Chapter 12: How to Stay a Christian When the Movement Will Not Turn

Most people who read this book will not have the power to reform a denomination. They will not be able to fire a pastor or rewrite a statement of faith or move a budget or unelect a bishop. They will only have a pew, a family text thread, a small group that meets on Wednesdays, a parent who watches the same channel every night, a child who is starting to ask questions the youth pastor does not want asked, and a Bible on the nightstand that has started to feel like it belongs to a different religion than the one being preached at them on Sunday.

This chapter is for that person. Not the reformer. The stayer. The one who has seen everything this book has described and still believes the man from Nazareth is who he said he was, and does not know what to do with that belief inside a movement that has attached his name to things he never blessed.

You do not have to leave the faith to leave the movement. That sentence is the whole chapter. Everything after it is only the working out of what that sentence means on a Tuesday afternoon, in an actual house, with actual people who love you and are also, on this one enormous thing, wrong.

First, Grieve

Before anything else, let yourself grieve. What you are seeing is a loss. The church you were raised in, or the church you converted into, or the church you married into, has, in significant parts of itself, become something you cannot follow in good conscience. That is not a small thing to notice. It is a bereavement. Something you loved has died, or is dying, or has revealed itself to have been sick for longer than you knew.

The movement will not let you grieve this openly. It will tell you that any grief you feel is proof that you were never really one of them, or that you have been deceived by the world, or that you are in a spiritual attack, or that you are being prideful, or that you are listening to the wrong podcasts. It will offer you a hundred explanations for your grief and none of them will be the true one, which is that you are grieving because you loved the thing and the thing has been wounded by its own hands.

Grieve it anyway. In private, if you have to. With a journal. With one trusted friend. With a therapist who does not think faith is a symptom. With God, plainly, without dressing the prayer up. The Psalms will help. Psalm 13. Psalm 22. Psalm 42. Psalm 88, which does not resolve. The book you carry has an entire vocabulary for lament and the movement has taught you almost none of it. Learn it now. You are going to need it.

Do not try to skip grief and land in strategy. Strategy without grief becomes bitterness, and bitterness is a bad guide. Grief, honestly walked, becomes clarity. And clarity is what you are going to need to make the decisions in the rest of this chapter.

Second, Read the Book Again, Like a Stranger

You have been trained to read the Bible through the movement's lens. That lens is thicker than you know. It has been ground in your youth group, your Christian school, your favorite radio preacher, your uncle's Facebook posts, the study Bible you got in eighth grade, the notes in the margins of the pastor's slides. You did not choose that lens. You were handed it. And even now, when you have started to distrust the movement, you are almost certainly still reading the book through it in ways you cannot yet see.

The remedy is not to stop reading. The remedy is to read the book again, from the beginning, as if you had never heard a sermon in your life. Read Genesis without the political overlay. Read Exodus and notice who Pharaoh is and what he does. Read Leviticus 19 out loud, slowly, and stop at the end of every verse. Read Deuteronomy 10:17-19 and let it sit for a week. Read the whole book of Amos in one sitting. Read Isaiah 1 and Isaiah 58 back to back. Read the entire Sermon on the Mount without stopping to explain anything. Read Luke straight through and count how often Jesus talks about money. Read James twice.

While you are doing this, read outside the movement's shelf. Read a Black church commentary. Read a Latin American liberation reading. Read a woman scholar on Paul. Read a Jewish rabbi on the Torah, because the Torah is his book before it is yours and he has been reading it longer. Read an early church father from before Constantine. Read a mother of the desert. Read a Quaker on the Sermon on the Mount. You do not have to agree with everything any of them say. You only have to let more than one voice into your head, so that the movement's voice stops being the only one that gets to interpret the words in front of you.

You will discover, doing this, that the book is bigger than the movement told you. It is stranger. It is more demanding. It is also, and this matters, more merciful than the movement told you, in the places you were told it was harsh, and harsher than the movement told you, in the places you were told it was gentle. It is not the book you were sold. It is the book that was there the whole time, under the highlighting.

