The more I talk to members of my own congregation, the more I discover that they struggle with belief, and it’s the message itself, not just its institutional forms, that they struggle with. The language Christians have used about life with God for centuries—the Trinity, sin, atonement, the Resurrection—doesn’t make sense anymore, even to some of my oldest and most dedicated members. Even a basic belief in God is no longer shared. So maybe it’s time for those of us who are ordained to be more honest about our own struggles to believe.
Daniel Taylor writes about something similar in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today. He lists various terms for people rejecting church or wondering about faith-dones, nonverts, New Atheists, unaffiliated, unchurched, dechurched, exvangelicals. Taylor proposes a new category, yearners, for those living somewhere between fully committed faith and full disbelief, who long for more than they currently have.
Non-Believing Minister
We’ve been talking about most of these groups for years—people who struggle with the institutional church as they’ve known it, but who still believe in or are curious about God. What I’m seeing now is almost the opposite: people in the institutional church who struggle to believe in God.
For the last ten years, I have been a Christian minister who does not believe in God. I don’t mean that I had occasional doubts about God. I mean that, even though I’ve heard God’s voice or felt God’s presence multiple times, at some point I simply stopped believing.
This change does not feel like loss. It is not a dark night of the soul. I’m a sensible, educated person who reads science and economics for fun. I pay attention to politics, and I am an activist on issues of war and peace, climate change, and reproductive choice. As I watched the world around me, a God of love who was intimately involved in each individual life no longer made sense.
In my previous job, it was not necessary to believe. I managed an interfaith nonprofit where theological agreement was not possible. I still preached every few weeks, usually at small, rural churches, and was able to do so effectively because faith is my native language—I speak it fluently. Despite any rhetoric you might have heard, church members in rural communities do not all believe the same thing. Their beliefs are on a spectrum, and I was always somewhere on their spectrum.
Experiencing the Luminous
Recently I began a short-term position as an interim minister at a midsize, urban congregation of the former Protestant mainline, where the sanctuary felt like it might be a “thin place” where the holy is especially close. I began spending time there on weekday mornings when the space was empty and discovered that when I watched for something luminous in that space, I saw things I couldn’t fully understand or explain.
Some of the people in that church started to feel luminous as well—as if God was at work in them in ways I couldn’t fully understand and or explain. I now find myself fully engaged in an ongoing conversation with a living God in whom I still do not believe.
What has captured me, I think, is not the space itself, although the space is lovely. Nor is it the people, though they are amazing. What has captured me, to borrow Christian Wiman’s phrase, is my willingness to attend to the possible presence of God in that space and in those people.
God in this Place
Attending to God involves, for me at least, a lot of waiting, seeking, pursuing, demanding, fuming, and even stomping my feet as I try to get clear about what God might be up to. The God in whom I do not believe meets me—at this time and in this place and with these people. Perhaps most importantly, this does not feel like some kind of painful cognitive dissonance from which I need to escape. It feels like a paradox—two opposing truths between which there is space for me to breathe.
What does this all mean, then, for my ministry?
First, it means that I need to be more honest about my struggles with faith when I preach.
I think it also means the church needs to create more opportunities for one-on-one and small-group conversations based on honesty about our beliefs. I hope some of our members—and perhaps even some of the unaffiliated who are searching for a better way to talk about God—will become more engaged if they’re allowed to pursue paradox rather than certainty.
And selfishly, I hope we learn to recognize paradox as a hallmark of a well-lived life of faith. When I watch the God described in Scripture, I see a God who delights in confounding our beliefs. We can learn to be more honest when that happens. My small part of that is to be more honest about my own struggles with belief.
Sarai Rice is a Presbyterian minister and a retired non-profit executive. She consults with congregations on a variety of issues, including planning, staffing, and governance. Sarai loves to work with congregations that are exploring anew their role in the community as well as congregations seeking new energy in the face of decline. She has a deep commitment to the notion that human institutions should work well for the people they serve.