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WHY I LEFT THE CHURCH
A Personal Testimony by J. Allan Danelek

The following account is my personal story behind why I left the church. It is offered only as an assist to those who might be questioning their own beliefs and is not meant to be taken as an attack upon the church or Christianity in general. I offer it only as one perspective among many and am perfectly willing to permit others their own views. I would be happy to hear from anyone about their own journey and am willing to dialogue with any reasonable person; please, however, don't try and reconvert me or tell me I'm hell-bound for leaving the church; first, that's rude, and second, I've heard it before. Simple disagreement is fine but please keep it civil. Thanks. J.D.

Unlike most people who walk away from decades inside the church, my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the sort of traumas many experience at the hands of the clergy. I was not molested or abused in any way, nor was I put out of fellowship or pressured to leave for some ill-advised lifestyle choices I'd made or personal habits I could not master. In fact, my rationale for leaving was not negative in any way, and I remember my twenty years as an evangelical Christian fondly to this day. For that matter, I count the time I spent in the church as among the happiest of my life, and owe much to those inside the ancient and hallowed institution who, over the years, guided me and helped me along my spiritual journey.

So why did I leave, if not because of some trauma or dispute?

I left because I simply outgrew it.

I know that sounds simplistic, and perhaps it is, but that's what happened. My spiritual reach was greater than the spiritual grasp my church—or any church for that matter—was capable of providing. I moved on because it no longer fed me spiritually, no longer engaged me intellectually, and no longer had anything to say to me on a practical or personal level. I had simply reached a level of understanding from which I was finally able to recognize and appreciate the holes in my faith, and it was at that point I could finally appreciate the choice set before me: continue along as best I could, suppressing any doubts or reservations I might have beneath a veneer of casual indifference, or move on. I chose the latter.

It wasn't an easy decision, nor was it one that I made quickly or took lightly. It was a process that took literally years and was, I believe, led my God Himself. But it was a necessary step I had to take if I was to come to understand the Divine in the way I hoped to. It was important that I leave if I were to grow any further and so, like a child that had completed elementary school and was ready to move on to more difficult lessons, I left, not in anger or disgust or even frustration, but with reluctance and even a note of sadness. The church had been my home, my spiritual mentor, and my emotional support for over twenty years, but in a way I almost felt that it was bidding me farewell the way a mother hen bids one of her hatchling to leave and start a family of its own. We left on good terms, the church and I, and I would probably never have come to the understanding of God I have today without her assistance and guidance. In that, I owe her a debt of gratitude and a word of thanks. Without the church, I would not be were I am today, and that would be the real tragedy.

A Born Again Believer
Before moving on to explore the events that led me to make the decision I ultimately did, it is first necessary to examine a little background to get a better understanding of what sort of experiences I had that ultimately were to get me to that point. While I realize that my experiences are unique to myself, I don't believe they are unique to Christians, and so some may find my story useful. At least, that is the spirit in which I present it.

I did not come out of a fundamentalist background and was, if anything, a late bloomer to the evangelical lifestyle. My family was Catholic, and that remained my professed—if largely inactive—faith for the first twenty years of my life. I briefly flirted with fundamentalism through the coaching of my first spiritual tutor—my late brother-in-law Charles—and even made a profession of faith as a teenager, but like so many interests that came and went during my youth, it quickly faded. By the time I entered the service at age eighteen, I was hovering between Christianity and agnosticism with only occasional thought being given to either.

It was October of 1979 when I became a genuine Christian. I remember it clearly and while I can't recall the date specifically, I remember the moment quite well. I was stationed in San Diego at the time, far from home and lonely, just another sailor in a town full of sailors waiting impatiently to finish their enlistments and move on to…well, I didn't know to what…but to whatever awaited them. I had befriended a clerk in a nearby store that summer and had been pestering her to go out with me when she began telling me about the importance of her faith (the truth be told, it was a tactic she later confided she used on guys who tried to put the moves on her. Either they fled like she were an unwed teenager or stuck around and "got saved" she told me with a smile.) Her words struck home and probably rekindled some fond memories of my earlier flirtations with Christianity as a teenager, and a few days later I found myself professing Christ as my savior.

In retrospect it appeared I was especially ripe for conversion for this time it stuck. Within weeks I had been “born again” and baptized in the “Holy Spirit” (yes, I also spoke in tongues and still can if I care to) and was attending a full-gospel Charismatic church. For the next year I immersed myself in my faith, read through the Bible (parts of it several times) until I got pretty familiar with it, and read mountains of Christian literature. It seems that while it may have taken me awhile to get serious about God, once I did I made up for lost time.

