What to Do When You're Not Sure You Believe Anymore

An Honest Guide for People Who've Quietly Drifted

My name is Clay Monkus. I'm a pastor in the Charlotte area, and I want to start with something that probably sounds strange coming from someone in my position.

I walked away from faith.

Not recently. Back in 2007. And the reason I'm telling you that upfront is because if you found this post through Google, you're probably not looking for another Christian trying to talk you back into something. You're looking for someone who actually understands where you are.

So let me tell you where I was.

I had been a Christian for 25 years. I had been in full-time ministry for 14 years. I was the lead pastor of a church I had helped start. From the outside, everything looked fine. I was the guy on Sunday morning telling everyone else how to follow Jesus.

And I wasn’t even sure I believed what I was teaching.

I don't mean I had a few minor questions I was working through. I mean I would stand up on a Sunday and preach something and drive home thinking: do I actually believe that? Is any of this real? And the honest answer was, I don't know.

So in 2007, I made the hardest decision I've ever made. I resigned my church. I walked away from ministry. And I told my wife I needed to take everything apart and figure out what I actually believed from scratch.

She did not love that. There were nights she sat in the bathtub and cried, wondering if I was even saved anymore. I don't tell you that to be dramatic. I tell you that because I want you to know this wasn't an intellectual exercise. This was our life coming apart.

But I had to do it. Because I couldn't keep standing in front of people and talking about something I wasn't sure was true.

For two years, I questioned everything.

And here's what I found on the other side of that. I'm going to try to share it as honestly as I can, because I think some of what I learned might actually be useful to you, wherever you are right now.

Nobody talks about how quietly it happens

There's a version of losing your faith that looks dramatic. A big crisis, a specific moment, a decision you can point to. But for most people it's nothing like that. It's more like a slow leak. You miss a Sunday, then a few more. You stop praying because it starts to feel like talking to the ceiling. You're around church people and something just feels performative. And eventually you stop showing up. Not with a big announcement, not even with a firm decision. You just stop.

And one day you look up and realize you've drifted further than you meant to.

If that's where you are, or somewhere near it, I want to be honest with you. Because I think you've probably heard enough of the other thing. The thing where someone tries really hard to talk you back in. The thing where someone explains why you're wrong for doubting. The thing that, honestly, is part of why you stopped going in the first place.

I want to try something different. I want to just be honest.

You're in better company than you think

Here's something I find genuinely fascinating about the first Easter.

The people who were there, the disciples, the women, the ones who had walked with Jesus for three years, their first response to the resurrection was not faith. It was confusion. The women found the empty tomb and the Gospel of Luke says they were puzzled. The disciples heard their report and called it nonsense. Peter ran to the tomb, looked in, and went home... wondering.

Not proclaiming. Wondering.

Skepticism wasn't invented by modern culture. It was the first response to Easter, by the people who were standing right there. People who knew Jesus personally, who had watched him die, who had every reason in the world to want it to be true, and still weren't sure what to make of it.

So if you've got real questions, honest doubts, a faith that's come apart at the seams, you're not uniquely broken. You're not evidence that Christianity is false. You're in the company of the first people who encountered all of this.

That's not a small thing.

There's a difference between inherited faith and examined faith

For most of my 25 years as a Christian, I had what I'd call an inherited faith. Faith I had received from the people around me. Faith that made sense in the environment I was in. Faith I had never really pulled apart to see if it would hold.

The problem with inherited faith is that it tends not to survive contact with real life. When things get hard, when the job falls apart, when the marriage struggles, when you're lying awake wondering if any of this is actually real, inherited faith doesn't have the roots to hold on. You need something you've actually examined. Something you chose.

And here's what I want to say to the person who drifted: most people who walk away from faith never actually examine it. They just stop. They let inherited faith fall apart and assume that means faith itself has nothing to offer. Which is a little like eating food that made you sick once and concluding that eating is a bad idea.

The questions are worth asking. The evidence is worth looking at. Not to prove something, not to win an argument, just because you deserve to actually know what you believe and why.

Don't settle for inherited skepticism any more than you'd settle for inherited faith. Actually go looking.

The one question that actually matters

Here's what I learned after two years of taking everything apart.

All the questions I was asking, is the Bible reliable? How do you reconcile God with suffering? How does faith coexist with science? They were real questions. But they were also orbiting something. There was a question underneath all of them that I had been avoiding the whole time.

Did Jesus actually, physically, historically rise from the dead?

Because if he did, everything else has a foundation. And if he didn't, none of the rest of it matters anyway. The Apostle Paul said it plainly: “If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, our faith is useless.” Empty. Not weakened. Useless. Paul wasn't trying to make faith feel safe. He was making an honest argument. The resurrection either holds everything up or it holds up nothing. There's no middle ground.

I had to go look. And I mean actually look, not to confirm what I already thought, but to honestly examine the evidence. The eyewitnesses. The timeline. The changed lives of people who had every reason to recant what they claimed they saw, and didn't. Paul, writing just 20 years after the resurrection, says Jesus appeared to more than 500 people at once and most of them are still alive. That's not the language of mythology. That's a man saying go check. Ask them. I'll wait.

I pushed on it hard. I couldn't find the holes I was looking for.

So what do you actually do with this?

If you've been quietly drifting, here are three honest things I'd say.

Don't run from the question. Run toward it.

The worst thing you can do is keep avoiding the center of it. That avoidance is what makes the drift permanent. If you're willing to actually look, to actually investigate, the evidence can handle the scrutiny. I promise you that.

Give yourself permission to be unsettled.

You don't have to have this resolved before you show up somewhere. You don't have to clean yourself up or get your theology sorted out first. The disciples weren't sure what they were looking at on Easter morning. Jesus showed up anyway. He walked into the room where they had locked the doors out of fear and confusion, and the first thing he said was: peace be with you.

That's still what he says. To the doubter. To the drifter. To the person reading this who isn't sure what they believe but is still, somehow, a little curious.

Peace be with you.

Find people who can handle your honest questions.

Not every church can. Some churches want you to perform certainty you don't have. That's probably part of what made you leave in the first place. But find a room where your story is safe, where questions are welcome, where nobody's pretending to have it all together.

That's what we've built at Next Level Church in the Charlotte area. We don't always get it right. But we're trying.

One last thing

I came back. After two years of taking everything apart, I came back. And what I found wasn't that all my questions got answered. A lot of them didn't. There are still things I hold loosely, things I'm still working through.

But the more I pushed on the resurrection, the evidence, the eyewitnesses, the people who died rather than recant what they claimed they saw, the more solid it became. Not less solid. More.

And somewhere in the middle of that investigation, the resurrection stopped being an idea and became a reality. Not a doctrine to defend. A person.

That changed everything. Not just what I believed. How I actually live.

If something in you is still unsettled, good. Don't run from it. That unsettled feeling might be the most honest thing about you right now.

And honest is a really good place to start.

If you're in the Charlotte area and want to keep asking honest questions in a room where that's actually welcome, we'd love to meet you at Next Level Church.→ nextlevelchurch.com