For most of my life, church was everything to me. And I mean everything. It wasn't just a place I went on Sundays - it was the heartbeat of my entire existence. My friends, my support system, my sense of identity and purpose and belonging... it all flowed from those pews, those potlucks, those small groups and service projects.
I was part of the 70% of Americans in the 1980s who said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. I volunteered for everything, tithed my income, wore the T-shirts and went to the conferences. The church wasn't just my community - it was my world. And for a long time, that felt like enough. It felt like home.
But then, I started to sense what author Phyllis Tickle called "The Great Emergence" - a massive upheaval in Christianity that happens every 500 years or so. Tickle argued that we're currently in the midst of one of these seismic shifts, a time when the old institutions and dogmas are crumbling, making way for something new to emerge. And for me, that crumbling started to hit home. The solid ground of my faith began to feel shaky, the unquestioned assumptions started to sprout question marks. I found myself in the unsettling space of what Tickle termed "The Great Unraveling," when everything you thought you knew starts to come undone.
Turns out, I wasn't alone. In the 1990s, the ranks of nonbelievers surged. An estimated 40 million people - one in eight Americans - stopped going to church in the past 25 years. It was the "largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history." By 2021, membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record.
Leaving was hard, like extracting myself from a marriage, an entire identity. For a while, I felt like I was in some kind of church witness protection program, hiding out from my old life, trying to figure out who I was without that all-encompassing community.
But here's what I'm learning: just because I left the church doesn't mean I left my hunger for community, for meaning, for something bigger than myself. Those needs are still there, as strong as ever.
So to all the other church refugees out there, I see you. I know the ache of that exodus, the disorientation of that wilderness. I know what it's like to wander in the desert of doubt, to feel like a stranger in the place that once felt like home.
It's a lonely journey at times, this path in the wilderness. It's hard not to feel like a spiritual misfit, a theological outcast. We're the ones who ask too many questions, who can't quite toe the party line anymore. We're the ones who've been burned by the institution, who've seen behind the curtain and can't unsee it.
But here's what I'm learning: there's a strange sort of sacredness in this wilderness, too. There's a holiness in the honesty, in the willingness to sit with the discomfort and the doubt. There's a kind of grace in the grit it takes to start over, to sift through the rubble of what we've lost in search of what we can still claim.
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