{"id":2664,"date":"2007-07-18T11:23:01","date_gmt":"2007-07-18T17:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/?p=2664"},"modified":"2007-07-18T11:23:01","modified_gmt":"2007-07-18T17:23:01","slug":"running-out-of-room-at-church-ask-folks-to-leave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/running-out-of-room-at-church-ask-folks-to-leave\/","title":{"rendered":"Running out of room at church &#8211; ask folks to leave"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This might sound counterintuitive, but <strong>Craig Groeschel<\/strong> at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.LifeChurch.tv\">LifeChurch.tv<\/a> has a series of articles on getting folks to leave your church.<br \/>\nGroeschel suggests that if folks aren&#8217;t behind your vision or mission and moving your church forward then <a href=\"http:\/\/swerve.lifechurch.tv\/2007\/07\/18\/leaving-the-church-3-of-4\/\">they&#8217;re dead weight<\/a>.<br \/>\nGroeschel says he preached the church&#8217;s vision in an attempt to get everyone on board. If people weren&#8217;t on board with the vision, he asked them to find another church.<br \/>\nHe even offered brochures from 10 other churches he knew and recommended. It was a serious challenge and <strong>500 people ended up leaving<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I boldly but lovingly asked everyone to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sell out to Christ through a local church.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d If it was at Life, great! But if they couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fully buy into the vision, I asked them to find another church.<br \/>\nThe next week, we had about 500 new seats for people who could get excited about the vision. Within a short period of time, God filled those seats with passionate people. Many of those who left our church found great, biblical churches where they could worship and use their gifts.<br \/>\nEverybody won!<br \/>\nThat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I sometimes say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can grow your church by asking people to leave.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Wow. Groeschel said churches also need to <a href=\"http:\/\/swerve.lifechurch.tv\/2007\/07\/17\/leaving-the-church-2-of-4\/\">create environments where people can leave a church graciously<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To have a really healthy church, you need to develop a climate that allows people to leave your church gracefully.<br \/>\nThe church I came from years ago was sort of like the movie The Firm. Once you were in, you could never leave\u00e2\u20ac\u201cat least not without controversy.<br \/>\nIf you left the church, many people thought you were:<br \/>\n1) Betraying the pastor<br \/>\n2) Abandoning your friends<br \/>\n3) Disobeying God<br \/>\nAfter someone left, they were treated like they were leaving Christianity. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a tragedy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I can say I&#8217;ve felt some of that in the past after leaving other churches. Some of those relationships are probably strained today because of it others have been rebuilt or maintained because of mutual understandings and grace on both sides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This might sound counterintuitive, but Craig Groeschel at LifeChurch.tv has a series of articles on getting folks to leave your church. Groeschel suggests that if folks aren&#8217;t behind your vision or mission and moving your church forward then they&#8217;re dead weight. Groeschel says he preached the church&#8217;s vision in an attempt to get everyone on &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/running-out-of-room-at-church-ask-folks-to-leave\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Running out of room at church &#8211; ask folks to leave<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-GY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}