INSPIRE BELIEVE GROW WRITER CONTRIBUTION
Help! I’m not in church anymore!
Don’t panic. Stepping away from church is sometimes the doorway to a deeper spirituality.
Getting to the point where your spiritual community is no longer home for you can be incredibly difficult. Distressing, disconcerting, disorienting. And just flipping painful.
But if that’s where you’re at, do not fear. It might be difficult right now, but there is definitely hope. People often find that stepping away from church is the beginning of something rather marvellous.
A deeper, freer connection with God. A new phase in their spiritual journey.
Often that journey leads people back into formal church — though sometimes of a different flavour than the kind they left — or to other ways of finding fellowship. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s certainly not the unmitigated disaster they thought it might be.
When the church is working well, it’s fabulous. A place where you have friends, where you find meaning, and where you meet with God. If you move to a new place, finding a church can mean instant community. There is often openness and kindness towards newcomers, which means you could be saying ‘yes’ to your first dinner invitations within two hours of walking through the door.
When I moved to my current city in my early twenties, the thing I was most eager to do was to find a church. The first Sunday, I was invited to lunch by a retired university lecturer from the local baptist church. I spent a splendid afternoon in her rambling, book-filled home, having interesting conversations and wonderful food. I was particularly taken, I recall, by her homemade tomato chutney.
The following Sunday, I tried out a nearby Anglican church and was invited to a social gathering later in the week. My host connected me with a doctor who had a place she wanted to rent out. “You need to live in Nicky’s house,” she said. And thus, over tea and biscuits, in the home of a stranger, was arranged my escape from hospital accommodation into the delightful victorian terrace that became home for the next several years.
The striking thing about all this, as I look back now, is that I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. It was just church. That was how it worked.
It’s not just the social life. A good church community will be there for you when tragedy and difficulty strike. Or if you just need a bit of help. Some churches are in the habit of organising cooked meals for families for the first couple of weeks after a baby is born. Or have teams of people who will help with decorating or cleaning if it’s needed. There are opportunities to volunteer in projects that serve the community. And to travel. There really is nothing like a mission trip to experience parts of the world that don’t usually appear in the travel brochures.
But all of that is the garnish to the main thing. Which is the life of faith that drew you to the church in the first place. The worship, the teaching, the Bible studies, the prayer gatherings, and just talking to other people who are as passionate about Jesus as you. If you’re lucky enough to go somewhere with a talented worship band and a good preacher, then every Sunday can be an intoxicating, invigorating spiritual experience.
When you’re in the middle of all that, it’s wonderful. A bit like falling in love. It feels like the excitement, and the fulfilment will last forever. In fact, to say that it’s ‘like’ falling in love doesn’t do it justice.
It is falling in love.
I remember believing that I was incredibly lucky to be part of the best church in the city. Perhaps the UK. Possibly the world. It was exactly the same emotion I had the first time I took my youngest son to a playgroup. He was undoubtedly the finest child in the room, and I felt a little bit sad for the parents who had to make do with inferior infants.
I was in love. With God and with my church. And I would have been hard-pressed to separate one from the other properly.
There are lots of reasons why the church can fall apart for us. Sometimes there is betrayal or leaders with PhDs in narcissism. Or maybe your life or that of your loved ones suddenly transgresses the boundaries of acceptability, and you find yourself no longer welcome.
Sometimes is not that dramatic. It’s just that, like a relationship that has got past the glow of falling in love, your energy and enthusiasm wane, and you find yourself looking around you and finding what you see not as attractive as you once thought it was. Some of the practices or doctrines that slid past you in the beginning are starting to trouble you now that you’re not looking at them through rose-tinted spectacles.
Whether the separation happens traumatically because we’re pushed out or have to run away for our own safety, or there’s a gradual awakening to the fact that this no longer fits us, it can hold the seeds of something very good. To understand why it’s worth thinking back to what was happening when we ended up in church in the first place.
For many of us, entry into the world of the church is through a powerful encounter with God. Faith might be a completely new thing for us, or we might have been awakened anew to the faith of our childhood. It might be sudden and dramatic or a bit more gradual.
But there is a good chance that we will find ourselves falling in love with Jesus and church all at once. Our spiritual experience is interpreted for us by the people in the church to which we belong.
