The Year I Stopped Going to Church and Started Reading the Bible
The last Sunday I went to church, I sat in the back row and did not sing.
It was not a decision. It was a slow drift that ended in a specific seat. I had been in that building for eleven years. I knew which songs the worship leader would pick before she picked them. I knew the exact moment in the sermon when the pastor would lean forward on the podium. I knew the families who sat in the third row and the ones who slipped in late and the ones who had stopped coming and nobody had asked why.
I knew all of it. And I could not sing.
I sat through the whole service with my hands in my lap. When it ended I stood up, walked to the parking lot, and drove home. I did not tell anyone I was not coming back. I did not have a conversation with the pastor. I did not write a letter. I just did not go the next Sunday. And then the next.
For a year, that was the whole story. I was not in church. I was not sure if I believed in the thing church was about. I was not sure what I believed at all.
Here is what I did during that year: I read the Bible.
Not the way I had read it before. Before, I read it in fragments. A verse for the day. A passage for the small group. A psalm when someone was sick. I read it the way you read a manual, looking for the part that applies to the problem in front of you.
This time I read it in books. Whole books, start to finish. I started with Mark because it is the shortest gospel and I did not trust my attention span for anything longer. Then I read it again, slower. Then I read Luke, then Acts, then the letters of Paul, then the Psalms straight through, then Job, which I had never read whole and which broke something loose in me.
The first thing I noticed was how little of it I had actually read. I had heard hundreds of sermons on maybe forty passages. The rest of it - the long genealogies, the minor prophets, the strange visions in Ezekiel, the arguments in the letters - I had never read.
The second thing I noticed was how much of it did not fit the picture I had been given.
I want to be careful here because I know how this sounds.
I am not saying the church lied to me. I am not saying the sermons were wrong. I am not saying I discovered the “real” Bible that the church had been hiding. That is a story other people tell, and I do not think it is true.
What I am saying is that the version of the faith I was holding onto had been assembled over eleven years from a specific set of passages that fit a specific set of themes. Provision. Protection. Deliverance. Breakthrough. Those are real themes. They are in the Bible. They are not the whole Bible.
The Bible I read that year had more doubt in it than I expected. More lament. More people arguing with God and not being punished for it. More unresolved endings. More silence where I expected a clear answer.
The last Sunday I tried to go back was about fourteen months after the first Sunday I did not go.
I walked in. I sat in the same back row. The worship leader led the same kind of songs. The pastor leaned forward on the podium at the same moment. Everything was the same. And I still could not sing.
But something was different. I was not there to receive anything. I was not there to get a word, or a breakthrough, or a fresh anointing. I was just there. In the room. With the people. And I found that I could sit there without needing the room to give me something.
I do not know how to end this story because it does not have an ending.
I go sometimes. I miss sometimes. I read the Bible more than I used to, and I still do not understand most of it. I have not figured out what I believe about a lot of things. The question I started with - the one about whether the church was the place for me - is still open.
But here is what changed. I stopped treating the church as the source. For eleven years, the church was where I got my faith. The sermons, the small group, the worship nights, the prayer meetings - that was the well. When the well felt dry, I thought my faith was drying up.
What I found in that year is that the well was not the only water. The Bible was there the whole time, unread. The questions were there the whole time, unasked. God was there the whole time, and I had been looking for Him in a room instead of in a book.
I still go to the room. But I do not go to the room to find Him anymore. I go because He is there, and He is also in the book, and He is also in the parking lot, and He is also in the fourteen months I spent not going anywhere at all.
That is not a clean lesson. It is what happened.