He told me he had stopped going.
Not because he had lost his faith. Not because anything had happened with the pastor or the doctrine or the worship style. He had stopped going because every Sunday, without fail, someone would find him in the foyer before the service or over coffee afterwards and ask the question.
So how is work going?
And he would feel the familiar tightening in his chest. The quick calculation of how much to say and how much to hide. The performance of a normal answer to a question that, for him, was not a normal question at all. Because work was not going. Work had not been going for a long time. Work was the thing he thought about at three in the morning when his mind would not stop. Work was the word that sat at the centre of a web of shame and anxiety and exhaustion that he had been carrying, quietly and alone, for longer than he wanted to admit.
And church had become the place where he had to perform the answer most often.
So he stopped going.
I think this touches something that does not get named often enough.
The people asking the question were not being unkind. They were doing what people do in foyers. Making conversation, showing interest, filling the space between the end of the sermon and the drive home. The question was not malicious. It was not even thoughtless, really. It was just the default. The social script that gets run on Sunday mornings because nobody has written a better one.
But for the person carrying something heavy — the one whose anxiety has a particular shape, whose mental health means that certain questions land like weights rather than pleasantries — the default script can make church feel like the most exhausting room in the week rather than the most restoring one.
This is not a small thing. The church is supposed to be the place where the weary find rest. Where the burdened are invited to lay down what they are carrying. Where the person who is not doing well does not have to pretend otherwise. These are not peripheral claims. They are close to the centre of what the gospel says it is offering.
When the foyer becomes a place where you have to perform wellness, something has gone wrong. Not catastrophically. Not maliciously. But genuinely wrong.
If you are the person who has stopped going, or who is thinking about stopping, let me say a few things.
First, your instinct to protect yourself is not a failure of faith. It is a reasonable response to a real cost. You are allowed to find church hard for reasons that have nothing to do with God.
Second, the question is not whether you can go back to performing wellness on Sunday mornings. The question is whether there is a version of church community, perhaps smaller, quieter, less foyer-heavy, that might be survivable. A midweek home group. A one to one with someone you trust. A service you can slip into and out of without the coffee hour. These are not lesser forms of church. They are the church finding a shape that fits the person who needs it.
Third, the God you are trying to reach on Sunday mornings is not waiting for you to have a better answer to the work question before he draws near. He is not checking your employment status. He is not measuring your productivity. He knows what you are carrying. He knew before you walked through the door. And he is, in the language of the psalms, close to the brokenhearted.
Not close to the put-together. Not close to the ones with the good answer in the foyer.
Close to the brokenhearted.
That includes you. On the hard Sundays and the ones you spent at home. On the mornings when you made it to the back row and the ones when you could not make it out of bed.
You do not have to have an answer for the work question. You only have to take the next small step.
The road is long. You are not walking it alone.
