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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
I have lived in two countries long enough to know that neither one stays the way you left it.
I was fourteen when I came to America. Old enough to remember England clearly — the neighbourhood, the game nights around someone’s kitchen table, the winters when the whole street came outside without anyone having to be asked. Old enough to carry those things with me. Young enough, perhaps, to build something new without too much difficulty.
The hardest part was the school. I worried my marks might slip with the change in curriculum, the different way of teaching things. I worried about walking into a place where everyone already knew each other and finding my footing. As it turned out, a teacher took it upon herself to introduce me to four girls on my first visit. We sat together at lunch throughout school. We talked in the corridors. There was a sleepover once, I think in the final year. They were good enough friends for what I needed, and I did not need much. That has always been true of me.
America shaped my adulthood in the way that only the place where you truly begin can. I married here. Built a life here. Became whoever I actually am here, rather than whoever I might have become had I stayed. It is home in the truest sense of the word, not because I was born here or because it has always felt familiar, but because it is where I chose to plant myself and grow.
England exists for me now mostly as memory. When I go back, I am always quietly startled by how much has changed. New buildings where old ones stood. Roads that didn’t used to be there. The places I loved simply gone, replaced by something I have no feeling for. It makes me sad in a way that is hard to explain, not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it. The sadness of realising that the place you remember never really existed except in a particular moment in time, and that moment has long since passed.
I don’t feel a pull to go back. England is where I am from. America is where I am. Those are different things and I have made my peace with that distinction.
Though I will say this. I still say England when someone asks where I am from. Not America, not both, not it’s complicated. England. Because that is the honest answer, and because some things stay with you regardless of how many years and how many miles sit between you and them.
My accent has never left. People mention it still, after all this time. I don’t mind. It is the most visible reminder of something I carry quietly and don’t often talk about. That I grew up somewhere else. That I remember a different way of things. That I belong, in some sense, to both places and fully to neither.
And that, I have found, is not such a bad thing to be.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 