When I was in my late 20’s, a bunch of my college friends were getting married, and a strange thing kept happening at the weddings. I was working as a youth pastor at the time. For a lot of my friends, who hand flown from our alma mater in Ohio landed in impossibly cooler places like southern California and the Jersey coast, I was the only substantively religious person they knew (at least the only one under the age of 65), and definitely the only one they knew who had made a career out of it. 

So when my work came up, it was treated with the same novelty of if I said I was a circus performer, and occasionally even some suspicion. But as the wedding weekends went on, and it became apparent that I was a relatively normal person, clinging to the last years of my 20s like the rest of them, the comments would shift. By the night of the wedding itself, long after the meals and the toasts, once the cake was eaten and everyone’s heels were off, some long-forgotten sorority sister, bride’s cousin, or family friend, would find me and say, 

“You’re the youth pastor right?” 

They would tell me about the Spirit they once felt. How real it all seemed to them once. How after that summer camp, that trip, that retreat, they really felt like it would all be different. And how it wasn’t. They would talk about the shame that always managed to creep in. They told me about the bullying they experienced, the busy schedules, the unspoken judgements, the questions they didn’t feel like they could ask, and how they left without ever deciding to. They spoke fondly of what they once had, with something like longing. They weren’t ever angry. They didn’t blame me for the church that had let them down (though I always tried to apologize for it). 

They just wanted to know…was it real? That tug that led them to devote their life to Christ at summer camp, that brought them to tears at a worship night, was that real? If it wasn’t, how could I do the work I did? And if it was, which they seemed to all suspect, however cautiously, what did that mean for them now? Was there anything left for them in the sacrament, the community, the sacred word, that once felt like faith? 

I was thinking about these people, these late night confessionals with the closest thing my inebriated bicoastal twenty-something friends knew to a priest, while I was working with a client the other day. We were trying to describe our target audience for a grant proposal. We intended the program to be for “nones” but not in the sense of people that the Church somehow missed, not nones in the sense that they had never had an interest, and not “dones,” understood as people who decidedly left the church because of bigotry, trauma, or conflict in the church, but people we could call “not anymores.” 

Most people who aren’t in church, particularly in cities like Nashville where I live, or Asheville where my client was, have been to church before. They went to VBS, they went to at least Christmas and Easter with grandma. A lot of non-church going people got baptized, got confirmed, gave their life to Jesus at a summer camp. I sat across from a 40-year-old at dinner the other day with a tattoo of a scripture citation, and I asked him about it, and he didn’t even remember the verse, he said he got it when he was 20. He was in enough at some point to have his body permanently marked, and now he can’t exactly remember why.

Over time, the kids at summer camp and on mission tripsand a big worship conferences faded away from faith. Not because there was nothing there, not because they found something better, but usually for a lot of little reasons. And sometimes, they missed it. Not in a way that made them head back into a church, but just enough that, once the champagne is gone, and the dancing is over, they go looking for a pastor to talk to. 

For the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be talking about this group, what my client and I wound up calling “faith-adjacent exiles” for the grant proposal, but who we’ll call the “not anymores.” We’ll talk about how they left, what they’re looking for, what we can learn from them, and what it means to take seriously our call towards those who stand on the outside of our congregations, who glance back over their shoulder at the stained glass and steeples and miss it. Join us.