I recently posted about how we are starting our search for community from scratch. I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and yes, it may sometimes seem like we are starting from zero.

But we’re not. Not really. We’ve got a wonderful community around us, and I really feel like I should be acknowledging that.

Yes, there were friends, and entire groups of friends that have pretty much flat-out rejected who we are now. But, more importantly, there are friends who have not.

Snowy and Ash are our closest friends. We got to know each other on the worship team at church. They come for dinner at our house every Thursday night without fail. We have talked about our decision, and we are both open about it. They still come. They still actively seek our company and support us and love us and treat us no differently.

Our family has been very supportive. For the most part, when they heard our announcement they didn’t even really react. There has been no change at all in our relationships. My brother and sister in law have been showing up at our door for coffee regularly, and we truly appreciate their presence. We are the ones who have been dropping the ball on that relationship, in spite of their active attempts.

The bible study group that we’ve been a part of for years has enthusiastically expressed their desire for us to stay. We have a potluck every second Saturday and spend the evening talking. Much of our time was spent in simple relationship-building and chatting, so the group has graciously decided to make every second meeting just relationship and chat with us attending, and they will meet every other time for bible study. They’re a great bunch of people so we’re excited to be able to maintain this group.

We’ve had a number of people call and express desire to get together and spend time with us (Hi, Chris! Hi Mel!) and Jenn and the kids have gone out to see Dorothy and the kids a couple of times already. Dorothy and Jenn spend time on the phone a couple of times a month still.

In our neighbourhood we are always surrounded by people who attend a previous church, and we haven’t been treated anything but warmly and as happily as ever. Our kids have a couple of adopted grandmas from that congregation that still keep them well-supplied with goodies.

As dark as it seems sometimes, we need to stand up and recognize the folks in our lives that are shining lights. Thank you. Thank you to those that I am positive that I missed in this. If I didn’t name you specifically, don’t be hurt, I’m just trying to get this finished before dinner and as you know, my brain is iffy at the best of times…

Life is good.

Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold.

One of the biggest reasons that it took so long to move away from our faith was the loss of community.

If you belong to a church, it’s instant community. Just by entering the building you gain a group of kids for yours to play with, and (likely) a group of peers to associate with at events that someone else plans. Boom, instant social life. Chances are you find another couple or two that you click with and boom, instant friends. You already automatically have the shared experience of a few hours on Sunday mornings to fall back on for conversation if needed.

When we left the church though, we discovered an uncomfortable fact: we’ve never had to make new friends on our own. From the time we were married we’ve belonged to various churches wherever we’ve lived. There’s a base of support, of familiarity, and of help if needed. Suddenly we were without that, and it’s scary.

Our existing social group, including a sports night at a local gym, is mostly with a circle of Christian families, and it has been made reasonably clear that the group no longer wishes to have us as members. It’s been polite, but meetings (we’re staying until the end of the school year) are rather tense.

We aren’t fans of sports, so community clubs are out. We have 5 kids from 14 down to 4, so many of the usual events like Scouts are difficult to manage. Each child would be in a different group on a different night, which defeats our family-centered philosophy to life.

Our city isn’t that large, so the secular homeschooling community is rather small. There is a “secular” homeschooling organization to match the Christian association, but (oddly enough) the members are almost all Christian. It’s still uncomfortable to come out and say that we’re not believers.

We recently, on the advice of Dale McGowan from Parenting Beyond Belief, started attending a Unitarian Universalist church in town. The UU is creedless, and there are atheists, Muslims, Hindus, humanists, Buddhists and all sorts of other -ists that attend. It’s a church, but without any dogma. They do have the potlucks and events that we love, though. There are issues with the place, but there are issues with any place real people meet together, so we’re staying there for a while. I’ll post more about our experience with the UU later.

I’m not really asking for advice, and I’m not really whining. I feel like there are some things that we’ve been going through that I haven’t read about anywhere else and I want to share them. Has anyone else felt this type of loss?

*As a side note: if you want to comment, please don’t trash our old group or Christians in general for their response to our choice. We’re not here to bash where we’ve come from, we’re here to move forward into a new life.

Our post about leaving the church was recently discovered by a number of websites, and we’ve gone from 50 hits a day to 6000 hits over the last two days. My site stats are now useless because the scale is shot:

We got shoutouts from the following sites, plus a bunch of links from people’s facebook pages. (People we don’t know who shared our letter).

The Meming of Life – Dale McGowan is the author of Parenting Beyond Belief, which was a fantastic help after we made the decision. It’s a must-read for anyone who is trying to raise kids outside of religion. He’s a nice guy, too.

Reddit’s Atheism category – where there was a lengthy discussion on the matter.

Why Won’t God Heal Amputees? – Which is a rather fervent atheist site.

And my favorite headline, from Reason Weekly: Ex-Christian family announces leaving church and faith; disgustingly touching show of solidarity from atheists ensues

Thank you to everyone for your kind words and support.

