Loyalty and Possession

To what degree should we as Christians hold exclusive loyalty toward the church family, congregation, or institution of which we are a part or member?
To what degree should church leaders or institutions expect exclusive loyalty and exercise possessiveness over their members?
What should we do when our loyalty toward a church body or institution comes into conflict with what we believe the Spirit is leading us to do or where He is leading us to go?
As church leaders, how should we respond when one of our flock feels directed by God to withdraw from our church family or congregation?
These are some tough questions that have been running through my mind lately. And as the issues of loyalty and possessiveness are a big source of hurt, hard feelings, and division floating around in Christian culture these days, I think it's important that we consider these questions and seek God-breathed answers.
When it comes to loyalty and possession, the prevailing reality in church culture is that loyalty to the church entity is expected (even demanded), and church entities harbor a distinctive brand of jealous possessiveness when it comes to their members.
Anyone who has ever left one church body for another has more than likely encountered this reality. In the best case scenarios, you get treated like a long-time employee who has just announced that you've accepted a position with a competing company. You might get some pats on the back and a few "good lucks," but the atmosphere will be a little chilly. In the worst cases, you get completely ostracized and treated as if you have just denounced Christ in public.
While many of the reasons for this reality can be explained as simple, sinful human nature, a lot of this stuff has been passed down to us from the church of the Middle Ages. For around a thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church exercised a very real and brutally-enforced form of possessiveness over its members, and a lack of loyalty toward Mother Church could get you burned at the stake. Unfortunately, the Reformers did not part with this mind set, and, for the most part, the Protestant groups and institutions that emerged adopted the same policy of possessiveness and exclusivity.
With the advent of freedom of religion, the physical threats by which church institutions once held their members in place have ceased, but the psychological and emotional deterrents are still there.
So what does the Bible say about these issues? While I can't think of any scriptures that directly address these things, I think the book of Acts is a good place to look if you want to see how early Christians were treating and responding to each other. As far as I can see, it seems like there was a lot of free-flowing exchange going on in the early church when it came to people. And it seems that most of this relocating of people from one location and church body to another was directed by the Holy Spirit. Basically, God was seeing to it that the right people with the right giftings were in the right place at the right time. And while there were some difficult partings (such as when Paul left Ephesus for Jerusalem), they just didn't seem to be uptight about trading people with other church bodies in other places.
That kind of uptightness didn't start until the second century, when the new focus on doctrinal differences led to some church bodies not acknowledging other church bodies as legitimate expressions of Christ.
As far as how we should deal with matters of loyalty and possession, I think we should deal with it as families (rather than as exclusive clubs), and we should deal with it in love (rather than in hurt and jealousy).
Family is family no matter where you go, and that should be the case between brothers and sisters in Christ. And when God calls people out of the nest to pursue His path for their lives, we should rejoice, pray them up, and send them out with our blessings.