Back Door = The door your members use to slip away from the congregation.

If you suddenly stopped showing up, would anybody notice? More importantly, would anybody do anything about it? You’d like to THINK so. But our last three church experiences answer that question with an unfortunate “no.”

The Wide Open Back Door…

We attended one church for ten years and were very involved there. But after a long list of our concerns went unaddressed (lack of adult education, the lack of a new member committee, and the inability of the church to pay its bills on time, their inability to keep things clean and repaired such as the nursery, –we found ourselves attending less and less, and eventually decided to go elsewhere. (Read “why we left our last church” in this blog)

It’s a common story. Many members don’t just stop coming, they first start coming LESS. They fade away. Until one day, they aren’t coming any more.

In this blog I hope to answer the following questions:

1. WHY do churches not realize a member is fading until it’s too late?

2. WHAT can be done to catch fading members before they’re completely gone?

3. And How and what can the congregation learn from it’s members exiting through the back door? 

Fading out can be found out…
After we cut back our attendance to only once or twice a month… no one noticed. Then for a month we didn’t show up at all, and no one said a word. Then two months, and still no response. Yet a simple check of worship attendance stats would have raised a red flag. Yet this church had NO SYSTEM IN PLACE for noticing who had stopped coming.  They entered worship attendance data from the pew pads, but nobody was reading the data.  Makes you wonder “how many other members have they lost and still don’t know they’ve lost them?”  The church where this happened to us only had 210 members. They can’t afford ignorance. No church of any size should care so little about “fading,” especially when the solution is simple and cheap: Religiously input the data, and religious READ the data.

[In my other blogs in this thread, you can read about our "Side Door" exits from two other churches. In each of those cases, fading through the sidedoor could also have been found out by a simple reading of worship attd stats in a timely way.]

Fading needs a response….
Our fade didn’t take place over a few weeks, it too place over MANY months. After pulling back a bit, we told some people what we were thinking.  We told a staff person and two elders in the church we were having serious problems with some things. Nobody connected our frustrations with our growing absence on Sunday. Big mistake -for them. And yes, it would have mattered A LOT had some of the leaders or pastor called us to talk, asked to stop over, asked us to stay and work things out. Our Fade was not cast in stone, but quite honestly, we felt like we had ALREADY talked and not been heard on the issues. We were in a period of “limbo” …wondering if we mattered. Wondering what it felt like to NOT be part of things there. Wondering how much we’d miss it. It was a “trial separation” on our part.

Had they noticed and done something would it have made a difference? We’ve often asked that question. And here’s the answer: Even as we were fading, I was doing some youth group planning for the coming Fall program year. Had the team and DCE over to my house for a meeting. I was hoping our fade would subside. But that’s when the last and final nail in the coffin was driven. An elder took issue with our youth leadership’s request for a refundable deposit on a youth trip the next summer. She opposed the idea, but the Session gave it their unanimous approval (this was the first Session meeting there I had ever attended!). Then the pastor, who hadn’t opposed it at the Session’s meeting, laid into me about it AFTER the approval.  Had this happened in any other year, against any other backdrop, I would have let it slide. But we had been in a trial separation mode for two months when the dope stuck his foot in his mouth. And it was the last straw, and we haven’t been back since.

Say what you will about an individual episode, but I know from dealing with fading members in previous churches, that it’s usually a NUMBER of episodes that pile up, NOT a single event,  –which contribute to the slow fade towards disengagement.

This episode raises the importance of READING THE SIGNS. Had the pastor or anyone been tending to the flock’s statistics, and had their ear to the ground about our concerns, the “last straw event” probably wouldn’t have gone down. Instead, he would have been engaging us on the larger issues we had been throwing off serious signals about. Remember, it was a SMALL church.

Sometimes you can’t close the backdoor but you can learn from those who have walked through it…
Fading members can help the church identify serious problems. Even when we sent a letter saying we were done, the only response we got was a letter a few weeks later asking our children if they wanted to remain on the rolls. We heard that some members were told the WRONG reasons why we had left. Most members we’ve since run into were left in the dark. Yet when we see them in public and tell them our reasons, many say “we’ve had the same thoughts.” When a very active family leaves, you should assume that “where there’s smoke –there’s fire.” We know of two other families who have since left for reasons similar to our own. 

I’ve been on church staffs and must admit, we paid NO attention to the back door. When members left we usually paid them little attention. In some cases, we said “good riddance.” But now that I’ve gone through that door myself, I see what folly it was not to take those people seriously, and at least try and learn from them. The “public reason” they or a pastor often gives for their leaving is probably not the entire reason.

In large businesses, it is customary to perform an “exit interview” –believing that ex-employees will tell you things they wouldn’t have if they were still on the payroll.

Research has shown that most members fade away NOT because they “lack” concerns, they fade because they have them! (like we did) and they are going unmet. Their spiritual enthusiasm fades, their needs go unmet, their skills go untapped, their ideas or critiques go unheard, and eventually they move into the category of “the unchurched” –months before the churches notices.

Let me suggest an OMBUDSMAN MINISTRY:  A person who is the designated “complaint hearer.”  Couple that with a regular reading of statistics and you just might be able to narrow down the path to the backdoor. Or at the very least, you would learn how your church is not meeting the needs of some members.