What was God to me at that point? He was a loving deity who was quick to forgive and endlessly patient, but one also who had very definite expectations and plans for my life. I truly believed God loved me and was pulling for me, but I also believed that when I sinned he kept his distance until I finally repented, after which we were friends again. He was my Father, my brother, my teacher, and my counselor, as well as my disciplinarian and task master. As my second spiritual tutor, Bill (a retired Navy chief I had met through the clerk at the store) was fond of pointing out to me "God was easy to please but difficult to satisfy." Never has a truer statement been uttered.

Of course, like falling in love, no one can maintain that degree of spiritual fervor indefinitely and so, over the next few years I went on a spiritual roller coaster ride. There were times of spiritual drought and times of plenty; months when I sojourned “in the desert” and times when I grew by leaps and bounds; times of close fellowship with other Christians in other churches, and times of loneliness when I found myself slipping back into by old habits (known as “backsliding” in evangelical jargon) resulting in spiritual depression and, at times, even thoughts of suicide. It was definitely not a smooth journey under any circumstances, with the highs being ever higher and the lows ever lower, but it was quite the ride nonetheless.

Four years later I married and some degree of stability entered into both my life and my spiritual walk. Being in one place for years at a time has a way of stabilizing anyone's life, and for the next fifteen years I was able to maintain a certain spiritual equilibrium. Though I was never quite able to recapture the exuberance and magical qualities of my earlier Christian experiences, I believe I had found something better. I found a peace about my faith. I was no longer so frenetic about my spiritual journey and found room for other interests and pursuits. I was more comfortable with myself and with God and, while He still struck me as something of a stern taskmaster, I no longer felt that our relationship was as dependent upon my willingness to sorrowfully repent of my sins as it once was. God, I felt, accepted me as I was and would continue to do so even when I wasn't behaving very “Christian”. We had an understanding, I guess, and for many years that seemed to be enough.

The First Doubts
I don't know when the first doubts about Christianity began to creep in. I suspect it was sometime in the mid-80's when I began to explore the issue of the end times and Second Coming that had been such a source of fascination for me since I adolescence. As a teenager I had read Hal Lindsey's book, The Late, Great, Planet Earth and was caught up in its imagery and drama, and genuinely believed that Christ was slated to return almost any time. I, of course (along with all other “true” Christians who believed as I did about these sort of things) would be “raptured” before the anti-Christ made his nefarious appearance and so be safe from the coming seven years of tribulations God was about to unleash upon an unrepentant humanity, though it bothered me that my family—only one of whom had ever made a similar profession of Christ as I had—would not be so lucky. Still, I imagined God had everyone's best at heart and even they would come to the “truth” and be saved before it was too late.

As time passed however and the date for the great tribulation kept slipping, I began to wonder and, finally, to doubt. Perhaps I had been too quick to believe everything Mr. Lindsey (and other end-times ministers of the era) had taught about Jesus' return, and I began to look elsewhere for other ideas about the end times. As is so often true of most beliefs that are blindly embraced in ones youth, it took me awhile to give up my beloved end times beliefs, but eventually came to decide that old Hal didn't know what he was talking about and the first pillar of my faith fell with a thud. It wasn't a catastrophic loss, I decided (and it did free me from having to worry about my family's imminent salvation) and I moved on. I even found that embracing a different view of the end-times than most of my fundamentalist colleagues hadn't destroyed my faith; it seemed I was still a Christian after all, despite no longer expecting to be raptured at any moment. It was even, in a strange way, a little exhilarating to go against the herd, and it taught me to be a little more careful about what I so casually came to accept from the clergy by faith alone. It was an important lesson that was to pay off repeatedly over the next few years.

Next it came time to tackle the issue of Creationism. As a born again fundamentalist, I had been forced to sacrifice my long-held believe in evolution on the alter of faith, and so for a time I became an enthusiastic, dyed-in-the-wool Young Earth Creationist who recognized the tremendous threat Darwin's theory of natural selection posed to my faith and the inerrancy of scripture. After all, if God didn't create the universe and human beings all in six literal days a mere six thousand years ago as apparently stated in Genesis, then the Bible was wrong and my faith was null and void. In a tremendous leap of logic, I truly believed that for even one verse of scripture to be proven scientifically or historically wrong invalidated everything else right down to the virgin birth and the resurrection. It seemed that my faith was held together with bailing wire and crazy glue; pull any single piece of the puzzle out of its place and the whole fragile facade would come crashing down. That, at least, was (and still is) the fundamentalist position, and the reason Young Earth Creationism remains popular in the more conservative branches of Christianity.

