First and foremost I want to assert that God calls everyone to follow Him, and will give every person the opportunity to know Him, and accept Him if they so choose. Thus these people who have left the Church have done so generally having been called by God personally, and at some point made a commitment to follow him to some degree, at least to the point of going to Church.
The way I see it is that people who have left the Church, and ultimately left the faith, are people who have known God, but have then decided to put other things in their life first.
As a hypothetical example, ‘Joe’ is a regular Churchgoer, who has a personal relationship with God, a life devoted to prayer and service. However as life continues, he becomes increasingly affected by his daily life, such as his workmates who regularly go to the pub for a good night out. Slowly, as time goes by, these relationships he has draw him further and further from God, not simply because of their presence in his life, but because of his personal decision to put them first, above God. Maybe he slept in on Sunday mornings because he had too much of a hangover from the night before, the exact reasons matter little. While he remains a Christian, and knows he should be doing more as a Christian, every time he puts another thing above God, he is drawing further away from Him. This is not a failure of God to meet with Joe, but a failure of Joe to commit to God.
Eventually, Joe may have put so many things above God that he has largely forgotten God’s calling in his own life. At this point he may well ‘cease to believe’, not because of any lack of God’s presence, but because of his willingness to walk away from God, whereby eventually God becomes so low on his list that He essentially ‘ceases to exist’ for Joe.
Therefore, the way I understand a loss of faith for an individual is not one of God failing to call them personally, or a failure of God’s existence, but the personal choice of an individual not to put God first, which leads to their loss of faith. It’s much like the story of the wealthy man in Matthew 19:16ff, who believed, but was unwilling to sell his possessions in service to his God. He was unwilling to place God first in his life, and was risking that these worldly things could draw him away from God.
This is a possible explanation of the reason why people of a strong faith can ‘fall away’ and leave their faith behind, not because of a lack of faith in the first place, but because of a lack of commitment, which leads them to make God less and less important, until he essentially fails to matter.
What are the repercussions of this? It shows us how important it is to put God first in our lives, without failure. Whenever we put something else in first place, we not only offend God, but also choose to put God lower down on our list, and thus open ourselves to falling away from God of our own doing. It’s not up to God alone to pull us back to Him, it’s something we have to be willing to commit to ourselves. It also shows how our Christian community is important, as it does nurture us and help us to stay focused, even though the ultimate choice is ours.
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