For some people this arrives suddenly. For others it takes years. Either way it ends in the same place, where somebody asks what you believe and the only honest answer available is, I don’t know what I believe anymore.
If you don’t know what you believe anymore, the first thing worth saying is that this is not a disqualification from church. It is a fairly ordinary thing to happen to someone who has been paying attention for a while.
You may have had all of it once. The answers, the verses, the vocabulary, the confidence that came with them. Losing that can feel like losing the thing itself, and it is worth being precise about whether it actually is.
Not knowing what you believe is a different condition from having decided against it. Most people who say the first are assumed to mean the second, including by themselves.
I Don’t Know What I Believe Anymore Is Not the Same as I No Longer Believe
It helps to separate faith from the sentences used to describe it. The line between them is blurry and arguing about exactly where it falls is a whole discipline. But the sentences are the part that gets revised, and they are usually what a person means when they say they have lost something.
What you believed when you were younger was assembled out of what you had read by then, who you trusted, and what you needed to be true at the time. Some of it was doing serious work. Some of it was inherited whole and never examined, which is not a criticism, because that is how most people acquire most of what they think.
Revising some of that is what happens when a person keeps thinking for long enough. People inside this tradition have changed their minds substantially and been regarded as faithful anyway. That is not proof of anything in particular. It does suggest the categories were never as tight as they were presented to you.
What often collapses is not faith but one particular account of it. That distinction is worth holding onto, because the account can go while something underneath it stays, and in the middle of the collapse the two are almost impossible to tell apart.
Certainty Is Not the Price of Admission
A great deal of church life quietly assumes that everyone present is sure.
The songs are written in the first person plural and the indicative mood. The prayers assert things. A creed, where one is used, is a run of declarative sentences you are apparently saying about yourself, out loud, in a group.
Saying I don’t know what I believe anymore out loud, in a building organized around belief, feels like an admission of failure. It is worth knowing that the tradition itself is less rigid about this than a Sunday morning usually sounds. This tradition understands a statement of faith as a testimony rather than a test. The words describe what the church has confessed together over a long time. They are not a personal loyalty oath being collected from each individual in the pew.
What that means in practice is that you can say the parts you can say, and stay quiet through the parts you cannot, and you are not being dishonest.
I can tell you what I know from where I stand, which is that people say this to me in my office. They say it far more often than the singing on a Sunday would suggest. I cannot tell you what anyone in the pews is privately thinking, and neither can anyone else. I can tell you the conversation happens.
A Congregation Can Hold More Than One Position at Once
A healthy church is not a group of people who agree. It is a group of people who can occupy the same building without agreeing.
The range at Windermere Union Church on any given Sunday is genuinely wide. There are people with a settled and fairly traditional faith. There are people who would describe themselves as barely religious and who come anyway. There are people in the middle of losing something, and people who lost it years ago and found something else on the other side.
That range is not a weakness being managed. It is what makes it possible to arrive saying I don’t know what I believe anymore without becoming the exception everyone is quietly accommodating.
It also means you are unlikely to shock anyone here, which is a lower bar than it sounds and still worth clearing.
There is a particular loneliness in assuming you are the only person present who does not have this settled. What I can say is that the assumption is one of the most common things people bring me, which means at minimum that several people are each certain they are the only one. A congregation can end up sounding more unanimous than it is simply because there is no way for anyone in it to check.
Love Comes First, Not Your Statement of Faith
The order here matters more than almost anything else in this.
If a church loves you only once it has established what you believe, then I don’t know what I believe anymore is a disqualifying sentence, the love is conditional, and everyone can feel it, including the people who currently qualify. Conditional love is unstable even for the people it is currently working for.
Love Above All means the first posture is not interrogation. There is no point in this process at which you are asked to account for yourself as the price of being included.
You do not have to bring certainty to be taken seriously here.
So bring the actual situation rather than a tidier version of it. I don’t know what I believe anymore gives a community something it can actually work with. A confident answer you have stopped meaning does not.
And if the not knowing turns out to be permanent, that is a real outcome rather than a failure to arrive at the correct one. Plenty of people stay unsure for good and live serious and generous lives inside a congregation anyway, and nothing about that arrangement needs to be justified to anyone.
The next post is for anyone whose main feeling about church right now is not uncertainty at all. It is anger.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and what Christianity can become when love matters more than certainty.
If you are looking for a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and you do not have to pretend to have everything figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All