But then a curious thing occurred. I discovered other Christian writers who managed to maintain their faith and believe in evolution as the mechanism of Divine creation. They made a convincing argument that the Genesis accounts were meant to be taken metaphorically and not literally, and eventually I found (to my great relief) that my faith didn't depend upon the exactitude of a few versus in Genesis nor was it utterly dependent upon the incompetence and deceit of modern science for its survival. Now I no longer had to accept the dubious premise that very nearly everything we know about the universe from a scientific standpoint is wrong and had, in fact, discovered that science and God could co-exist in harmony. With that a second pillar of my faith crumbled.

Again, I accepted this new revelation as a gift of freedom. Like a heavy coat of armor that had never fit properly, I was glad to shed that dogma, and I moved on without it, my faith in both God and science firmly reestablished.

Hell—the Final Straw
The third and, perhaps, most significant pillar that made up my extensive house of cards collapsed when I began struggling with my beliefs about Hell. I had always been uncomfortable with this particular element of my faith even during my most fundamentalist phase, largely because it always struck me as being so patently unfair and, as such, so cruel. How could a loving and caring God send—or, if you prefer, permit—anyone to go to eternal punishment for what struck me as being fairly petty sins such as fornication or lying? Even worse, it occurred to me that most people weren't even going there because of anything specifically they had done, but for failing to do something they should have done—namely accept Jesus as their Savior and repent of their sins. It seemed to me one's salvation depended far more on being born into the proper environment where one had the gospel clearly and competently laid out to them than it did anything else; it was geography and timing that seemed to be the determining factors where salvation was concerned rather than the saving power of the Gospel.

The Devil, too, was a stumbling block for me. How could an omnipotent, omniscient, and loving God produce such a monstrosity in the first place, particularly knowing exactly what the outcome of that creation would ultimately be? None of it made any sense to me, unless I was willing the accept the idea that God and the Devil were allies in this ridiculous adventure, an idea I could never quite get my brain around. Something clearly was amiss here, and I spent literally years looking for an answer.

At first I thought annihilationism—the belief that Hell is simply a metaphor for spiritual extinction and not a place of eternal conscious torment—was the answer. After all, it seemed far more compassionate to exterminate the wicked rather than torture them eternally, and so for a time I was able to embrace it as the solution, but eventually it also left me in the same place as before. Even if God wasn't going to banish anyone to eternal darkness, it still seemed pointless to extinguish a human soul—one created in the image and likeness of God Himself at that—simply for failing to embrace Christianity. If that was the case, it appeared that only a tiny fraction of all the humans that have ever been born or ever would be born would exist beyond the few short years they exist on this planet. While some people had no problem with the idea of seeing this life as the complete extent of their existence, I found it more problematic than useful and eventually came to find my newfound solution to be no solution at all, but just a source of even more problems.

Clearly there was something wrong here. Either God was loving and caring as I had spent twenty years of my life believing, or he was not. Either he was a God of compassion or a God of judgment; he could not be both and still exist in my frame of reference. Something had to be done.

Something was done. I went of a quest of spiritual discovery.

Leaving the Angry God
After the collapse (or, some might say, reordering) of my basic theological views, it seems I was suddenly imbued with a newfound sense of wonder and curiosity about my beliefs. After all, if I was capable of being wrong about such foundational beliefs as the Second Coming, Young Earth Creationism, and even Hell, what else could I be wrong about? For that matter, since I had been taught most of my theology by others and had not developed it myself, how certain could I be about any of it? Curiosity drove me to learn more about my faith, which would only be possible by going to sources outside of my “approved“ reading list—even if it meant going to sources entirely outside of Christianity!

As such, the next few years proved to be a time of tremendous learning for me. By reading other theologians—especially those outside the “pale of orthodoxy”—and even perusing the works of people who would not be considered Christians at all, I eventually came to change many of my long-held assumptions about my faith. For example, I began to examine the scriptures as historical documents rather than the “Word of God” in an attempt to understand the mindset and motivations of its writers. I learned about church history (and not the sanitized version I had been taught originally) and came to understand how a zealous certainty about anything can bring men and women to commit the most horrific and godless acts in the name of religion. I taught myself about other faith systems: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism…even atheism, to see if they had anything to say to me, and even revisited the literature of the very New Age movement I had been so quick to denigrate when I had been a fundamentalist peddler of certainty (at one point I had even taught Sunday school classes on the dangers and doctrinal errors of the cults—a “cult here being defined as essentially any faith structure that possessed beliefs at variance with those of fundamentalist Christianity.)