Third, Decide What Kind of Christian You Are Going to Be

You cannot be a general Christian. There is no such thing. Every Christian is a specific one, formed by specific choices, whether they know it or not. The movement has been making those choices for you by default. Once you notice, you have to start making them yourself.

Some of the choices are theological. What do you actually believe about the Bible, now, after reading it as a stranger? What do you believe about the atonement? About hell? About who is in and who is out? About women? About queer people? About immigrants? About the death penalty? About wealth? About war? You do not have to have a finished answer to any of these questions this week. You do have to stop pretending you agree with answers you no longer hold.

Some of the choices are practical. Whose voice are you going to let form you, going forward? Whose books will you read? Whose podcasts will you play in the car? Whose sermons will you listen to? Whose accounts will you follow? These are not small decisions. Formation is cumulative. Ten years of one voice makes a person. Ten years of another voice makes a different person. Pick your voices deliberately, because someone is going to pick them for you if you do not, and the algorithm is not on your side.

And some of the choices are relational. Who are you going to be honest with? Who are you going to be strategically quiet with? Who are you going to invite into what you are seeing? Who are you going to protect from what you are seeing, at least for now, because the relationship cannot yet hold the weight of it? These are hard questions and they do not have universal answers. Your marriage is not my marriage. Your mother is not my mother. Your job is not my job. What is required is that you ask the questions honestly and answer them in a way you can live with in front of God, not in a way that only manages the anxiety of the moment.

Fourth, Find or Build a Small Table

You cannot do this alone. The movement has trained a whole generation of thoughtful believers to try, because the movement has poisoned so many rooms that thoughtful believers have concluded the only safe room is a room of one. That conclusion is understandable and it is a trap. The book knows nothing of solo Christianity. Every image it uses for the church is plural. A body. A family. A building of living stones. A vine with branches. A city on a hill. None of those images can be embodied by a single person alone in a car listening to a podcast on the way to work.

You need a small table. Not a megachurch. A table. Two or three or six people who have seen what you have seen, or who are willing to see it with you, and who are willing to meet regularly enough that trust can actually grow between you. The table can meet in a living room. It can meet at a diner. It can meet on a video call across three time zones. It can meet at a park while the children play. What matters is that it meets, and that when it meets it does the two things the first church did in Acts 2:42. It devotes itself to the apostles' teaching, which means it reads the book together, honestly. And it devotes itself to the breaking of bread and to prayer, which means it eats together and it prays together, and the eating and the praying are not decorative.

If a table like that already exists in your life, cherish it and give it more of your time than you think you can afford. If it does not exist, you will have to build it, and building it will be slower and lonelier than you want. Invite one person first. Then another. Do not try to launch a movement. Try to have a meal. The book started that way and it can start that way again, in your kitchen, this year, with people you already know.

Do not require doctrinal agreement as the price of admission. Require honesty. Require willingness to read the book without the movement's overlay. Require a commitment to show up. The rest will sort itself out over time, or it will not, and either way you will be closer to the Acts 2 pattern than you are now.

Fifth, Do Not Weaponize What You Have Learned

There is a temptation, when you first begin to see what this book has been describing, to become the thing you are critiquing. To turn the sharpness of prophetic language on your own family with the same self-righteousness the movement uses on everyone else. To quote Matthew 23 at your uncle across the Thanksgiving table and enjoy the way it lands. To post the sharpest verse you have found this week and wait for the likes. To make a personality out of being the one who has left the fold, which is only another way of staying inside the fold, because you are still defining yourself entirely by it.

Do not do that. The prophets do not enjoy their own words. Jeremiah weeps. Isaiah walks naked and barefoot through the city and is not proud of it. Jesus looks over Jerusalem and cries. Paul says he could wish himself accursed for the sake of his people. The tone of prophetic speech in the book, when you actually read it, is grief before it is anger, and love before it is either. If your critique of the movement does not have that tone, it is not prophetic. It is just online.

