The Empathy List #121: Only Single At Church

This one's for the marrieds who sit alone in the pew.

Hello friend, Liz here.

For a month now, I’ve been exploring the theme of going back to church after leaving. Of course, this series has been intensely personal for me because I’m IN THE MIDST of this process right now. Yet I’ve found many of you have resonated with the culture shock of entering the mainline after being raised within evangelicalism.

I once thought it’d be an easy plug-and-play. And it’s not.

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This is part 3 in a series on coming back to church after you’ve left evangelicalism.

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But there’s still one aspect of returning to church I haven’t addressed yet because it’s the most vulnerable for my own family—and that’s the fact of disagreement. Because when you decide you’re ready to go back to church, you may find, as I have, that your partner may not be ready. In fact, your partner’s faith may have changed dramatically between the last church and now.

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By the way, for those who find themselves in mixed faith marriages all of a sudden, I HIGHLY recommend you pick up Stina Kielsmeier-Cook’s excellent memoir that talks about her husband’s deconversion from Christianity happening at the same time as she committed herself to a lay group of Catholic nuns! Read Blessed Are the Nones: Mixed Faith Marriage and My Search for Spiritual Community)

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Going back to church is scary. For those of us who leave evangelicalism, we leave a conditional, but reliable community. We often have no tools to make friends outside of the groups the church made for us because church was our entire world. We may not have other interests, hobbies, or even topics of conversation on which we can draw. We may not even know how to talk to people who believe and think differently than ourselves.

In my cynical moments, I imagine our parents and church leaders intentionally trapped us within evangelicalism because they believed this subculture was the only right and safe place on the globe. But more likely, they did not know how to teach us these skills because they did not possess these skills themselves. They were happily segregated from the rest of humanity and they did not know what they (or we) were missing. They could not give us what they did not have.¹

Nothing has made me wonder about what church is ontologically and fundamentally more than my husband saying that he still believes in Jesus, but not in the church anymore. And that he doesn’t know when or if that will change, but no thanks, he’ll stay home.

Question: If going back to church is scary, can you guess what’s even scarier?

Answer: Church shopping alone.

Image by Eugenia Mello for TED Ideas

Like everything else, the fact of my husband backing away from church has an origin story. I won’t tell you most of it because it’s his to tell, but I can tell you my part:

My husband no longer trusts my gut about church.

As in, when I come home giddy about a sermon, a preacher, a small group, a spiritual community of any kind, he raises an eyebrow. I know that sounds super judgey, but I believe it’s warranted.

Here’s some backstory: In the months after leaving our Anglican church (ACNA) for lots of good and ZERO abusive reasons², my husband and I often fought about church. In fact, my husband confessed that he’d felt bulldozed by me over the years. I had insisted he go to church with me, had told him I’d felt like a “single mother” at church (OOF, it’s so embarrassing to admit my assholery), had bullied him into most of the congregations we’d been a part of since our move to Denver in 2015.

His words stung, but he was right. I remembered how, whenever he’d expressed concerns or hesitations—like at the Acts 29 church that had been spiritually abusive—I’d ignored them, asked him to try harder to meet and talk to church members, encouraged him to see how he could serve the community, despite his discomfort and cynicism.

Not all of what I offered is bad advice. But it did not make him feel safe. Though I had not intended to make his voice less valuable in our church searches, that’s exactly what I had done.

Being at church together was more valuable to me than his (or my own) safety at church. And that had led our family into much pain.

So, when we started talking about leaving another church (😭), I discovered that I had a more important task to attend to than making a decision about our Sundays: I needed to repair my most important relationship. I repented, asked my husband’s forgiveness, and committed to backing off, to give him space when it came to church, to not make ultimatums, to listen better. He then requested a “break” from church, and I complied. That’s when we stopped attending the Anglican community in the summer of 2022. And we never went back.

That first summer out of church, we spent our Sundays walking winding paths within Denver’s Botanic Gardens, perusing stalls at the farmer’s market, and, blessedly, sleeping in. That time was restorative in so many ways, including for our marriage, though I often felt overwhelmed by grief. But my husband finally felt seen and understood in his spiritual struggles, and I felt relief from the burden that church had become.

In fact, that’s when I started to recognize an unhealthy pattern that I’d developed toward “the church”: I was codependent toward the church. (I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming essay.)

Photo for Everyday Health

But I also started to see that I did not need my husband with me to be a churchgoer. I could sit alone in a pew… and still reemerge alive at the end of a service. (No, I wouldn’t implode or be eaten by sharks or be snubbed by the other church ladies, at least not immediately ;-)).

Slowly, I started to untangle my spirituality from my husband, a thing evangelicalism NEVER EVER encouraged. I found that I had subconsciously adopted the patriarchal narrative that I could not pursue God on my own, not without my husband within hand-holding reach.

When the tug to get back to church began to throb, I decided not to ask my husband to go with me. (I did invite him from time to time, but I made clear that I had no expectations.) I would embark on the journey back to the pew on my own. After a while, sitting alone stopped feeling awkward and started to feel natural. The solo drive to and from church became a space to grieve, to sing, to pray. My spirituality took on a new relevance, and I felt the closeness of God as I embraced my loneliness.

Interestingly, my husband did not make hard and fast rules for himself, and if I did invite him to church, he considered it. He came several times to the Methodist church, and most recently, he attended my new post-evangelical Denver church this past Easter. (The kids’ enthusiasm about the egg hunt was encouragement, I believe ;-)).

Church does not look the same for us as a family. But it feels healthier, more balanced, more open-ended. And it is safe.

Since Jesus’s native state was one of question-asking and invitations (not demands), a church experience like this feels truer to the gospel, too. Jesus is knocking, not barging in.

And I’m trying to adopt the same posture toward the most important person in my life, my husband. His disagreement and ambivalent feelings and uncertainties matter to me, just as much as my own. My marriage is no longer one in which we both totally align. And I believe it’s better for it.

As you consider your own relationships, I pray that you, too, may know the mercy of opening your hands and releasing the ones you love so that they can put their hand in yours of their own accord. It’s the only true love. And it’s the love that God offers to us.

Though it’s scary to let go, there’s nothing like that moment when they choose you—again.

Thanks for reading this tender narrative with empathy! I appreciate this community so much and would be honored to hear your own story of church hurt, grief, leaving and coming at church in the comments if you feel brave. Your story matters, too.

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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REPLY TO THIS EMAIL: How have you navigated church disagreements with your partner or family members? Tell me all about your church journeying.

1. I am obviously generalizing, but over the course of reading and talking to many friends and writers, I have noticed a pattern of isolationism. Many remark on the church being their one and only “special interest” (and not only in the way that the inimitable

D.L. Mayfield

means!). In my experience, church became a major place I spent free time and energies, resulting in less space for alternative hobbies.

2. Just want to make that abundantly clear! No abuse happened to us at that church! And we still love many, many people in that sweet community. There are many other good reasons we left, but not even a hint of spiritual abuse entered the equation.