Churches should have graduation ceremonies.

Recently a church that I attend devoted a few minutes in a Sunday morning service to the recognition that a couple who had been prominent in church affairs were leaving to take up a position in Florida.   They were sent off with expressions of gratitude and with the blessing of the congregation.

Most people who leave a church go, however, with no such blessing or recognition.  I picture them slinking away, hoping they will not be called upon to explain why they no longer attend.  There is a kind of guilt built into the process of leaving, when for some, at least, it may be a significant step in a journey of spiritual growth.  It may be, I suggest, that a person has gained importantly from that church connection but has reached a point of diminishing returns and will now be better fed from some other trough.

“Ungrateful,” you say?  “Shouldn’t such a person now ‘give back’ by teaching or helping in other ways to build and maintain the community that has nourished him or her?”  Yes, if in giving back one continues to find spiritual sustenance.  But maybe not, if the rewards once found there are now lacking.

I know whereof I speak.  I am a leaver of churches.  I left one because it was too large to notice that I was there, and I doubt that it missed me.  I left another to go to a new and exciting congregation with a minister that I was drawn to.  On two occasions I left because of geographical moves, one move recognized and blessed by the congregation, and one not.  Another church was left behind when my wife and I decided to retire from choir singing after many years, only to discover that membership in the musical community was all that tied us to that church.  A change in ministers was reason enough to drift away from another church.

In most cases people simply vote with their feet.  They attend because they want to, and when they stop wanting to, they don’t attend.  And those who miss them are left to wonder why – who or what has driven them away?  Why didn’t they find enough to keep them in the fold?

In another church, when we were more intentionally on our spiritual quest, we chose to withdraw our membership, talked with the minister (who was not surprised), and wrote a letter to the congregation – a no-fault letter, noting a change in theological direction and a need to explore in a different community.  We blessed them and went on our way.

Picture a spiritual growth continuum extending from the simplified and literal Bible stories of early childhood religious education to the mystical experience of immersion in Cosmic Oneness.  In my experience, the teaching and preaching of most churches extend only a relatively short way beyond childhood simplicity.  Pastors choose not to challenge such articles of simple faith as “God decides when I will die.”  They begin where they believe the parishioners are, and while that is a principle of good teaching, they tend to leave them there, which is not good teaching.  Ministers have been taught in Seminary about the implications of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the many non-canonical gospels, the work of the Jesus Seminar, the beliefs and practices of Eastern religions, religion as cultural mythology, scripture as metaphor, modern physics, Jungian psychology, and probably the mystical experience of silence, meditation, and Ultimate Oneness.  All of this information is relevant to the spiritual path, yet these topics remain sequestered in the lecture notes of these former ministerial students while the church’s message of least-common-denominator or “Chicken Soup for the Soul” religion continues to be taught with little change year after year.  After all, there are always some people willing to stay at the third, fourth, or fifth grade level of religious understanding, and their simple faith usually remains without challenge.

In my experience, it is a rare pastor who is able to speak to persons at enough different levels of insight to help the genuine seekers move on to new stages of spiritual growth.  I am fortunate to have known a few such pastors – too few.

So let’s celebrate the passage of the parishioners who honestly say, “We have gotten as much as we seem to be able to from these teachers in this environment, and it is time for us to move on.”  Let’s graduate them, sacramentally, with our blessing.