The people around you who are still inside the movement are not your enemies. They are, in most cases, people who have been formed by the same forces you were formed by, and who have not yet been given the space or the reason to see what you have started to see. Your job is not to shame them out of the movement. Your job is to live in front of them in a way that makes the movement's account of Christianity less believable and the book's account of Christianity more believable. That is a much slower work than an argument, and it will convert almost no one in the timeline you would prefer. Do it anyway. It is the only work that has ever actually changed a church, and it is the work Jesus modeled with a towel and a basin and thirty-three years and one Friday.

Sixth, Give What You Have

If you cannot reform the denomination, you can still do the works the book describes, on the scale of your own life. You can feed a hungry person this week. You can pay someone's electric bill this month. You can rent the room over your garage to a family that would otherwise be on the street. You can drive the neighbor who cannot drive to the doctor. You can sit in the waiting room. You can pay the bail. You can go to the funeral. You can bring the casserole. You can be, for one specific stranger, the church that never showed up.

The movement will not measure this. The algorithm will not measure this. The pastor will not preach a sermon about it. The Christian bookstore will not sell a book about it. The book you carry will, in Matthew 25 and Isaiah 58 and James 1 and 1 John 3, measure it as the entire test of whether your faith was real. When Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, he does not ask about their theology. He asks about the food, the drink, the welcome, the clothing, the visit. That is the whole exam. It has been the whole exam the whole time.

You do not need permission from a pastor to take that exam. You do not need a ministry name. You do not need a fundraising page. You need a wallet, a car, a kitchen, a phone, and the willingness to be interrupted. Start there. The rest of the church you are trying to build will grow up around that habit, or it will not grow at all.

Seventh, Teach the Children Something Better

If you have children, or if children are in your care in any form, they are watching. They are watching the movement. They are watching you. They are figuring out, faster than you know, whether the God they are being introduced to is the one in the book or the one on the cable channel. This is not a small responsibility. It is the responsibility.

Teach them the book straight. Read them the parts the curriculum skips. Read them the parts about the widow, the stranger, the debt cancellation, the loud denunciation of the rich, the loud denunciation of religious pride, the loud tenderness for the outsider, the loud command not to bear false witness. Tell them that Jesus was brown, and poor, and a refugee before he was two years old, and a laborer, and a Jew, and an occupied person, and killed by the state at the request of religious leaders. Tell them that his followers were mostly women, mostly poor, mostly foreign, and that this was not an accident.

Tell them the truth about the country too. Not to make them hate it. To make them citizens who can love it honestly, which is the only kind of love that can improve anything. Tell them the truth about slavery and about the tribes and about the labor movement and about the civil rights movement and about the people the church helped and the people the church hurt. Give them the whole story. They can handle it. What they cannot handle is finding out at nineteen, in a college class, that the version they were given at nine was a comforting lie, because then they will throw out the God who was folded into that lie, and they will not always find their way back to the God the lie was hiding.

And when they ask you the hard questions, tell them what you actually think. Not what your parents told you to say. Not what the pastor wants you to say. Not what will keep the family peace at the cost of the child's ability to trust you. Say, honestly, this is where I have landed, this is why, this is where I am still unsure, and I would love to keep talking with you about it as long as you want to talk about it. Children can survive parents who do not know everything. Children rarely survive parents who lied on the important things.

Eighth, Stay or Leave Your Church on Purpose

At some point you will have to decide whether to stay in the church you are currently in, or to leave it. There is no clean answer. Both choices are costly. Both choices are, in different circumstances, faithful. What matters is that whichever you choose, you choose it on purpose, in front of God, with the book open, and not out of exhaustion or inertia.

If you stay, stay honestly. Do not pretend to agree with what you do not agree with. Do not tithe to a budget that is bankrolling harm. Do not send your children into a program you would not sit through yourself. Ask the questions in the members' meeting even when it is uncomfortable. Support the people in the congregation who are already asking them. Refuse the small compromises that add up, over years, to complicity. Staying honestly will cost you friendships. It will get you talked about in the parking lot. It will possibly get you asked to leave. If you are asked to leave for the honest questions, you have your answer, and you can leave with clean hands.

