Spiritual but Not Religious? Why I Went Back to Church

For more than twenty years, if you’d asked me about faith, I would’ve told you I believed in God. I talked to Him all the time. I just didn’t go to church.

Maybe that sounds familiar. A lot of us walked away from church at some point. Maybe an experience left you questioning people’s motives. Maybe life just got busy. So we call ourselves spiritual but not religious. We believe in God. We just don’t want the noise that sometimes comes with religion.

That was me. Until it wasn’t.

I Never Stopped Believing

I grew up in church every Sunday and Wednesday night. I went to church camp. One summer I even declared I wanted to be a missionary. But somewhere in high school, I stopped going and never quite found my way back.

I didn’t stop looking for God, though. I found Him in yoga studios, lying still at the end of class. In a rainforest in Costa Rica, with rain falling and birds singing, where I felt a peace so complete it could only be spiritual. At a church service on the beach, with the waves crashing in front of us.

God was there in all of it. But looking back, I can see what was missing. What I lost wasn’t God. It was the practice of faith. The community. The going deeper. I talked to Him when I needed Him, but He wasn’t part of my everyday life.

The Question That Kept Me in the Hallway

There was one question I couldn’t get past. If God loves everyone, why would He exclude the good people I knew who found Him differently than I did?

I couldn’t figure out which door was the right one. So I kept standing in the hallway. Experiencing God without fully committing to Him.

It took me a long time to see that the question itself had become the distraction. Not because it wasn’t worth asking. Because God doesn’t need us to have everything figured out before He can have our hearts.

He wasn’t asking for my certainty. He was asking for my trust.

What Finally Brought Me Back

In the end, it wasn’t about me. It was about my boys.

After a loss in our family, they looked up at me and asked where he went. Whether they would see him again. What happens when someone you love dies.

I didn’t have an answer for them. Not because I didn’t have faith. I did. I had just never shared it with them. God had never been part of our everyday conversation, and now I was trying to have the most important conversation of their young lives with no foundation to stand on.

If I wanted my kids to know God is there, even in the hardest moments, I had to stop keeping my faith to myself. So I put it on my goal list that year: Find a good church for my kids.

It sounded simple. I still put it off for months. Then my neighbor invited me to go with her one Sunday, and I thought, Okay, God. I hear You.

I tried a church that felt familiar first. The hymns and rhythms I grew up with. The kids loved it. But I wasn’t that little girl anymore. My faith had grown in hard seasons and unexpected places, and it needed something that would challenge me to go deeper. So I went back to my neighbor’s church. Now Sunday mornings are my favorite part of the week.

What I Was Missing

I’d had a relationship with God for years. What I didn’t have was people walking alongside me in it. As I wrote in my book, Living Well, Pure and Simple:

“What we’re missing is something nothing else can replace: the encouragement and support of real people growing in faith together.”

I didn’t need a perfect church. I needed a place that would meet me exactly where I was. No judgment. No agenda. Just people trying to figure out how to live faithfully in a loud world.

If you haven’t found that place yet, keep looking. It might not be the church you grew up in. It might feel a little outside your comfort zone. Mine did. It was exactly what I needed.

One Simple Step

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to stop letting the questions keep you away.

This week, ask a friend where she goes to church, or say yes the next time someone invites you. Go once. Notice how it feels to be there.