ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 12 · 1 John 2:19
They went out from us. The people leaving, why they say they are leaving, and the difference between apostasy and a wound the church gave them. Where the ten questions land.
Last class. Eleven weeks of documents, charts, founders and households, and the course ends where it has to end: with the people who are leaving.
The ten questions have been waiting for this week. Why does my country seem to be falling deeper into sin. Why does my country seem to be dying. What am I to do. Those get answered here or they do not get answered.
The passage everyone reaches for is one sentence. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us (1 John 2:19).1
Before it gets used, read the verses on either side of it.
John is writing about antichrists, and he says so twice in the three verses around it. Verse 18 names them. Verse 22 defines them: who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ.1
So the sentence is about people who left and denied Christ. That is a specific thing. It is not a verse about everyone who stops attending, and applying it that way flattens categories Scripture keeps apart.
Somebody who is not in the pew this morning is in one of at least five situations, and they are not the same.
Some have denied Christ outright and say so. That is apostasy, 1 John 2:19 speaks to it, and John's point is a comfort rather than a taunt: the departure revealed something that was already true, and the church did not lose what it never had.
Some left a congregation and not the faith. They are in another church across town, sometimes for good reasons, occasionally because they were right and we were wrong.
Some were driven out. A deacon was cruel, an elder covered something, a pastor bullied and nobody stopped him. Those people did not leave Christ. They left us, and we handed them the reason.
Some drifted. No decision, no crisis, just erosion, which is the condition Hebrews warns about when it says we must pay closer attention lest we drift away (Hebrews 2:1).2
And some are in the middle of it right now and have not landed. The man in Mark 9 said I believe, help my unbelief, and Jesus healed his son anyway (Mark 9:24). Jude says have mercy on those who doubt.3
A church that files all five under "they were never really of us" has saved itself the work of finding out which one it is looking at.
Christ gave the third category a sentence of its own.
Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea (Matthew 18:6).4
That is among the harshest sentences Jesus speaks about anyone in the Gospels, and it is aimed at people inside the household of faith who wreck somebody's faith from within it.
When a church discusses the ones who left, that verse belongs in the room.4 Some of them were pushed, and the pushing was done by people who were sure they were defending the truth at the time.
The numbers are real, and inflating them helps nobody. Lifeway found about two thirds of young adults who attended regularly in high school stopped attending for at least a year between eighteen and twenty-two. Barna's 2019 work put the figure near two thirds as well, up from just under six in ten in 2011.5
Those measure attendance rather than faith, which is a distinction this course keeps making and which cuts both ways: some who stopped attending never left Christ, and some who kept attending never came to him.
The reasons people give are worth taking at face value before we psychoanalyze them. Hypocrisy in the people who taught them. Politics they could not distinguish from the gospel. Questions that got a defensive answer instead of a real one. A church that handled somebody badly and closed ranks.
Most of those are about us rather than about God. This course has spent eleven weeks arguing that a nation is downstream of its people. So is a departure.
There is a passage where this happened to Jesus and it is not comfortable reading.
He had said hard things in Capernaum, and John records the result. After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him (John 6:66).6
He did not chase them, soften it, or run a follow-up campaign. He turned to the Twelve and asked a question: do you want to go away as well? And Peter answered with the only honest reason anyone ever stays. Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.6
That is the answer to deconstruction and it is not "the church is fine." The church is not fine and this course has documented it for eleven weeks: emperors at councils, two popes, the men who wrote that all men are created equal and kept slaves. Peter's answer does not depend on any of that being clean. It depends on there being nowhere else to go.
Now the three the course has been carrying since week one.
Why does my country seem to be falling deeper into sin. Because it is made of people, and people are made one at a time, and fewer of them are being made. That is the correlation from week one, and it is a direction rather than a formula: Josiah was faithful and Judah went into exile anyway.
Why does my country seem to be dying. Every nation on the chart in week four had two edges. The church bar is the one that runs the whole width, and it does not run through Washington. A Christian can grieve a country without being surprised that it is mortal.
And what am I to do.
Not build a Christian nation by statute. You cannot legislate his salvation. You can legislate his commands as a servant of his throne, and that is real work, and it is not the mission.
The mission is the assignment from week one, which has not changed since a hillside in Galilee. Make disciples. Baptize them. Teach them to obey everything he commanded.
And the people to start with are the ones this week is about. They are your children, your neighbours, the young man who stopped coming and the woman who never says why. The nation you want is downstream of them, and no legislature will reach them, and you can.
Which is where the last line of this course has been pointing all along. The ideal America we want may be an America not even present in our own homes.
Everything in these twelve weeks has been arguing toward one sentence, so it may as well be said plainly at the end.
He lived the perfect life we could not live. He went to the cross and the debt was paid in full, with nothing left for us to add. He rose, and there is no other exit from the chains of sin, which no amendment and no republic and no household has ever managed to file off.
God chooses, and the Father draws, and no one comes to the Son unless the Father draws him (John 6:44).7 Salvation is his work from start to finish. We receive it; we don't author it, and we cannot author it for the people we love most, which is the hardest sentence in this course and also the one that lets a parent sleep.
Scripture is our final authority over all of it, including over this class. If anything said in twelve weeks does not survive the text, the text wins.
The Lord knows those who are his (2 Timothy 2:19).8 He knows the ones in the pew and the ones who left, and he is not finished with either group, and neither are you.
assignment still is.
change about how we talk about the people who are gone?
that a strong reason or a weak one, and why?
this room.
End of the course. The assignment came before this country and it outlives it, and it has your name on it this week.