Leaving a church for good is right when the church has stopped being a healthy body. That means abuse is hidden instead of confronted, leaders keep all control and will not share ministry, or the Bible no longer works as the church’s authority. The urge to leave is usually something to outlast when the real complaint is that people differ from you, or that the church has stopped serving you. The trouble is that both kinds of reasons can feel exactly the same from the inside.
Dr. Carmen Imes, who teaches Old Testament at Biola University and wrote a book on why the church still matters, has made this call in both directions. “I have left churches and I have stayed.” Her reasoning, along with Lisa Fields’s pushback in their conversation, gives a reader something better than a rule. It gives a way to test which kind of reason you are holding.
What question are you really asking?
Most people frame it as a simple choice: stay or go. But any answer depends on a criterion, and the criterion usually goes unstated. Two common assumptions tend to do the work, though neither is named in the conversation itself. One treats loyalty as the test, so staying always counts as faithful and leaving always counts as a small betrayal. The other treats fit as the test, so a church is like any service and you may leave once it stops meeting your needs.
Imes rejects the loyalty test directly. “I don’t think it’s like stay at any cost.” She puts a different question in its place: “I think it does depend on whether the church is a healthy community”. The test now concerns the condition of the community, which also rules out the fit test. A church can be uncomfortable and still be healthy. A church can be the place you were baptized and still be unhealthy. Comfort and history are real goods, but neither one settles the question.
What makes a church unhealthy enough to leave?
Imes names several conditions. Abuse that is not dealt with, or is covered up. Leadership that is authoritarian and refuses to let the members bring their gifts and take part in ministry. A church that has lost its anchor in the Word of God. On that last point she is specific: “if the Bible has become a suggestion or kind of an antiquated document that we find inspiration from, but it’s not our authority, then those are problematic and it’s time to go.”
These three concern how a community handles power. Covered-up abuse protects the powerful at the expense of the harmed. Authoritarian leadership gathers all ministry into one person. Abandoning Scripture removes the authority meant to stand over everyone, leaders included.
Imes’s own story fits. She and her husband once sat under a pastor she describes as very controlling, who was not open to anyone bringing their whole self to ministry. “It was like, it was all him.” She recalls him coaching her through a short holiday script line by line, correcting how she said every sentence, even though she had a background in theater. That small scene was typical of how he ran everything. Eventually, she says, “we felt like it was sucking our souls dry.” They left.
She adds two reasons of another kind. One is your own mental health as it relates to being in a particular place. The other concerns race. People of color, she observes, often carry a heavy burden of bending over backwards to fit into a majority culture. “there comes a point where it’s like, I can’t bend anymore.”
These two are about cumulative cost. They describe what a community keeps taking from a person over time, a weight someone can carry for years before it becomes too much. So the grounds for leaving fall into two groups: failures that remove any check on power, and costs that build until a person can no longer bear them. Neither group is about preference. Wanting something better is a different thing from being worn down.
Why isn’t disagreement enough?
Here Imes makes her sharpest argument, and it turns on her choice to stay. She and her husband now attend a church where they do not fully agree with the leadership about women in ministry, a question on which faithful Christians land in different places. They stayed on purpose.
Her reason: “if we keep leaving a church over differences in theology or in practice, then we are seeking a kind of echo chamber that’s impossible to find.” And then the next step: “And as soon as we find it, it’s only a matter of time before we are gonna leave again over a difference.”
The logic is worth spelling out. Suppose disagreement justifies leaving. Any two Christians disagree about something, so every church on earth meets the condition. A test that every church fails tells you nothing about any particular church. It only guarantees that you will keep moving. The criterion proves too much, and that is how you can tell it is the wrong one.
Imes grounds the alternative in how the New Testament describes believers. She notes that in the first century the sibling bond, more than marriage, was the relationship that demanded the deepest loyalty. When Jesus and Paul call believers brothers and sisters, they are reaching for the strongest family language they had. And siblings come with a built-in limit: “you don’t get to choose your siblings”. Her conclusion is blunt: “we are stuck with each other in the church, and we need to learn how to work through those differences and come out on the other side.”
Isn’t abandoning Scripture just another theological difference?
This is the obvious counterexample. If theological disagreement is not a reason to leave, why is a church’s view of the Bible?
Because the two disagreements have different structures. When Imes disagrees with her leaders about women in ministry, both sides are arguing about what the same Bible teaches. The authority is shared, and the dispute is over reading it. When a church treats the Bible as an inspiring old document but not as its authority, no shared standard remains to settle any dispute. From then on, disagreements are decided by whoever has the most power in the room. That places this reason with covered-up abuse and authoritarian leadership: all three remove the check on power that ordinary disagreement leaves in place.
