Life After Church: God's Call to Disillusioned Christians

I didn't want to like this book. I thought of myself as a believer and someone who was a part of the church. Coming out of this book, that perspective is challenged. A member of the church actively seeks out changes that need to be made, they don't wait for others to get around to it. Reading this book over a summer where I was becoming a little disillusioned with the church was convicting in a way I don't want to forget. Sanders was able to articulate a lot about my frustrations with the church and what I should be doing with those. Certainly a provocative read, and one I wish entire congregations could be forced to read.

Life After Church was an incredibly hopeful book. Sanders pegged both the positive and negative reasons for leaving exactly. At times it seemed that he had been in the room listening to conversations that I have had. He doesn't just stop at the act of leaving. As the book progresses he begins to answer the question that most of leavers have of 'what next' and 'how to stay connected to the body of Christ' if you have left. Sanders also gives almost leavers or those who have checked out of church but still sit on a pew advice. He shows them how to stay and not be miserable but to make a change in their congregations. One interesting aspect of this book is that he ties its ideas into what George Barna talks about in his book Revolution. The author introduces the idea of revolutionary leaving to form new communities to carry out God's work. He gives advice on how to leave in a positive way for both you and your former institution. Throughout the book, he ties his ideas back to a scriptural foundation with a natural, not preachy, style. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is fed up with traditional church structure but does not want to descend into negative do-nothing-ism and complaining.

Do you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you love God? Do you want, and try, to become more like Christ each day? Do you feel like your local church is helping you, or hindering you? If you have ever wondered if you are the only one who feels disconnected from God during church services, this book is for you. If you sit through a "worship service" and wonder what abundant life would be like, this book is for you. If you have ever wondered why you are so frustrated with church, this book is for you. So many times, we as church leaders accuse those who leave the church of being uncommitted and backsliders. Maybe, just maybe, people are leaving the church to find God. Maybe we have it backwards. Read this book.

The book is very good for christians struggling with leaving their church. Leavers are clearly defined as people who leave because staying prevents them from developing their full potential in God and ruins their relationship with Him. They are so important for the advancement of the church - they show churches the 'dead fish' that poison their shores and should be removed. He calls them 'prophetic leavers'. Still, the only two options he gives are stay or leave to start another church. After leaving an extremely abusive church, going through counselling and a lot of study and personal search for God's vision for my life I find there is a third option. I see christianity in a whole different way. I agree that many will start a different kind of church, more fresh and more biblical - but I have been praying so much that God shows me HIS plan for the church, the way HE intended christianity to be, HIS plan for mankind. I am slowly understanding how He is so willing to lovingly affect people in everyday life - even those that run away from churches. I understand there is a way of bringing God into the lives of those who reject churches and reject the idea of God, because they don't reject God Himself, they reject the conotation God and christianity have in their minds (a very bad conotation unfortunately created by christians themselves). It is just a matter of language. I now think there is a third possibility - a life ministry that is not based upon church and Bible mainly, but on God's character first and utmost. There are ways to speak God to people who don't understand and don't give authority to the Bible or the church. Many reject the gospel message presented in the classical way - Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, etc. - just because they grew up with strong wrong ideas about this message. But they would accept God if they discovered His character. I know that because I live in a communist country and my father has always rejected God and christianity because of the strong atheistic teaching during communism. So many years I tried to tell him the Gospel and I suffered so much because he rejected it - I was so afraid he would go to Hell. How many christians tell the Gospel but never live it? I was upset with him for not accepting it, but I never had time for him because of the busy church schedule - investing in people who 'responded', who were 'worth it'. After leaving the church I have started to see everything in a whole different way - I really believe if you sincerely want to know the truth, God will reveal it to you. My conviction now is that we 'tell' the Gospel, but we don't live it out for people. All we do is in order to sooner or later force the Gospel on them - we never just love and accept and support people with no other interest in mind than be friens, we never do what Jesus did. We are so used to 'say' things and make people responsible for rejecting our spoken message, but we never take time to be living testi

In some religious circles, there is no greater heresy than walking away from church. For that and many other reasons, some Christians go through the motions week after week, attending church services that leave them feeling spiritually numb, hollow, or worse. But others have chosen to make the exodus, because to stay would be to live a lie. Brian Sanders calls these people "leavers" --- Christians who love God but who cannot in good conscience continue to be a part of a traditional church. Sanders knows these leavers well, because he is one of them. A member of an intentional faith community in inner-city Tampa, Florida, Sanders walked away from church 10 years ago. Early on in the book, he offers this commentary on church as we in America know it: "I still can't fathom what it is about traditional church services that people like. All of it seems so tedious to me --- on the best days tolerable, on the worst painful." What he knew then, and what he has discovered in the intervening years, is that many Christians share that perspective. Some have left the church, but others remain, often out of guilt --- and then they compound the guilt by feeling guilty about continuing to attend services under false pretenses. It is to both the leavers and the seriously disaffected that Sanders addresses his book. The "leavers" Sanders writes about are not people who have simply left one church in search of another, but rather those who have left church itself --- or, as he puts it, "the experience of church as we know it." He quotes one contributor who compared church services to the movie Groundhog Day, in which the main character is forced to live through the same experiences day after day after day. To many Christians, that is what church life amounts to --- an endless cycle of sameness, a far cry from the fire within that burns with a longing to see the transformational power of God manifested in their lives. Sanders addresses a host of arguments against leaving the church, all of which he has wrestled with. But after years of rationalizing his reasons for going or not going to church and berating himself for disliking it so much, he discovered there was one question that kept nagging at him: Was it possible that God might actually be leading people to leave the church? "I'm sure that we should remain committed to the church, as the body of Christ, its head and the mission that it has been given, but so much of what we call 'church' simply isn't," he writes. That said, Sanders is much less critical of the church than you might expect. He simply dreams of more. Sanders describes the five stages most "leavers" experience: contentment with a specific church; disaffection, when, for example, the church fails to practice what it preaches; threshold, when the person leaves physically but not emotionally; closing the door, when the emotional connection to a church is finally severed; and new beginning, discovering a vision for a new expression of faith.