If you are asking whether to leave your church, you do not need a verdict today. You need a clearer view of what is happening. Leaving can be faithful when a church has become a danger: abuse hidden instead of confronted, leaders who control everything, or a church that no longer treats the Bible as its authority. Staying can be faithful when the struggle is a difference: people who see things another way. The hard part is that from the inside both can feel the same. This guide gives you time and a few honest tools to tell them apart.
You can work through it alone with a notebook, or with two or three people you trust. Everything you write is yours. Nothing here asks you to tell your story to anyone, and if a prompt touches something too raw, skip it. If you are being harmed right now, at church or at home, you do not need a study first. You need safety and people who can help. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, and a trusted counselor, friend or pastor outside the situation can help you think. Seeking that kind of care is not a failure of faith.
Before you weigh the church, notice what you are carrying
People rarely arrive at this question rested. They arrive tired, embarrassed, angry, grieving, or numb. Before you can see your church clearly, it helps to see the weight you are bringing to it. A wound you have not named will color every Sunday you try to evaluate.
Take ten unhurried minutes. On one page, write down what you are carrying into this decision. Do not sort it yet, and do not defend it. A list might include a specific conversation, a leader’s tone, a friendship that ended, a pattern of being overlooked, exhaustion from serving, a theological disagreement, or a sense that you no longer belong. Some items will feel small. Write them anyway.
Then read the list back once and mark anything that still makes your body tense when you read it. You are not diagnosing yourself. You are simply noticing where the heaviest weight sits, so you do not mistake the loudest feeling for the whole story.
Dr. Carmen Imes, who teaches at Biola University and has written on why the church still matters, does not treat this as a simple loyalty test. “I don’t think it’s like stay at any cost.” She names her own history plainly: “I have left churches and I have stayed.” That gives you permission to take the question seriously in both directions. Neither answer is automatically the spiritual one.
Two questions in the wilderness
Read Genesis 16:1-13 slowly. If you are in a group, have one person read it aloud while the others listen without looking at the text.
Hagar is an Egyptian slave in Abram and Sarai’s household. She has no say in what is done to her body or her future. When conflict breaks out, Abram hands her over, and the text says it directly in Genesis 16:6: “And when Sarai dealt hardly with her, she fled from her face.” She runs into the wilderness, pregnant and alone.
Then Genesis 16:7 says, “And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur.” Notice the word found. Hagar is not seeking God in this verse. She is fleeing a household. God comes looking.
Now look at what the angel says first, in Genesis 16:8: “And he said, Hagar, Sarai’s maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.” In plainer English, the angel asks, Where have you come from, and where are you going?
Sit with the order of things. Before any instruction, God asks two questions. He calls her by name. He lets her speak for herself. Hagar can answer the first question. She knows exactly what she is running from. She does not answer the second. She has no destination yet, only an escape.
That is often where people stand when they think about leaving a church. They can describe what hurt with painful precision. They have not yet thought about where they are headed. Neither question is a trick. Both deserve an honest answer.
Imes reads this scene as a picture of how God treats people harmed by his own people. She sees Abraham and Sarah as standing in for the people of God in their day, people who, in her words, “get a lot of stuff wrong.” Her conclusion about the wilderness is this: “God actually meets Hagar outside of that system and sees her and cares for her needs.” That is her interpretive reading, and it is a careful one. What the text itself plainly shows is that Hagar’s flight did not put her beyond God’s sight.
The hard verse, read carefully
Genesis 16:9 is where many readers flinch: “And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.”
This verse has been misused. Some have pointed to it to tell hurting people that God wants them to go back and endure. Imes calls this “a tricky biblical story,” and she says plainly that it is not a model for sending everyone back to an abusive relationship. Her reading turns on Hagar’s circumstances. A pregnant woman alone in the desert, with no support and no resources, would likely have died. “for her own safety, God sends her back for a time.”
Lisa Fields draws out the same point in the conversation: “she goes back, not to stay permanently, but to get enough strength to actually leave.”
Here is the reading principle underneath both comments. Genesis 16 is narrative. It describes what God said to one woman at one moment. It does not issue a command to every person who has been harmed. And the verse does not stand alone. Read on to Genesis 16:11, where the angel promises a son: “and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.” The child’s very name will carry the memory that God heard her. Whatever return meant for Hagar, it was not God ignoring what had been done to her.
Then she gives God a name of her own, in Genesis 16:13: “Thou God seest me.” She has been treated as property. God treats her as someone worth seeing.
If you are in a place where you are being abused, this verse is not God’s word to you about going back. The story itself says no such thing. Get to safety.
The second flight
Now read Genesis 21:9-21. Years later Hagar is sent away again, this time with her son. The water runs out. She sets the boy down and moves away because she cannot bear to watch him die.
