The Cost of Leaving Fundamentalist Christianity

And how we are trying to build healthy community on the other side.

If you had asked us fifteen years ago, the year we got married, where we would be in the year 2025, we would not have guessed most of the markers of our current life.

We were still in very conservative, exclusive church circles. Zach was on the Dallas megachurch pastor track. We were living within the confines of a fairly traditional marriage. We were pursuing our own version of the American Evangelical dream.

Twenty-one years old on our wedding day in 2010.

But the dam was starting to crack. We saw how the sausage was being made, and it was making us sick. Maybe we’ll share the whole story someday, but suffice it to say that, in summary, we were heading for:

1. Ignoring our moral compasses, OR

2. Getting divorced AND/OR

3. Leaving Christianity behind altogether

We had to make some hard decisions which eventually led to Zach’s resignation. That was an awful, dark season in our lives, but we have never regretted doing the right thing and taking a stand on our principles. Not once.

Six months after Zach quit his job at one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the world and was deciding if he wanted to continue in ministry. Matchbox Twenty concert in Dallas. Summer 2013.

Since then, we have been kicked out of or cut off from just about every organization with whom we were previously associated. We can joke about it now, and we wear some of these exclusions as badges of honor, but there are some that still sting.

We have lost friends and family members. We’ve been told that we “are going to hell and taking our whole congregation with us.” We’ve been called wolves in sheep’s clothing. We’ve received death threats and had to remove our children’s pictures from the internet.

Why? Because…