Some of us left church. Some of us still go every Sunday, and we miss someone who stopped coming.
Maybe it was years ago. Maybe it was last spring. Either way, we carry it.
I was saved at fourteen and have served the church ever since. I have also watched a generation of my friends’ children walk out of it. My new book, The Rest of the House: What Church Handed You, What It Didn’t, and Where Jesus Was All Along, comes out today. It is for both sides of that door.
It starts with Tessa. At fifteen, she felt God closer than ever. It was the last night of winter retreat. Twenty teenagers gathered around one boy and prayed loud over him, and Tessa’s hand was flat between his shoulder blades. She has never forgotten how hard he shook.
A month later he stopped coming. She left church at twenty-two. She had one real question about that night. She asked it once, and all she got was a verse.
Vera, 74, lives in the apartment downstairs. She played piano at Tessa’s childhood church for twenty years, until the deacons told her she couldn’t play anymore. She still believes, and she still goes every Sunday.
Parents and pastors are in these pages too, from Baptist, Methodist, charismatic and Anglican churches. They miss grown children who stopped coming.
The book follows them through one year. Each one gets to tell the truth about what church gave them, the good and the hurt.
People leaving is nothing new. Some of the first to leave walked away from Jesus Himself. John writes that “many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him” (John 6:66, BSB).
So what do we do with the hurt? And what do we do with the good, the nights God felt close?
Church handed many of us one part of loving God and called it the whole. A better answer does not heal that. Being believed does, about the good and the hurt both. And along the way, we find that Jesus has already come to us.