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There is something different about going to church now. Not just where we go, but how it feels to go at all.
After we left, we gave ourselves time before we began looking in earnest. We visited a Presbyterian church several times, drawn in by the warmth of the welcome and hopeful that something might take hold. There were good moments. The messages contained things worth thinking about, points I hadn’t considered before. But something kept us at a distance. The pastor read her sermons, and while I understand that many do, there was very little beyond the reading itself. No lift in the voice at the right moment, no sense that she knew it well enough to look up from the page and mean it. My husband found it nearly impossible to stay fully present. And if the person delivering the message cannot quite inhabit it, it is rather difficult for the congregation to either.
So we kept looking.
We had begun to understand something about what we were after, even if it was hard to put into words. We didn’t want to be overwhelmed when we walked in. Some churches greet you so aggressively that you feel processed rather than welcomed. People come immediately with questions and information before you have even had a moment to take the place in. There is nothing wrong with that approach. It simply wasn’t what we needed. The churches we found ourselves returning to were the ones that let you sit. Perhaps one person says hello, and then you are left to settle. That felt right.
Then we visited a Catholic church, and everything was different.
We walked in to silence. Not the awkward silence of a room that hasn’t filled yet, but the intentional quiet of people who had come to do something specific. There was no music, no greetings, no conversation. People came in, moved to their pew, and knelt to pray before the service began. I stood and watched and felt something shift in me. I had attended church my entire life and it had never once occurred to me to pray before the service. Every church I had known opened with someone else’s prayer on behalf of the congregation. This was different. This was personal, and it was chosen, and I have started doing it myself since.
The structure of the Mass was unlike anything I had experienced before. There were two readings from scripture and then a reading from the Gospel, and the priest’s message drew directly from those readings. You followed along in the Source and Summit Missal rather than flipping through a Bible trying to locate whatever passage the pastor had just referenced. I had never realised how much energy I spent doing that until I didn’t have to anymore. Here, you listened to the readings, you followed along, and you were ready. The message landed because you were already settled into it.
We talked about it on the way home. We talked about it during the week. That had not always been the case with church, and we noticed the difference.
We have been back many times since. Mass has become our regular choice, and something has grown from it that we did not entirely anticipate. We downloaded the Source and Summit app and began reading the daily readings together as a couple. We have recently added a daily reflection as well, a short message connected to one of the readings for that day. Our faith is more present in our daily life now than it was when we were attending church three or four times a week.
There is still much we want to understand before we could say with any certainty where this is leading. The Catholic faith is deep and layered and we are conscious of how much we do not yet know. But we are learning, and we are doing so willingly, which feels like something worth paying attention to.
Our faith has not changed in its foundation. But it is being examined more carefully than it ever has been, and that examination has brought us closer to God rather than further away. We talk about faith more now. We think about it more deliberately. We are more intentional than we have ever been.
We don’t know exactly where this leads. But for the first time in a long time, we are not simply attending church. We are seeking something. And it seems, quietly and unexpectedly, that something may be seeking us as well.
— Kate
There is a kind of grief people don’t often talk about.
The quiet grief of leaving a church you once believed would always be your home.
For many years, our lives were deeply connected to one congregation. We weren’t simply Sunday morning attendees. We were there for Sunday school, morning services, evening services, and Wednesday nights. I sang in the choir, played in the orchestra, and took part in the music ministry in ways that genuinely fed something in me. Our daughter attended the school connected to the church. In many ways, our lives were woven into that place.
And for a long time, it felt right.
We had joined not long after we began attending. The sermons were meaningful, the people seemed welcoming, and our daughter loved being there with her friends. After leaving another church where we had stopped feeling connected, it truly felt as though we had found where we belonged. For years, we were committed in the way that only happens when something feels worth giving yourself to.
But sometimes things change slowly, almost quietly, until one day you realise something feels different.
For us, that shift began with a situation involving church leadership. It was handled in ways that raised questions we found difficult to set aside. We tried, for a time. We focused on our faith and on the genuine good that was still happening around us. But when trust shifts even slightly, it changes how you hear everything that comes afterward. Over time, we began noticing other things more clearly.
There was a meeting, eventually, that changed something permanently for my husband. I will not go into the particulars. What I will say is that respect, once lost, is very difficult to rebuild. He continued attending with me for a while because we both valued our Sunday school teacher and felt we were learning something worth learning. But something had shifted in him that did not shift back.
For a while we kept attending anyway. Sometimes people stay longer than they should because leaving feels harder than remaining.
Eventually I had to admit something to myself. The only parts of church I still felt truly connected to were Sunday school and the music. When our Sunday school teacher announced he would be leaving to take up a position elsewhere, it forced the admission I had been avoiding. If those were the only reasons I was still there, then perhaps I was no longer truly part of that church. And church ought never to be reduced to a schedule of obligations you feel bound to honour.
So we left.
Looking back now, something else stands out that we didn’t fully recognise at the time. Toward the end, getting to church had begun to feel like something we had to push ourselves to do. We were always there, but often rushing in at the last minute, sometimes arriving just as things were starting.
Since leaving, something curious has happened. On the Sundays we do attend somewhere, we are ready early. So early that we often sit in the car for a few minutes before going in. I mentioned that to my husband recently and said perhaps it told us something about the church we had left.
He thought for a moment and said something that has stayed with me.
“Toward the end it started to feel like a job. Like keeping up appearances. Not like going to worship.”
Hearing him say that, I thought he was probably right.
When we stopped attending, I assumed at least a few people might reach out. After all, we had been deeply involved for years. One person did. Just one. It was not anyone in church leadership. Another message came months later, but it felt less like genuine concern and more like someone confirming something they had already heard.
That silence told us something important. Perhaps the sense of family we believed existed there had not been quite as real as we had thought.
Even so, leaving did not damage our faith. If anything, it clarified it. Our faith was never meant to be tied to one building or one group of people. It is something steadier than that.
We still attend church most Sundays, visiting different congregations and taking in what we can along the way. We haven’t found a new place to call home yet.
But we are looking. And we are looking more carefully than we did before.
— Kate
There are things I think that I will never say out loud.
Not because they are shameful, or dangerous, or particularly radical. Simply because I am not built that way. I process things privately, turn them over quietly, and then move on without much fuss. That has always been true of me.
But thoughts have a way of accumulating. And somewhere along the way I realised I needed somewhere to put them.
So I write.
I am not entirely sure what this will become. I have a feeling it will cover more ground than I can currently anticipate. Faith, because it is central to my life even when it is complicated. Marriage, because twenty years of anything teaches you things worth saying. Motherhood, because I have always experienced it differently from the way most people seem to and I have spent too long staying quiet about that. The small and specific details of a life that looks ordinary from the outside and feels, from the inside, like something worth examining.
I grew up in England and have lived in America long enough that I belong to both and fully to neither. I notice things. I observe quietly. I form opinions I rarely share in conversation because it has never felt worth the effort of explaining them to people who weren’t asking.
Here, perhaps, is different.
I am not writing to be understood by everyone. I am writing because there are things I have thought for years that I suspect other people have also thought, quietly, without saying. And if one person reads something here and thinks, I have never admitted that, but yes, then that seems worth doing.
This is not a grand project. It is simply a place where the thoughts that would otherwise crowd can go instead.
And perhaps, if I am honest, the quiet hope that it might one day become something more.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 