What premise do most people overlook?
Lisa Fields names it. Her diagnosis of why people walk away is not about doctrine at all: “the reason we walk away when the relationships get hard is because we were fighting for ourself. We weren’t fighting for the other.”
She connects this to James, who asks where conflict among believers comes from. The KJV of James 4:1 reads, “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?” The fights start with wanting our own way. Fields sets that beside Paul’s description of love, which in 1 Corinthians 13:5 “seeketh not her own.” Being tangled up in each other’s lives is not the problem, in her reading. “It becomes healthy in the entanglement when we’re fighting for the other.”
Imes agrees that, while abuse is real, much leaving has a quieter cause. She lists what often sits underneath: complacency, disconnect, and the thought, “This isn’t serving me anymore.”
This gives a reader a diagnostic question. Is my reason about what this community is doing to people, me included, or about my not getting my way? The question will not settle every case. Self-interest and real harm can sit side by side, and a person being harmed is entitled to want relief. But if every reason you can name is about what you are not getting, the problem may not be the church.
Doesn’t “outlast it” become a weapon?
This is the strongest objection, and Fields raises it herself. In practice, she points out, churches rarely listen and change. People end up stuck in places where they are not seen or heard, and their concerns go unaddressed. “to tell them to stay and bear in this place seems really just not helpful.” She describes people who end up saying, “I wanna be a part of the family, but not this family.”
The objection is fair, because the label “difference” can be stretched over real harm. A leader who will not share power can call your complaint a difference in ministry philosophy. A congregation can tell a Black member that her exhaustion is a matter of taste. And the people doing the labeling are often the ones with power.
So the label cannot be the test. A more reliable check is what happens when you raise the concern. In a healthy church, you can name a disagreement openly and still be welcomed, trusted and allowed to serve. If raising it costs you your place, your role or your standing, or if the same concern is dismissed year after year without anything changing, you are no longer dealing with a difference. You are dealing with the control Imes describes. Her own list protects people in exactly this way, since it includes mental health and the unbearable weight of bending to fit.
Imes also adds a point about probability. When Fields says not every church is abusive, Imes replies, “In fact, most of them aren’t.” That suggests most departures are not about abuse. It cannot tell you about your church. A low base rate is not a verdict on a particular case, only a reason to examine your own reasons carefully.
What does Hagar show, and what does she not show?
Imes turns to Hagar, the Egyptian slave in Abraham and Sarah’s household, in Genesis 16 and 21. She reads Abraham and Sarah as standing for God’s people in the Old Testament, people who get a great deal wrong. Hagar is abused in that household, and she runs. God meets her in the wilderness, outside the system that harmed her. She names him in Genesis 16:13 as the God who sees her: “Thou God seest me.”
The hard part comes next. In Genesis 16:9, “the angel of the LORD said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.” Imes does not dodge this, and she does not treat it as a rule. She says plainly that the story is not a model for sending people back to abusive relationships. Her reading rests on Hagar’s situation: a pregnant woman alone in the desert with no support and no resources, who would likely have died. “for her own safety, God sends her back for a time.”
Then the story changes. When Hagar leaves again, in Genesis 21, God provides for her and her son in the wilderness without sending them back. In Imes’s words, “the second time she leaves with God’s blessing and she strikes out on her own.”
The narrative describes what God did for one woman at two moments. It commands no one to return to harm, and it should never be used that way. If you are being abused, at church or at home, that is not a difference to wait out. Get to safety and to people you trust. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
What the story does show is that God’s care does not stop at the door of a failing community. “He can meet us outside of that.” The two different outcomes also show, as Imes puts it, that “there’s not just like one size fits all” for surviving life in the church.
What remains unsettled?
The test tells you what kind of reason to look for. It does not tell you how long to wait before a hard situation becomes a reason, or how much bending is too much. Imes offers no timetable. She says only that if a time comes to leave a particular church, we need to be looking to the Lord as we do it.
One thing does follow with more certainty. Leaving a church and leaving the church are two separate decisions. Imes is clear that God may meet you outside a congregation, and equally clear that “he doesn’t mean for us to be on our own”. Hebrews 10:25 speaks of “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.” Whatever you decide about one congregation, the call to belong to God’s people still stands.
If you are leaving for the sake of people a church is harming, yourself included, the exit can be faithful, and it points toward a healthier family. If you are leaving only because you did not get your way, a new church will hand you the same problem in a different building.