By Stephen Kneale
It never ceases to amaze me the sheer number of people who move to an area and find themselves frustrated that they cannot find a good, bible-believing, gospel-preaching church. I am not surprised that such places exist; lots of the country could do with at least one good church in its vicinity. What surprises me is the number of Christian people who actively choose to go to these places without having first checked whether there was a suitable church to attend or with a specific and credible plan to plant one if not. I suppose what I am saying here – to put it in the bluntest of terms – is if you cannot find a suitable church to attend in an area to which you have chosen to move, that is your own fault!
Before I say any more, I am not saying that inability to ever find a suitable church is always your fault. I understand you may have moved to an area with a good church but after some years it departed the gospel. Otherwise, you might move to serve in a plant which subsequently failed and you determine there are no other options in the area (that is, indeed, why you determined to plant there). I understand you may be able to travel to a good church but then health or other reasons overtake and limit your capacity to travel. But these cases are all ones where you were in a good church and then were unable to remain in it for reasons beyond your control.
However, I am speaking about people who choose to move to a new area – potentially from one in which they were in a good church – only to discover upon arrival they cannot find anywhere to settle. There is really only one reason why you might find yourself in this predicament: you simply did not prioritise church when you moved.
This is very common. What really drove your move was your job, being nearer to family, the scenery of the area, the specific house that came up for sale, or a host of other considerations. If you get to an area and struggle to find an acceptable church, you are simply admitting that you prioritised other things over the need for a good church. If church was even amongst your highest priorities, you would not have moved without first checking there was something suitable. That you only started looking when you arrived or you didn’t bother checking before you went says it is so.
Let’s put it this way, nobody would sell their parents’ home and move them across the country in old age only to then wonder whether there were actually any care homes that could suitably take care of them and their needs. If you aren’t able to care for them because their care needs have become too complex for you, and you didn’t bother checking out the care provision before you moved them, it would (rightly) be considered a dereliction of your duty of care to your parents. Yet this is precisely what many do when it comes to moving across the country and finding a new church. Rather than being the first concern, it is something of an afterthought. How is this any less a dereliction of our duty concerning our spiritual lives?
Some might insist that they moved only to find there was no Baptist/Presbyterian/Anglican church (delete according to your preferred polity). It’s not that there are no churches, it’s that there are none they deem suitable. But this is just an outworking of the previous issue. If you are content to attend a Baptist/Presbyterian/Anglican church though you are not Baptist/Presbyterian/Anglican, this is a non-issue. If you are not content to do so – and you are within your rights to act in line with your conscience so far as you understand scripture – the above point stands. If being Baptist/Presbyterian/Anglican is, indeed, that big a priority for you, you should have checked there was a suitable Baptist/Presbyterian/Anglican church in the area before you went and determined not to go if there wasn’t one there.
The same goes for the belief that there is an evangelical church of some sort with which you thought you would be happy, but it turns out it does something or other with which you are deeply uncomfortable and find unacceptable. All well and good for you to have convictions about acceptable and unacceptable forms of worship. But if these things really are a priority to you, you should have gone to the trouble of making sure there was a church you could join before you go. If you determine to go anyway, you are either telling us this thing is not such a big priority for you, in which case join the church there, or else you shouldn’t move to the area at all because church ought to be too high a priority to simply chance it when you get there.
Again, there are any number of situations that might mean we might struggle to find a suitable church. But if you are actively seeking to move to a new area and, upon getting there, discover you cannot settle anywhere, you simply haven’t prioritised church or your walk with the Lord. Who, in the end, is to blame for that?