# The Outcome of Helping Someone Leave Isn't Mine to Control ## Claim When I'm helping someone leave a false-teaching movement, I'm only responsible for how faithfully and lovingly I show up — not for whether they actually change their mind. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds in any long-timeline persuasion or care relationship — evangelism, addiction support, family conflict — not only exit counseling from a movement like NAR. - Breaks down as an excuse if used to justify giving up on the relational effort itself; the claim redefines what "success" means, it doesn't lower the bar on effort. - Does not claim any particular method (listen-then-ask, in this case) reliably produces an exit — the source itself disclaims that ("not a formula"). This note only claims where responsibility properly sits. ## Evidence A biblical counselor, describing a 30-year-old attempt to reach two Mormon missionaries through friendship before hard questions, reports one of the two eventually left the group and became a Christian — years after the original conversation, prompted by unresolved questions that "got us thinking." He frames the takeaway not as proof the method works reliably, but as a locus-of-control principle: "Duty is ours, the results are God's." ## Links - [[Spiritual Formation and Discipleship MOC]] — the boundary that makes accompanying someone out sustainable rather than crushing - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Group Becomes a Control System When It Exempts Itself From Truth-Telling for Its Mission]] — because applies-in; understanding how a control system operates (isolating members once doubt surfaces, as the missionaries' bishop did) is the context a helper using this method needs to anticipate. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Concentrated Authority Without Accountability Produces the Same Failure Patterns Across Religious and Software Ecosystems]] — because applies-in; NAR is named directly in the source as the prompting case for this exit-counseling method. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/NAR and Charismatic Authority Critique MOC]] — applies-in as a practical, pastoral counterpart to the critique work in this MOC. ## Tests / falsifiers - Track whether helpers who explicitly adopt this duty-focused (rather than outcome-focused) framing report lower burnout over multi-year efforts than helpers who measure success by whether the person exits. - Compare exit rates for people approached with sustained relational trust-building versus single confrontational corrections, to test whether the underlying method (not just the framing) actually correlates with departure. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-08-16 - Next review: 2026-11-16 ## Source - [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/How to Help Someone Escape False Teaching]] — reports the listen-then-ask method and the Mormon missionary anecdote it's built on.