Gospel Goodbyes

Saying goodbye hurts. The pain of sending God’s people into new expressions of the gospel is never about the number of people you send, but the names of those you send. Numbers are impersonal, but names belong to living, breathing people that we have known, loved, and lived alongside. It’s never about how many you send, but who you send.

I am not as young as I once was, and with each passing year I’ve experienced the pain and privilege of seeing more people sent from our church. Young adults who came as interns and left as fathers and mothers. Friends whose faith was revived at River City, only to later move across the country for new jobs or to care for family. Brothers and sisters who’ve followed the Lord’s call to join another church or step into a new ministry. These goodbyes are never easy, but they are part of what it means to be a sending church.

One of our distinctives as a church is our commitment to raising and releasing leaders, because we believe gospel influencers are meant to be catalytically sent and not selfishly collected. At my installation service, my friend and mentor, Steve Treichler challenged our church to build rivers and not lakes. By that he meant that, like a river, we should send our best downstream to bless the next church, rather than collect our leaders like still water in a lake. It is a privilege and a pain to send.

Change is Inevitable

Benjamin Franklin once wrote to a friend that “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” I would hasten to add that change is another of life’s certainties. Nothing stays the same. We grow older. Friends move away. Children leave the house. Jobs change.

Change inevitably brings loss. Even when it's a good change that we choose and pursue with confidence, it still costs something. The same is true in the life of a church. Relationships shift. Seasons turn. Ministries begin and end. And with each change, we are invited to trust again that God is faithful.

Paul and His Friends’ Tears

In Acts 20, Paul is speeding his way to Jerusalem, eager to arrive before Passover. Along the way, he stops to see his dear friends from Ephesus. He had spent significant time there as he helped to nurture a new church, and on his journey to Jerusalem, he wanted to spend some time with the elders of the Ephesian church. They meet on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and Paul gives them a compelling exhortation about their responsibility as shepherds of God’s people. You can feel the love and gravity of his words.

When their time together ends, Paul kneels with them to pray. The text says there was “much weeping on the part of all” as they embraced and kissed him, “being sorrowful most of all because they would not see his face again” (Acts 20:37-38).

This is what we might call a gospel goodbye. A farewell born not of distance or disagreement, but of shared devotion to Christ’s mission. Gospel goodbyes carry both pain and privilege. Pain, because love in the kingdom is deep and real, and saying goodbye to those we love is hard. Privilege, because it means we have loved deeply enough that it hurts, and because we get to send those we love into God’s mission with joy and hope.

Reasons for Goodbye

Not every goodbye looks the same, but many share the same heartbeat of faithfulness.

Some goodbyes are geographic. People move to another neighborhood, another city, another season of life. They take new jobs, start new families, and care for aging parents. Though distance separates us, gospel partnership remains. But the change in relationship due to geographic distance is real.

Some goodbyes are missional. We send people to new works, such as a new church plant, a foreign mission field, or a new Home Group. Even if they’re still part of River City, or live in the same city, our rhythms change, and we see them less. These are joyful goodbyes because they extend the reach of the gospel. But they can still carry the grief of loss as our relationships change.

As a church, we’ll soon experience one of these missional goodbyes as we send the Norris family to plant a new gospel community. As we send them, and whoever from our church is called to join them, their departure will carry the same mix of sadness and celebration that Paul and the Ephesians elders felt, because gospel goodbyes always do.

Some goodbyes are very painful. Not every departure feels like a purposeful send-off. Sometimes people walk away. Some relationships fracture. Paul knew that pain (2 Tim 4:10), and so did Jesus (John 6:66). Even here, the gospel meets us in our pain, reminding us that Jesus never abandons his people, and that love is never wasted.

The Pain and the Privilege

Gospel goodbyes are part of life in the kingdom. When we make room for people in our lives, we grow close to them, and that closeness means it will always hurt when we part ways. But that pain is not something to avoid; it’s something to embrace as evidence of gospel love.

The greater the love, the deeper the ache, and the greater the privilege of sending someone out in faith. Whether we stay or go, we remain part of one mission, one body, one story that belongs to Jesus.

At River City, we want to be the kind of church that loves people deeply enough for it to hurt when they leave, and hopeful enough to keep sending them anyway. Because the mission of God is bigger than one church, and His grace is big enough to hold every one of our gospel goodbyes.