What Is the Extent that Churches Should Try to "Keep" People? Is It Even Right At All?

If the Bible is the authority for faith and practice, the faith and practice will correspond to or reflect the Bible.  God keeps people saved (1 Peter 1:5).  Saved people won't eject from the church (1 John 2:19).  If that is the faith and practice of the Bible, then God keeps people in a church.  The truth of scripture is not the enemy of someone staying in a church.  The truth attracts believers.  They're going to want it.  They're staying because the truth is what God uses to keep them in the church.

The truth isn't what will cause a saved person to leave a church.  The corruption of or absence of the truth will cause a person to leave a church.  So how is it that a scriptural leader keeps someone in a church?  He does it by building that person up in the truth, strengthening him in the truth, so that he will not be led astray by error.

Is the following how a church leader thinks?  "I better preach the truth, because I want these people to stay."  It should.  However, it isn't unusual instead to think, if I preach this truth, that person might not like it and will leave.  So how is it that you "keep people"?  You don't preach or enforce that truth.  You do the opposite to keep people.

Have you ever visited a church or been around another church and noticed weakness?  I mean, regular unscriptural practice among the members.  When I say that, I don't mean the process of Christian growth, where change occurs over time, more doing of right with some doing wrong.  A leader can't teach everything in weeks, months, or even years, and especially today.  We can't assume that people grew up with the teaching of the Word of God.  They have to be trained.  What I'm describing is church wide weakness, that doesn't seem like it's even being dealt with.  Sometimes, however, the growth factor is used as an excuse for weakness, constant explaining away of disobedience, that isn't confronted for fear of losing people, not keeping them.

The unwillingness to deal with sin of various types -- commission, omission, worldliness, etc. -- because confronting it would result in not keeping someone or many people, takes a church the trajectory of apostasy.  Very often the explanation is, "You're not going to keep people."  Leadership pictures the shrinking of the congregation.  That imagination informs policy, staving off potential leaving.  It also looks around and the increased numbers of churches that take the easier positions or ones conducive to keeping more people, and therefore adding them, are doing that, keeping and adding.  And their leaders explain these as reasons for church growth:  they've closed the back door.  So "God is using these decisions."  It's not explained as, "we're disobeying God and God isn't being pleased, but we're going to do what we're doing anyway, because we want to keep these people."

When one reads evangelical's materials on the church and then watches what they do, one can see that not losing people becomes preeminent.  They do what it takes to keep people and then they adapt their belief and practice to that to various degrees.   No doctrine is really adaptable, but in an arbitrary way, grace seems to have been the easiest.  Grace is a wide river, overflowing its banks, pulling in people who won't repent, won't obey, and live in continuous sin.  God's grace keeps taking care of them.  This false grace doctrine leaks into numbers of other doctrines to allow for all sorts of doctrine and practice friendly to keeping the most people.

Someone might rightfully explain that churches haven't kept carnal people.  Those people are already lost.  Also, by keeping them, they've hurt their church.  The goal of the church is to please God.  People that want to please God will stay.  They are better off losing people who don't want to believe and obey scripture, even if it means being smaller.

Another thought on keeping people is the following.   What is the size of a church?  Is the size of the church the number of people a church has when it allows false doctrine and practice?  Or is the size of a church the number of people it has when it obeys the Bible?  Who decides how big a church is?  What is gained by having a big church that does it by not pleasing God?  Or arrives at the greater size through greater disobedience to or displeasure of God?

I've asked the question, should churches try to keep people?  It's right to try to keep people, but not according to conventional thinking.  You try to keep people by explaining what the Bible says about leaving.  You try to keep people by helping them deal with trials and tests.  You try to keep people by building them up in the faith.  That's really trying to keep people.  The church becomes stronger and it pleases God more.  It will even grow, but the growth will be the addition of true Christians.

Someone may want to leave because he's tempted by the world.  The way to keep that person is not by making the church more worldly so that person will feel more at home.  That's a person, who might not even be saved.  He loves the world.  He can't find out that he isn't saved if the church tolerates it and accommodates it like most churches in evangelicalism are doing today.

No, the person who seems to be headed out because he loves this present world, he should be confronted for his worldliness with the thought of biblical restoration.  Give him scripture that will confront the destructiveness and faithlessness of this thinking and behavior.  Woo him to stay by providing scripture.  This is spiritual warfare.  It will preserve a soul, save a soul from death, but it will also exalt God and His Word, the purpose of the church.  It will preserve the truth by passing down the purity of the Word to the next generation.  This is truly keeping people.