When they tell us what the Christian life should be like and what constitutes true Christian doctrine, we are very likely to believe them. Our own experience serves as evidence that these people know what they’re talking about.
Everything melds together. You don’t separate out which parts of your experience are connected with your relationship with the divine and which are about your connection with the church and the buzz of a Sunday service or the joy of communal singing or the satisfaction of doing work for God. Our connection with the Divine might not be as deep as we think.
Some of what we think of as our own spirituality might actually be other things. And we can be relying on other people to do some of the heavy lifting for us. The worship leader puts together the right set list to help us to an emotional place where we can meet with God. The sermon leads us to a place of committing again, with renewed enthusiasm, to the life of faith.
There’s not necessarily anything wrong with all this. It’s OK as far as it goes but is hardly surprising if, at some point, we find ourselves outgrowing it and we find a yearning for something deeper. Sometimes events overtake us, and we end up ousted from our community of faith before we’ve begun to be dissatisfied. When that happens, it can be a rude shock.
But here’s the thing. There is a point when spiritual growth is going to require some separating out of all these things that have been melded together. This is where finding yourself out of church can actually be helpful. It enables space for some disentangling and sorting out. Distance is awfully good if you want to get some perspective.
If you are outside of church and possibly even before you end up outside of the church, there are some things for which you might be hungry. And those hunger are trustworthy invitations to a deeper, more authentic spirituality.
Firstly, there is an intellectual hunger. A dissatisfaction with trite, formulaic answers. A desire to question. Here is where it is important to know that there is a difference between correlation and causation. The fact that you met particular concepts alongside your encounter with Jesus doesn’t necessarily mean that the two things are connected.
Just because Jesus met you when you were going to your church doesn’t mean that everything the minister says is true. You can take a step back, think for yourself, examine the things that are sitting uncomfortably with you, and ask some difficult questions.
Secondly, there is a hunger for emotional integrity. So often, our feelings and emotions remain unexamined because the church has a habit of telling people how to feel. Or we just get so caught up in all the things the church has to offer that we don’t stop to attend to what’s going on inside.
We allow our hopes and dreams to lay dormant while we devote ourselves to ‘playing our part’. Old hurts and traumas remain unexamined. Being away from the church can be the start of finding the courage and believing you have permission, to be honest about what is going on within.
And, most preciously, there is a hunger for connection with the Divine. Not mediated by worship services or Christian TV, or the sometimes frenetic activity of volunteering for the church. A simple desire to discover whether now the first flush of youthful love has gone, there is, within your soul, a deeper, truer hunger for a maturer, quieter love. And the very fact that you’re wondering tells you that there is. There is a deep part of us that is wired for a deep connection with the divine, and that is ultimately not satisfied with anything less. Even if the ‘less’ has Christian labels and is mediated through a Christian community.
If you have found yourself outside of the church, do not fear. All is not lost.
The world has not ended.
Rather, you have been invited on a journey that will take you to some interesting and beautiful places, should you choose to accept. So you might like to pause and give yourself chance to listen to your heart and the whisper of the Spirit within, take courage and allow them to lead you on your journey. It will probably be a bit messy for a while. You might just be exhausted or angry or sad or confused or all of those things for ages. It might feel like you’re the only person walking this path, but I promise you there are others and if you can find some companions for the journey, then do. If no one springs to mind, then maybe a spiritual director or an online community.
Lots of people have the Mid Faith Crisis podcast really helpful. But if you just keep walking, the chances are the fog will clear eventually, and the view will probably be really nice. You may well find community again. It might look very different to the one you left. You might start your own. Or you could end up somewhere very similar to where you started. Except this time, you will be different. Freer. Less entangled. Able to enjoy the good bits without getting clobbered by the rubbish.
May God bless you on your journey.
If you enjoyed this, you might quite like my Loved Called Gifted podcast, available on most podcast platforms, or you can find it here.
I offer spiritual direction and other bits and pieces that you can discover on my website.
Inspire Believe Grow is an exciting new space for faith-based content on Medium. Punchy. Insightful. Challenging. A breath of fresh air when engaging in the Christian journey.
Don’t miss DAILY content on Inspire, Believe, Grow. Click the banner below and visit the homepage for the publication. You can also learn about how YOU can contribute stories!
Please consider clicking the "follow publication" button--help build our following.