Edit to add Ex-Christian.net.

Many of you have been hearing things about us from various sources, and some of you have contacted us to express concern or to ask about what you’ve heard.

To put it plainly and clearly, we have left the Christian church. We consider ourselves, in varying degrees at various times, agnostic, atheist, humanist, or like the great catch-all answer in a multiple choice survey, “Not Sure”.

This is not a sudden thing. It is not caused by a trauma or single event. We feel that this is the natural continuation of our spiritual journey of many years.

Through much of our journey as Christians, we often felt that we didn’t quite fit in with our peers. There have always been some major issues of Christian doctrine and practice with which we didn’t agree. As we matured in our faith and our lives, we began to study these areas and also discovered more of them. As we progressed in our study, we moved further and further from mainstream Christianity as our doubts and concerns took us away from the “accepted position” in more and more ways. Evangelism. Worship. The infallibility of scripture. Creationism. Homosexuality. Abortion. The church’s role in society. The existence of evil. Too many more to name.

I was hesitant to list any examples because that implies that if we only had “correct” answers to certain questions we would return to our life of faith, and that would be putting far too simplistic a face on it. It also implies that we are now 180 degrees opposed the the normal Christian position on those topics, which is also entirely incorrect. Our thoughts on most of those topics usually start with a phrase like “Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but…”, and that’s not very acceptable on some of the essential tenets of the faith.

Our decision to leave the church and our faith was one that took years to reach, had hundreds of hours of research and discussion behind it, and was the single most difficult decision that we have ever made. It’s not a step we took lightly or quickly. Actually, I would call it a realization rather than a decision. Over time, we realized that we didn’t believe most of what we said we did by our use of the name Christian, and we didn’t support most of what we said we did through our association with the Christian church.

The intermediate step we took was to begin home churching, thinking perhaps that would help. We began to slowly strip away the parts of expressing our faith that we objected to, or that we felt we couldn’t do in good conscience. After a while we realized that there was nothing left to strip away; we had left it all behind. This was an incredibly hard thing to do. We both reached the conclusion independently at approximately the same time, but were reluctant to tell the other out of fear. When the truth came out and we were each looking at the other with a relieved “You too?” expression, we both knew that this was right for us.

There are some things that we want to clarify for those of you who have expressed concern or have worried about us:

First, nothing has changed except what we call ourselves. There are very few things that have changed about us in the past few years. We have just put names to what we have been feeling and thinking all along. We’re still the exact same people, with the exact same ideas. The exact same things make us laugh and cry. We enjoy doing the exact same things. We still have our same skills and weaknesses. We still want to talk about the same things. We’d still love to spend time with you.

Which leads to the second thing we want you to know: We’re not angry, bitter or disillusioned ex-Christians. We’ve realized that we don’t believe much of what we professed in the past, but we don’t demand or expect that everyone should do the same. This is our decision, not yours. We still respect you and your beliefs, we still acknowledge your decisions as yours to make, and we will fight to let you make them as you see fit.

Thirdly, I’d like you to know about our sorrows. We have been living in fear of the big reveal. We’ve compared it to “coming out of the closet”. Much of our close community is conservative Christian and when we put out some early hints to people, the reaction was painful and severe. We are well aware that our choice will be too much for many of you to accept, and we may never hear from you or see you again. This is our greatest source of pain and sorrow. Taking the steps to deliberately alienate ourselves from the only friends and community that we and our children have known has been the most difficult thing we have ever done, but the fact that we chose this road despite the consequences should indicate how seriously we take our choice. No person would willingly put themselves through this much pain, stress and heartache unless they were truly sure of their path.

We have been avoiding this announcement for months. We knew it was coming, but kept trying to put it off. We know that having this in writing means we have crossed a line that will separate us from a large percentage of people that we consider friends. But we also know that we are happy. We know that we can teach our children what we believe without guilt or a feeling of duplicity. We can be true to our own thoughts and feelings. We know that we have made a decision that is right for us.

My hope is that this message will have no impact on our relationship with any of you. A naive hope, perhaps, but an honest one.

Thank you to those of you who approached us with your concern and questions, we appreciate your thoughtfulness and worry. I apologize to those that approached me that I haven’t responded to (you know who you are and you are loved for it) because we hadn’t sat down to really put any of this together in a single place. I’m sorry to raise this in such an impersonal way, but a broad announcement seemed to be the best way to get it done, like pulling off a band-aid quickly. If you’d like to talk further, we’re here.

If you are interested, we will still be posting regular family updates, photos and information at http://wonderfulpages.com

Thank you for reading.
Kirby and Jennifer and the Crew.

Edit: Welcome to folks from The Meming of Life (and thanks to Dale McGowan for his kind words). We’re still struggling with how to follow this letter up, but we have a series of posts planned on how “it” actually happened and what various reactions have been, and the struggles that we’ve had and are still having because of this letter. Feel free to check back to the main page for more later, or subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss anything.

Also see a followup from my wife here.