The Family of God

When I went to college almost nine years ago, I left the church that I had gone to nearly my entire life.  Except for a couple of years during middle school, I attended the same church to adulthood.  Many (most?) of my important childhood memories revolve around church life.  There was a time where each week the congregation would hold hands and sing "The Family of God" together, and the sense of belonging, of family, of love I felt during those times stands nearly unmatched in my memory.

Do you know there are some people who spend their entire lives in the same church?  Why is this so strange to us now?  Regardless of the good or not-so-good reasons that people leave a church, what should be the ideal?  Is it something indifferent to leave one church for another?  What should we want for ourselves and for our children?  

...which reminds me of this Chesterton quote from What's Wrong with the World:

"There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man.  It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man.  Certainly, at least, we need a theorist.  A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work.  When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all.  It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning."