There’s a particular quiet that settles over Appalachia in January, over the land like a quilt — soft, slow, and heavy enough to make you listen. The air cools, the fog lingers, and the whole world seems to take one long breath after the rush of the holidays.
It’s in this stillness that many of us begin to reckon with faith — not the kind we were handed in childhood, but the kind we’ve grown into. And more and more, people are admitting something that once felt unthinkable: They’re finding God outside the church.
Not because they’ve lost belief. Because they’ve lost the version of faith that demanded they shrink themselves to fit inside it.
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Leaving Church Wasn’t Losing Faith — It Was Recovering My Own Voice
I was raised in the kind of church culture where showing up was simply what you did.
Sunday mornings. Sunday nights. Wednesday Bible study. Revival week that stretched on like a second job. Scripture recited as easily as the times tables.
But the deeper faith of my childhood didn’t come from the sanctuary. It happened in the small, everyday holiness of Appalachian life — the kind you don’t notice until you’re grown enough to realize not everyone was raised that way.
The woman who first shaped my understanding of God wasn’t a pastor or a Sunday school teacher — it was my Great Gran, a mountain woman who lived her faith without fanfare or fuss. Her wisdom was stitched into the rhythm of work: breaking beans into the fold of her apron, hanging laundry in the wind, tending rows of tomatoes like they were scripture themselves.
Her prayers weren’t performed; they were breathed — soft as a sigh, steady as her hands. She never tried to impress anyone with her religion. She simply lived it. She taught me, without ever needing the words, that a person’s life was their sermon.
Gran found God in her kitchen, in her garden, and in the cradle of the hills she walked every day of her life. She read her Bible until the pages curled like fallen leaves, prayed over our family with a conviction that didn’t ask for witnesses, and showed us — again and again — that holiness lives in the hands, not the mouth.
Her house was a sanctuary long before I ever knew what that word meant.
As I grew older, I began to see the difference between the faith I was taught and the faith I felt. I saw how Scripture could be used as a weapon. How judgment could hide behind a polite church smile. How politics sometimes eclipsed compassion. How the loudest Christians often seemed the least like Christ.
And slowly, like so many others, I felt myself slipping toward the door — heart still believing, but spirit no longer at peace.
Walking away wasn’t the death of my faith. It was the beginning of my freedom.
Finding God in the Land That Raised Me
When I stepped outside church culture, I didn’t step into emptiness. I stepped into the hills that raised me.
Into the hush of winter mornings when the fog sits low in the valley. Into the hum of cicadas in the July heat. Into the way a front porch can hold a whole community when grief knocks at the door.
I realized that the God I’d been searching for wasn’t hiding under a Steeple — He was in the places that shaped me long before I ever walked through a church door.
I met God in the fog clinging to the ridge at dawn,
in the hush before the first birdsong,
in the long conversations held on porches where truth felt safe.
I felt something sacred in the rhythm of daily life here —
the way neighbors show up with food before being asked,
the way grief is tended communally,
the way the mountains listen more gently than people do.
This wasn’t a new kind of faith.
It was the oldest kind I’d ever known.
This land — these hills — have always been holy ground. I just didn’t know I was allowed to call it that.
Winter Makes Us Tell the Truth
January has a way of stripping things down to what they really are. When the noise of the holidays fades and the pressure to perform finally quiets, we’re left with the questions we’ve been avoiding — the ones that rise up in the stillness like truth we can’t outrun. The weeks after Christmas have a way of magnifying the places where we no longer fit.
For those of us who’ve stepped away from organized religion, that quiet can stir old guilt, old wounds, old wonderings:
Why does church feel like a place I can’t breathe?
Why do I find more peace on a trail than in a pew?
Why does the God I meet in nature feel kinder than the one preached at me?
These questions aren’t signs of spiritual failure; they’re signs of spiritual maturity. Faith isn’t meant to calcify — it’s meant to grow. And sometimes growth looks like outgrowing the environment that once held you.
Because the older I get, the more I realize that the kind of faith I crave isn’t found in performance — it’s found in presence. Not in the pressure to appear holy, but in the everyday chances to be kind. Not in reciting the right verses, but in quietly living them. Not in belonging to a church, but in belonging to each other.
That’s a truth my Great Gran lived long before I knew how to name it.
Returning to a Simpler, Truer Way
When I think about the early followers of Jesus — the fishermen, the women, the tax collectors, the ones society overlooked — I’m reminded of the people I grew up with: coal miners, factory workers, worn-out mothers, neighbors who gave what little they had because that’s what love required.
Ordinary people who lived generosity without ceremony.
Who practiced forgiveness because they had survived too much not to.
Who believed God was close, not distant — woven into the everyday.
That kind of faith feels familiar.
It feels real.
For many, stepping away from church isn’t abandonment.
It’s reclamation — of heritage, of intuition, of a relationship with the Divine that never required an intermediary.
To the Ones Who Feel Unmoored
If this year has left you questioning, wandering, or weary —
If the faith you inherited no longer fits the shape of your spirit —
If you find more comfort in a walk through the hills than in a Sunday sermon —
I want you to know this:
God is not confined to a steeple.
You can find Him on your front porch.
You can find Him in the kindness of strangers.
You can find Him in the rustle of the woods or the warmth of a kitchen.
You can find Him in the healing work you’re doing within your own heart.
Faith outside the church isn’t lack.
It’s permission.
It’s expansion.
It’s reclamation.
And for many of us — especially those shaped by grief, by generational wounds, by the quiet strength of mountain women — it is the truest homecoming we have ever known.