If you leave, leave cleanly. Do not disappear without a word, if you have the strength for a word. Tell one person, or write one letter, or say one sentence at the door, so that your leaving is a testimony and not a rumor. Do not slam every door on the way out, because some of the people behind those doors will need to reach you later, and you will want to be reachable. Find your next room, or start it, and do not spend the next decade defining yourself only as ex. Ex is not an identity. It is a stage. Move through it.

If you have been abused inside a church, none of the previous two paragraphs apply. Leave. Now. Without explanation. Without a farewell letter. Without a meeting with the elders. Your survival is not negotiable, and the book, honestly read, has never required you to negotiate it. Find a therapist. Find a lawyer if you need one. Find safe people. God is not in the building you are leaving. God is walking out with you.

Ninth, Keep the Long View

The movement looks enormous right now. Its budgets are enormous. Its media reach is enormous. Its political power is enormous. Its confidence is enormous. And you, in your small kitchen with your small table and your small choices, feel small by comparison. This feeling is a lie the movement wants you to believe, because a person who believes the movement is inevitable will not do the small faithful things that are the only things that have ever changed a church.

Read history. The church of the first three centuries was tiny. It met in houses. It had no political power. It buried its dead in catacombs. It was persecuted by an empire that considered it a joke. Within three hundred years the empire was calling itself Christian, which was, in some ways, the beginning of its worst problems, but the point is that the small faithful thing outlasted the enormous confident thing. It has done so more than once. It will do so again.

The reformers were small. The abolitionists were small. The civil rights movement, at the beginning, was a handful of Black preachers and a handful of Black women organizers meeting in living rooms. The people who hid Jews from the Nazis were small. The people who ran the underground railroad were small. History does not remember the megachurches of any era. History remembers the tables in the back rooms where a few people decided to actually do what the book said.

You are being invited to sit at one of those tables. You are being invited to be one of those people. Not because you are special. Because the invitation has always been open, in every generation, to whoever will read the book honestly and turn.

Tenth, Remember Who You Are Following

At the end of all of this, the question is not what you think of the movement. The question is who you are following. If you are following a party, this book has been the wrong book for you and you should probably stop reading it. If you are following a nation, the same is true. If you are following a pastor or a personality or a brand of theology or a nostalgia for the country your grandparents told you about, the same is true. None of those things are the man from Nazareth, and none of them can save you, and none of them will still be standing in a hundred years.

If, however, in the middle of all of the mess this book has described, you still find yourself drawn to the actual man in the actual Gospels, the one who touched lepers and ate with tax collectors and forgave a woman without asking her husband's permission and turned over the tables in the temple and washed the feet of the man about to betray him and told his followers to love their enemies and then loved his own enemies from a Roman cross, then you have somewhere to stand that the movement cannot take from you. You did not need the movement to give him to you. You do not need the movement's permission to keep following him. The movement is not the door. He is the door. The movement is a hallway some people have mistaken for the whole house, and you are allowed to walk out of the hallway and further into the house.

Do that. Walk further in. Bring the people who will come. Grieve the ones who will not. Set your table. Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Tell the truth. Teach the children. Read the book. Sing the laments. Love your enemies, including the ones inside the movement who are convinced you are theirs. And when you are asked, as you will be, whose side you are on, tell them honestly. You are on the side of the man who said the two commandments were to love God with everything you are and to love your neighbor as yourself, and everything else in the law and the prophets hangs on those two, and you do not have room, on those two hooks, to hang a flag or a party or a nation or a movement or a lie.

That is enough. That has always been enough. The rest of the book, the one they wrote and the one you are living, is only the working out of that enoughness in whatever room you happen to be standing in.

The last chapter is short. It is a letter to the reader who has made it this far, and who is standing at the door of the hallway, looking into the house.