How Many Did
You Drive Away?

What this is about

Every ministry keeps one number and it goes up. Decisions, baptisms, attendance, giving, reach. It is counted, audited, reported and celebrated, and there is nothing wrong with counting it; the book of Acts counts it too.

Nobody keeps the other number. Nobody stands up at the annual meeting and says how many people left the faith by way of this pulpit — not offended by Christ, but worn out, frightened, manipulated, or taught a version of Christianity they later discovered was thirty years old and had been sold to them as the apostles’ own.

In any other field we would call a one-directional account partial. The question this page asks is whether Scripture is content with it.

The short answer

Three things in that sentence. The charge is not that the flock never grew — it is that the flock is gone and the shepherds are the reason. The verb is driven, which is active: the sheep went in the direction they were pushed. And the sentence is a piece of grim wordplay the translators kept: they did not visit them, so God will visit upon them. The punishment is named in the vocabulary of the neglected duty.

Ezekiel puts the same category into a list. When God takes an inventory of what the shepherds failed to do, one of the five items is this:

And twelve verses later God says he will do it himself: “I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away” (34:16). Which is why this is not a hopeless subject. The people who were driven off are not a write-off. They are the objects of God’s own search — and that is a comfort to the sheep and the reverse of a comfort to the shepherd.

Who these passages are aimed at

Think of the frightening passages in the Bible — the woes, the wrath, the millstone — and picture who is on the receiving end. Most people picture an outsider: a tyrant, an idolater, someone not in church.

In the seven severest religious oracles the full version of this page examines, the target is a priest, a prophet, a shepherd, a scribe or a teacher of the law every single time. Jeremiah 23 is not aimed at Babylon. Ezekiel 34 is not aimed at the wild animals that ate the scattered sheep. Matthew 23 is not aimed at Rome.

And Christ’s charge against the religious professionals of his day is oddly specific. It is not hypocrisy in general. It is obstruction:

The people in view were not refusing to come. They were entering in, and they were stopped by the men who held the keys. That is the whole of this page in one verse.

Teachers get a heavier account

The New Testament has one extended passage on becoming a teacher, and it is a deterrent.

It is restrictive — be not many. The reason it gives is judgment. And the pronoun is we: James, an apostle, puts himself inside the warning. That last detail is almost always dropped when the verse is quoted.

The same principle appears everywhere once you look for it. Ezekiel’s watchman who fails to sound the alarm does not merely fail — “his blood will I require at thine hand” (33:8). Hebrews says church leaders “watch for your souls, as they that must give account” (13:17). Paul describes two men whose teaching “will eat as doth a canker… and overthrow the faith of some” (2 Timothy 2:17–18) — and notice that the measure of how bad the teaching was is what happened to other people’s faith.

Christ’s own version has no threshold at all: “whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck” (Matthew 18:6). One. Which is exactly the number a report expressed in averages cannot see.

The test: four speeches about God

Here is the interactive, and it is short. Below are four speeches about God and suffering, all from one book of the Old Testament, all in the inspired text. Three are by one set of speakers and one is by another.

The question is not whether they are in the Bible. They all are. The question is: which of these did God himself say was right?

0 of 4 answered.

Why that matters more than heresy

Job’s three friends spend most of the book defending God. They affirm his justice, his power and his sovereignty; several of their lines are preached approvingly to this day, and one of them is quoted as Scripture by Paul. And God’s verdict on them is: “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right” (42:7). It is a charge about accuracy, not about tone.

They were wrong because their system was tidier than God is. Suffering is always punishment; prosperity tracks righteousness; therefore this man has earned it. Every individual proposition was arguable. The portrait assembled out of them was false, and it was pressed on a man who could not argue back — which is, incidentally, the position of a congregation.

Ezekiel makes it a formal charge, and this is the most remarkable verse the full version of this page found:

There is a grief in the congregation and God disowns it. He did not put it there. Somebody else did, with words.

But read the second half too, because it is the discipline of this argument: the same prophets also reassured the people who ought to have been disturbed. One ministry, both failures, one sentence. Anyone who wants to use Ezekiel 13 against harsh preaching has to take the half that condemns comfortable preaching as well.

And if you want to know how much weight Scripture puts on misrepresentation, there is a case with a recorded sentence. Moses lost the promised land after forty years of leading people to it. No immorality, no money, no false doctrine. He spoke to a difficult crowd in anger, took a share of the credit for a miracle he had not worked, and struck a rock he had been told to speak to. The verdict: “Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel” (Numbers 20:12). The offence is located in what the people saw. The miracle worked; the water came out abundantly; anyone standing there with a clipboard would have recorded a success.

“But Jesus drove people away too”

This is the serious objection, and it is right. In John 6 a crowd finds his teaching intolerable and walks out — “from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” — and he does not soften a word or chase anybody. Told that the Pharisees were offended, he says “let them alone” (Matthew 15:14). Paul curses a rival gospel and rebukes an apostle to his face.

So a ministry may lose people and be faultless. Offence taken is not proof of offence given. Any version of this argument that contradicts John 6 is wrong.

