[tip] This post has been updated.  The original (and “inferior” one) can be found here. [/tip]

Julia, I have finished reading your book called Quitting Church: Why The Faithful Are Fleeing And What To Do About It. I enjoyed reading the book and found myself nodding in agreement on every page. At first, I was a little disappointed because I didn’t feel that you had added much to the conversation.  It seemed that a lot of your material was based on surveys and research that were well known and readily available to all of us already.  However, after re-reading the book I realize that was not a fair assessment.  Although some of your material did come from these surveys, it is helpful to have it all summarized here in one place.

Initially, I was hoping that you would give us new information and new insights into why we are quitting church. The reasons you gave for people quitting church were not necessarily new (church is irrelevant, there is no community, mediocre teaching/preaching, denominationalism, immoral leaders, etc.)  These reasons are not new.  However, the sections in chapter 6 and 8 on reasons why women and singles are quitting church were enlightening for me.

You showed me that churches do even less for single people, and single mothers who are struggling to put food on the table each evening. I appreciated your viewpoint on these issues and I feel bad for not being more sympathetic to these groups of people.  Your experiences and perspective on this matter is something that more church leaders need to hear

There are other sections in your book that I was hoping you would have expanded.  You did a lot of interviews with different church leaders but we only read small portions of your interviews in the book. I would have loved to hear more from your interview with Brian McLaren of John Eldredge, for example. I think material from those kinds of interviews would help advance the conversation that many of us are having about quitting church.  Do you have more of these interviews that we can read elsewhere?

Quitting Church

I also got the impression from your book that you are trying to say that if the church would simply become more relevant, more aware of the different needs in the congregation etc. then people would not quit and those who have left would return. If the church could just shape up and address the particular needs of the single crowd, the single mothers, and address the tough issues from the pulpit, then everything would be fine and dandy.  These are all fair criticisms of the church but there are others who are saying that even if the church fixed all these problems, it still would not matter.

For some, the institution of the church itself is the problem. It is not simply a matter of working on the inside to fix the problems.  These people put emphasis on the church as the people of God.  The church is not the institution, it is not the building and it is not what someone does on Sunday. Of course you would be hard pressed to find a church leader who would disagree with that, but there are some who leave church precisely because there is TOO much emphasis placed on the institution, the building and on Sunday.  They would much rather spend time with other believers in smaller communities throughout the week then with large numbers of people once a week.  I think many people quit church in order to find church.