But perhaps the most important thing I discovered was that the angry God I had been taught to believe in did not exist. Instead, I came to see the underlying thread of truth that transcended all faiths and pointed me towards a God that lied just beneath the surface waiting to be discovered; a God not of expectations and judgment and reconciliation through the bloody sacrifice of His only Son, but of a God of unconditional love. I found a God who didn't love us because we had repented or believed the right things or belonged to the proper church, but one who loved us in spite of what we believed (or refused to believe.) Not a God who loved us because of our good deeds or willingness to change, but loved us in spite of our selfishness, ignorance, and arrogance. In other words, I found a God who could love me for me (or in spite of me) and that changed everything.

It didn't happen overnight, of course. It took years before I could at last find the strength to wean myself of the church I had allowed myself to become so dependent upon for my beliefs, but one day I finally realized it was time to go. I could no longer conceive of their God of certainty and judgment, and so I did the only honest thing there was to do: I resigned my membership in my local congregation and walked out after a service one Sunday morning never to return. I could still attend a funeral service or a wedding in a church, of course, and could still speak fondly of Jesus, but I was no longer one of them. I had become the very thing I had always imagined impossible for me to be: I was an ex-fundamentalist, an ex-evangelical, an ex-Christian.

And a remarkable thing happened to me: for the first time in my life I suddenly felt free. Not free from God, but free in God. Suddenly it was okay to wonder and question and explore and find out for myself who or what God meant to me. I no longer had to be afraid, for I understood that God had never been angry with me in the first place; I had simply believed what others had told me about him without question and in so doing had allowed them to infect me with their own fears and superstitions and self-doubts. Overnight God became for me more vibrant, more alive, more meaningful than He/She/It had ever been before, for I had let the Divine out of the tightly sealed box I had kept it imprisoned in for so long. I discovered a God that was much larger than I ever imagined, and one who made me feel that I was an important part of the universe merely by existing. For me, God had become not just real but a thing of joy, and in that I had found a God I could love at last. It had been a long journey, but one that had been worth every step.

Walking with the Divine
Of course, this doesn't mean that my world has suddenly become idyllic or that all my problems have vanished like dew on a summer morning. I still have my doubts and struggles and uncertainties just as I've always had, and I still occasionally catch myself doing and saying things I later regret, but the change is that now I no longer feel guilty about them. I no longer see myself as living under a death sentence if I fail to apologize to God for my human failings, nor do I have a sense of urgency about saving the world from eternal damnation. I accept myself for who I am—warts and all—and in doing so find the strength and courage to change those things about me that are less than loving, less than caring, and less than divine. I can see God in myself if I try, and strive to find God in others as well, for I know that in doing so the vitality of the Divine is showcased and my path of spiritual discovery is opened before me.

But what of my past? What of Christianity? Was it all one huge mistake and waste of time?

Never. Christianity was my spiritual kindergarten. It's where I learned to read and write and do simple math. It taught me the ABCs of spirituality and took me down the roads that forced me to think about God. It might appear on the one hand like years of futile wandering, but that would be an illusion; in reality, it made me the man I am today and put me on the path that was to ultimately lead me to discovering the Divine. True, it gave me only a tiny, incomplete picture of God, but at least it was a picture I was able to build upon. Without Christianity and the people it sent into my life, I doubt if I would know the God I know now. It gave me the tools of discovery I needed to find the mother lode of wisdom I was eventually to uncover and for that I will be eternally grateful.

But now it is time to move on to new vistas of discovery and learning. Christianity was the path I chose to find my way to God, but it is by no means the only or even the best path. It is merely a way, but the one I could best identify with due to my Judeo-Christian heritage and citizenship in a western nation where Christianity has been the majority faith for 500 years. For others, however, it might prove entirely inadequate as a conduit for spiritual growth. Each path is unique and different, and each must be explored on a personal, even intuitive, level. I believe that if you are truly interested in finding a God that loves wastefully and lavishly and believes in you more than you believe in yourself, you will find him/her/it despite what path you take.

The mistake is in trying to follow another's path, for it will never lead you where you want to go. You might follow it for a ways, but eventually you must branch off and follow your own heart, for it is the only one that speaks specifically to you. In the end, it is the only one you must listen to, for within it is the whisperings of the Divine. Follow it, and it will show you the way. At least, it did for me.

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