But Scripture does not stop there. It draws a line, repeatedly, and the line is not about how upset anyone was. It is about what they were leaving.

So the question is sayable in one sentence: did they leave over something Christ said, or over something you added? That is not always easy to answer, and often the honest answer is that you do not have enough facts. But it is a real question with a real answer, and it is not the question “was anybody upset”.

The tell, in my view, is whether a man can say what he would accept as evidence against himself. A preacher who can name the doctrine that cost him a family, and show it in the text, is doing what Christ did. A preacher who says “the gospel offends” about every departure, including the ones that followed a meeting about money or a rule he invented, is not quoting John 6. He is using it.

The question, asked in a liturgy

There is a version of this argument that ends in nothing but anxiety. The historic church did not leave it there. Its answer was structural: you do not stop a man misrepresenting God by asking him to be careful. You give him something he did not invent, cannot alter, and can be held to.

A creed fixes what is believed in words nobody present composed. A set lectionary makes a man preach the passages that tell against him, which a man choosing his own text will never do and never notice he is not doing. The sacraments put a frightened person’s assurance somewhere a preacher cannot revoke it. And a minister who can be examined and removed by people outside his own congregation has a ceiling on his worst tendencies, where a founder answerable to a board he picked does not.

And then there is the ordination service, which asks this page’s question of the man himself, out loud, before he is allowed to preach. From the Book of Common Prayer, in the form settled in 1662, the bishop to the candidates:

Or any member thereof. One person — which is Matthew 18:6 written into a service book, and precisely what a report expressed in averages has no row for. Said to the man, on his knees, in front of the congregation, before he had preached a word.

And in the same service he is asked whether he will “be ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word.” The verb this page has been tracking turns up in the liturgy with a different object. What a minister swears to drive away is bad doctrine. Jeremiah’s charge is that the shepherds drove away the sheep instead.

The number cannot be produced. The question still can be answered.

Be honest about the limit: this page cannot supply the figure in its own title, and neither can anyone else. You cannot count the people who quietly stopped believing, because they stopped telling you. Even where you know someone left, you usually do not know why in a way that would survive examination. Any number anybody offers for this is invented.

But look again at what the texts actually ask for, because it is not a statistic. Jeremiah asks the pastors to notice that the flock is gone. Ezekiel asks whether anyone went after the ones that were driven off. James asks a man to be afraid of the office before he takes it. The Prayer Book asks him to admit the greatness of the fault in advance.

None of that requires a figure. What it requires is that the category exists in his mind, that he has looked, that he can name a person and say which of the two columns their departure belongs in — and where it belongs in his own, that he has been to see them.

Where this page lands

My own view, offered as opinion. The single-column report is the most comfortable dishonesty in modern ministry, and it survives because the alternative is unbearable rather than because anybody has defended it. Nobody argues that the people a ministry breaks do not matter. The reports simply have no row for them — and what has no row does not get discussed, and what does not get discussed is not repented of.

The New Testament is considerably more interested in that row than we are. It is why the one extended passage on becoming a teacher is a warning; why office is the first aggravation in the Westminster catechism’s list of what makes a sin worse; and why the severest sentences in either testament fall on men who were, by their own congregations’ standards, doing well.

It also runs the other way more often than the critics of hard preaching allow. Ezekiel 13 condemns the false comfort before it condemns the false grief, and a ministry that has never cost anyone anything is failing a test of its own.

The honest position is not that a faithful ministry loses nobody. It is that a faithful man can tell you which losses were the gospel’s and which were his, because he has looked — and that a man who has never asked the question has already answered it.

Check it yourself

Six things. All of them are free.

1. 1. Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34, read whole, in one sitting. Twenty minutes. These two chapters are the foundation of the argument and they need no interpreter. If you disagree with this page after reading them, the disagreement is worth having.
2. 2. Ezekiel 13, especially verse 22. Ten minutes. The verse about the grief God did not cause — and the second half of it, which condemns the opposite failure in the same breath.
3. 3. Matthew 23 entire, then Luke 11:37–54. Twenty-five minutes. Read them together; Luke has the key of knowledge and Matthew has the shutting up of the kingdom. Read Matthew 23 to the end, because it closes in grief rather than anger and that changes how the whole thing sounds.
4. 4. Job 4, 5, 8 and 11, then Job 42:7–8. Forty minutes. Read a whole speech by one of the friends and notice how much of it you would be content to hear preached. Then read the verdict.
5. 5. John 6:22–71, Matthew 15:1–20, Acts 15:1–29 and Ezekiel 33:1–20. An hour. These are the passages on the other side — the emptied room, “let them alone”, the yoke the apostles declined, and the watchman condemned for silence. A reader who takes the indictment without these has taken half the evidence.
6. 6. The Ordering of Priests, Book of Common Prayer (1662). Fifteen minutes, free online from the Church of England and from several archives of the 1662 text. Shorter than most magazine articles, and it asks the question more directly than most modern writing on ministry manages.