had not been attending much either. The incident happened a couple years before I came.

Though I knew the basic story from reputable sources, I simply listened. There were moments when I wanted to interrupt and “edit” his take on the situation. But I said, “That would be difficult. I’m sorry for how it all turned out.” I did not totally agree with him but showed understanding. I let him know my desire to help in any way I could, though his son was now too old to attend our school. In the end, it helped create an avenue for them to reconnect with the church, including the son. At the time, I felt my listening had not done any good. I underestimated the power of showing interest.

Because most people who are no longer in church have a painful story to tell, we would create more path­ways back to church for people if we acknowledge their hurts, even if we question the facts of some difficult church event. Better to simply say, “I am so sorry. That obviously would not represent God or the church.” There are times it would be appropriate to add, “On behalf of the church, I want to apologize.” Such care can help heal a wound that may be decades old.

Hopelessness is a key marker that former members cross on their pathway out of the church. When life events happen and members feel discouraged, we find it not uncommon to question the value of spiritual things. Christians can start to think, The church seems pointless. Nobody really cares. When this mind-set begins to take hold, they are on track for dropping out. If loving members intercede by recognizing difficult events in members’ lives and show compassion, they demonstrate that the church is not useless. They show that God’s family really does care. Listening communicates love.

Here is one more thing pastors might keep in mind when listening to missing members. As representatives of the church, we may find people’s anger boiling out and spilling all over us. It is easy to take these expressions of hatred personally. I recall one elderly man shaking his finger at me in anger. He had not been to church for many years because, he said, “God allowed my daughter to die in a car accident one week before she was to be married. How can I worship a God like that?” How tempting it is, in these circumstances, to theologize. I simply sat there with tears in my eyes and said, “I am so sorry.” Pastors represent God and sometimes people unload their pain on clergy who personify the Lord (albeit imperfectly!).

Not for the fainthearted

Our ministry project to reach miss­ing members focused on touching the lives of ten families. Though we certainly made mistakes (we did not use the name project anymore) and needed to spend more time learning to listen to the hearts of missing members, we did have some success. We started our contacts in a very low-key way and shared loaves of bread, gifts made by the children at the church school, and other simple items. As the ten weeks progressed, we began to share appro­priate literature. Then we invited these people out for a meal or to a church social. After ten weeks of contact, we invited them back to church. Three families responded positively.

One of these families had fallen out with another family in the church over a rental property. The two parties never worked the issue out until one of the volunteers from our ministry offered to meet with them. In this case, the presence of a third party brought healing. After talking for a couple of hours, the two couples prayed together and then hugged each other. There were tears. The following Sabbath they actually sat together in church. I realize some situations are far more complex, but one thing occurred to me as I look back on this story: this couple actually wanted to come back to church. They just needed to resolve this conflict.

Conclusion

I have discovered over the years basic patterns among churches that effectively reach missing members. First, there is usually a core group who are dedicated to this ministry. These members have often gone through training on reaching former Adventists. They especially learn and practice how to listen empathically to others with nonjudgmental attitudes. These caring groups are intentional in not only finding missing members but also in their awareness of who has quit coming to church.

In our Project Love ministry, I really hoped all ten families would return. After years of seeking to connect with former members, I now realize that to have one-third of them reconnect with the church should be considered an excellent response. We rejoiced at see­ing these members back in church and learned that people are forgiving of our fumbling efforts to show we care. It was less important to have the structure of our program nailed down and more criti­cal to demonstrate genuine Christlike love to those who were once active in the church family. We learned that people are more important than projects.