Apostasy and Disappointing Pizza

Jan 27, 2023

I don’t really know what kind of a disclaimer to put here. This is a strange one.

I’m inevitably going to get some messages from people who are troubled by this post and worried about my soul.

I appreciate your concern for me. I do. It’s sweet of you. I guess I just want to reassure you that while this is a part of my story, it’s not the whole thing.

I did something weird a few years ago.

I had a funeral service for my faith.

I joke that I’m a Christian about 60 percent of the time.

(Sometimes it’s less of a joke than other times)

But a few years back I decided I was completely out.

I wasn’t a Christian anymore.

I didn’t believe my prayers were going anywhere.

I didn’t believe in a creator or a higher power of any kind.

I was more sure than not that what we see and experience in life is all there is.

And I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could share that with.1

Being a pastor is super lonely.

That’s been my experience at least.

Maybe that’s not the case for every pastor.

For me it has been.

As a pastor I’ve had very few people with whom I feel safe sharing deeply personal things.

When it came to my waning faith, almost nobody felt safe to share with.

None of my pastor friends.

Very few outside friends.

Certainly nobody in my church.

I didn’t feel like I had anyone to lean on for help or support.

For a long while my faith questions/doubts stayed between my therapist and I.

I hoped that I'd ultimately rediscover my faith and everything would be right again.

But that wasn't happening.

As the questions kept coming and the doubts kept growing,2 my own mental health took a nosedive.

I’d never had suicidal thoughts before, but I started having them every day.

I had multiple panic attacks each week, sometimes 2-3 a day.

I slept only 3 hours or so a night.

In the past, even while depressed, I’d had some amount of hope. But I felt completely hopeless during this time.

I wanted the pain to stop.

I hoped that maybe if I could make peace with my dissolving faith, my mental health might recover, at least a little bit.

In my first year as a pastor 20+ people associated with our church died.

Many more have died since then.

Before coming to this church I’d only led one funeral.

That first year I did a lot of funerals.

I got really good really fast.

I kind of loved doing it. I still do. Funeral services are often kind of a beautiful thing. People are given space to grieve publicly, a bunch of stories are told, and folks can remember the person and all of the ways in which that person changed the lives of everybody around them.

There’s also a sense of closure; of finality. Once a funeral service is over, there’s more of an admittance on a soul level that the person is gone.

I never really felt like I got the chance to experience those things for my faith.

Giving up my faith caused me a lot of grief.

I've grieved loved ones, but I've never grieved the loss of a faith or worldview before.

I didn’t even know how to do it.

Losing your faith feels very different from losing a loved one.

It feels like something that you should be able to come to terms with quickly. “I don’t believe.” Boom. Done. Moving on.

It wasn’t like that for me. I was having an impossible time letting go.

I didn’t feel like I had the kind of closure that I needed to accept the loss of my faith, and to move on with my life.

I wanted the chance to grieve the loss openly.

I wanted the kind of closure that comes from a funeral service.

I wanted to leave behind my faith in a final, ceremonial way.

I took a personal day and drove to the closest coastal town, where I spent three hours writing a funeral service for my faith.

In a Pizza Hut.

Seems like a strange place to apostatize, but they have a cheap lunch buffet.

I hand-wrote the service in my journal over many tears and endless pizza.

The food was only okay. Not great. Two out of five stars.

I reread this today and cringed so hard I broke my hip bone

I drove to my favorite beach. Among a beach full of kite flyers, shell hunters, swimmers, dog walkers, and one very handsy couple that made me a little uncomfortable, I presided over the funeral service for my faith.

It was a funeral with no attendees and no body.

Still, the service had everything, including a song, a prayer (it was weird writing a prayer to not-God), and a couple of readings.

I wrote and structured it like I would for any funeral.

It was uncomfortable.

Definitely in the top five weirdest ideas I've ever had.

But when you're looking for closure, and you have nobody else to lean on, you'll try almost anything.

Even if it's weird.

The ceremony felt a little anti-climactic at the end. It felt like something tangible needed to be laid to rest.

So I grabbed a giant rock and laid it in front of me.

It worked well enough.

I threw a handful of sand on top of the rock and said my final goodbyes.

I drove back home in silence, unsure of what my life was going to be moving forward.

Questions I’m sure some folks have, and my unsatisfying answers:

When did you come back to your faith?

Honestly, I don’t always know if I did. I definitely didn’t come back to the same kind of faith. The faith I have now is much more unsure, but I’m comfortable with that lack of certainty.

Are you a Christian now?

Yeah.
Usually, yeah.
I think so, anyway.
I believe. Except for the times I don’t.
I’m a Christian who’s very, very, very, very, very unsure.

How did you keep being a pastor while not a Christian?

I don’t really know. I was lucky to have quite a few weeks off from preaching around the time of the weird faith funeral.

I still did need to pray with people. I remember mustering up as much hope as I possibly could before I prayed for or with someone.

Hope that I was wrong.

Hope that God was real.

And then I prayed with the person.

To a God that I thought may not exist.

With all the hope in the world that I was wrong.

I’ve asked myself probably hundreds of times whether or not I should have quit being a pastor when my faith fell apart.

And looking back, if I’m being honest, I probably should have.

It’s really hard to be a professional Christian when you realize you're probably not a Christian anymore.

All the Things I Haven't Said

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All the Things I Haven't Said

Apostasy and Disappointing Pizza

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