Even before the pandemic, people had a nasty habit of asking, “How are you?” without actually wanting to know.

We do that a lot in the South, along with the infamous, “Let’s get together soon,” which really means, “It was nice talking with you, and now I need to end the conversation in a way that doesn’t make me feel bad for ending the conversation.”

Side note: I once watched someone from the North open their calendar when someone said they should get together. The look on the Southerner’s face was epic!! #busted

Because I am a pastor, I move in circles full of people who routinely ask, “So, how’s the church?” Before the pandemic, typical answers in those circles revolved around attendance and offerings. Full disclosure: I never felt good about those being the most important metrics, but I also struggled to find new metrics to replace them with.

But now? On the other side of the pandemic, I have an answer that usually gets the attention of the person who asked me, and causes his or her face to do that weird crinkly and squinty thing that we do when we’re trying to make sense of what we just heard.

I tell them, “We’re half as big and twice as healthy.”

Now, let me unpack that with a few follow-up statements:

We’re not healthy because bad people left

The easiest conclusion to draw would be that all the unhealthy people left and that’s why we’re healthy now. Or, said another way that seems to fit today’s cultural narrative of either/or, we’re good because bad people left.

Nothing could be further from the (whole) truth. Like many churches (and maybe other types of organizations, but churches are what I know) experienced over the last few years, we saw a lot of really wonderful people leave. Most of those people have yet to return, and most of the ones who haven’t returned have yet to actually tell us they won’t be returning.

If that last sentence made your head spin, welcome to my head (and heart) space. It’s been an emotional roller coaster for me and many other pastors, but not because the numbers are down. It’s been hard because the numbers are attached to people, and those people were attached to our hearts. Maybe “were” is too harsh because it sounds like they no longer are, but for me, I’ve had to figure out how to hold that emotional love personally without allowing it to cripple our forward movement corporately. And make no mistake, the Church (including the one I lead) is marching on, and while I can’t look inside another person’s heart, I feel confident that a large percentage of the people who didn’t come back to our church locally are still marching with the Church universally.

Which leads to the second observation…

We’re healthy because the leaving led to an examination

I’ve always said that, while we can’t grieve every loss when it comes to attendance (because people really do come and go enough to make your head spin!), we should always pay attention when strong believers leave.

I’ve never regretted making that statement more than during the great exodus that we’ve lived through (and are still living through) in the American church. It would be so much easier to simply convince myself and our church that something was wrong with “all those people who abandoned us.”

But the exodus has to lead us to an examination if we want to move beyond it in a healthy manner, and so that’s what we’ve done. We’ve done the hard work of the soul, and spent the gut-wrenching moments together in prayer. We’ve not hidden the fact that the ghosting we’ve experienced has wounded our body, and that the relationships we’ve lost have grieved us. But they’ve also done something else: they’ve caused us to pray the prayer of David in Psalm 139:23-24: search me, know me, test me, lead me.

Personally, I’ve asked God to show me the ways that I’ve failed, and to reveal to us the ways in which our church fell short and can be better. How can we look more like Jesus? Love more like Jesus? Just like a body losing weight, the reason for the loss must be determined in order for the body to recover and grow. Sometimes we lose weight because we’re sick and unhealthy. Sometimes we lose weight in the process of getting healthy. A commitment to health will reframe our response to the loss, and that’s the beautiful truth we’re living in now.

Things grow best when they’re healthy

We’re growing again, but we aren’t growing the same as before. Our movements are more measured now. Steady. Intentional. We’re more aware of the way the body feels, and we recognize that, just like in our physical bodies, rapid growth isn’t always a sign of healthy growth.

We have one service now instead of two. My internal drive still wants to have three, or four, or more, but I refuse to let that drive outpace the health of our body. And so now we squeeze more people around tables after the service than trying to squeeze more service out of the people. (Yes, we really do all eat a meal together every week – our hospitality team is amazing!!)

I’ve realized over the last 2+ years that I’m called to lead the body, not bleed the body, and if we had things in place that pushed our body more than loved our body, then we want to put those things to death.

And the beautiful thing about death is that, in a Kingdom birthed out of a resurrection, the death of one thing very often leads to the life of what God intended all along.

Do we miss the ones that haven’t returned? More than maybe they’ll ever know. Will we ever go back to the way things were when they left? Not a chance.

Maybe someday they’ll pop back in and experience the difference.