In Genesis 21:17, God hears the boy, and the angel calls to her with another question: “What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.” The phrase where he is matters. God meets them in the wilderness, not back at the tent.
Genesis 21:19 follows: “And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.” This time no one sends her back. Imes puts it this way: “the second time she leaves with God’s blessing and she strikes out on her own.”
Put the two flights side by side and one thing becomes plain. The same God, caring for the same woman, gives two different answers in two different situations. Imes draws the lesson that “there’s not just like one size fits all” for surviving life in the church. That cuts against two easy rules. It rules out the claim that staying is always holy. It also rules out the claim that leaving is always healing.
She adds one more thing that keeps the story from becoming a case for isolation. God can meet people outside a failing congregation: “He can meet us outside of that.” But “he doesn’t mean for us to be on our own.” Hagar is sent toward life, not toward nowhere.
Telling a difference from a danger
Go back to the page you wrote at the start. Now you can begin to sort it, slowly.
Imes describes the conditions under which she believes it is time to go. Abuse that is not dealt with or is covered up. Leaders who are authoritarian and will not let members bring their gifts. A church that has lost its anchor in Scripture, treating the Bible as inspiring but not as its authority. She also names your own mental health “as it relates to involvement in a particular place,” and the burden many people of color carry of bending to fit into a majority culture until “there comes a point where it’s like, I can’t bend anymore.”
She tells of one church where a pastor controlled every part of ministry, down to how she delivered each line of a short holiday script. She and her husband left, she says, because “we felt like it was sucking our souls dry.” She also tells of a church where she and her husband disagree with leadership on women in ministry, a question faithful Christians answer differently. They stayed. Her reason: if they kept leaving over differences, “then we are seeking a kind of echo chamber that’s impossible to find.”
Lisa Fields offers a question that helps with the sorting: “the reason we walk away when the relationships get hard is because we were fighting for ourself. We weren’t fighting for the other.”
Use that question gently. It is not an accusation, and it does not apply to someone being harmed. Wanting relief from harm is not selfishness. Fields herself pushes against any easy call to endure. When people are not seen or heard and their concerns go unaddressed, she says, “to tell them to stay and bear in this place seems really just not helpful.” The failures of leaders are real and grievous. They are not the failure of Christ, and you are not required to stay under them to prove your faith.
Some items on your list may resist sorting. That is honest, not a failure. Leave them in a third column marked unclear, and treat them as things to watch rather than things to decide.
A practice for this week: answer the angel’s two questions
Set aside two quiet times this week, a few days apart. Each time, read Genesis 16:7-8 aloud, slowly, and then write.
- The first time, answer only Where have you come from? Describe what has happened in your church as plainly as you can, the way you would if you trusted the listener completely. Use names of actions, not adjectives about people. Instead of writing that a leader is toxic, write what the leader did.
- Beside each thing you describe, write one word: difference, danger or unclear.
- The second time, answer only Where are you going? If you left, what would you be moving toward? Another congregation? A season of rest and recovery? No church at all? Write what you honestly expect, not what you think you should say.
- Finally, choose one person outside the situation, someone wise, and ask whether they would read what you wrote or simply listen. If any of what you named is abuse, choose someone who can help you get safe, and consider a counselor as well as a pastor.
You may find the second question harder. If you have a vivid answer to where you have been and a blank where the future should be, that is not proof you should stay. It may mean you need rest, help, and time before you can see the well that is already there.
Questions for conversation
- In Genesis 16, God asks questions before giving direction. What changes when someone in pain is asked questions first instead of being told what to do?
- Hagar names God as the one who sees her. Which matters more to you right now: being seen, being heard, or being told what to do? Why?
- God gives Hagar two different answers in two situations. What details of her circumstances seem to account for the difference?
- Think of a church conflict you have watched from a distance. What would have made it a difference, and what would have made it a danger?
- When have you seen someone told to stay and endure when they needed protection? When have you seen someone leave over something that might have been worked through?
- Imes stayed in a church where she disagrees with leadership. What would make that kind of staying healthy, and what would make it harmful?
- If you are weighing this decision now, what would help you answer the question of where you are going?
For whoever is holding the room
Do not ask anyone to say which column their church belongs in. The sorting exercise is private unless someone chooses otherwise. Let silence be acceptable. If a person begins to describe abuse, thank them, keep the group from offering quick verdicts or defenses of the church, and follow up privately with practical help, including the hotline above and a referral to someone trained. If what they describe involves a crime or a minor, help them reach the proper authorities. Resist the urge to reassure anyone that every church is safe, and resist the opposite urge to treat every hard church as abusive. Imes’s own observation is that most churches are not abusive. That is true about churches in general. It tells no one about their own.
The angel’s second question is still open for Hagar when she leaves that first fountain. She does not know yet where her road ends. Neither may you. What she does know, and names, is that she was seen on the way.