Most people who stop going to church are not running from God. In the stories pastor Rasool Berry heard from a panel of people who had walked away, the wound usually came from how they were treated: judged for a failure, shamed for a question, handed rules instead of help. That is a quieter and more hopeful story than the one we usually tell. People hurt that way can often hear the gospel again, from a church that has become safe to be honest in.
Safe does not mean a church without convictions. It means a church where doubt, struggle and failure can be brought into the open without the person being pushed to the edges. That kind of church is harder to build than a new program. It is also closer to the way Jesus treated people.
What did the people who left actually say?
Berry sat with a group of former churchgoers who had agreed to explain, on the record, why they no longer went. Many of them carried church hurt. He expected hostility. He found something else. He describes them this way: “they were not angry and vengeful, but they were very thoughtful” about what they had been through.
Berry draws a sharp contrast between that room and the wider secular culture he meets as a pastor in New York City, where a definite faith claim can be treated as strange or even threatening. The panel was different. They did not object to a Christ-centered view of the world. In Berry’s words, “their beef was with the trappings of just people being mistreating others or being legalistic, or being judgmental or the systems, or even just being in a place where they just had questions that just couldn’t be answered.”
Read that list slowly. Mistreatment. Legalism. Judgment. Questions left hanging. Not one of them is a complaint about Jesus. Each is a complaint about the people who claimed to represent him. Berry says the leaving was less a verdict on God than “a decision to do something else with their time and their life in light of some things that happened and they brushed up against.”
He noticed one more thing. When the panelists heard a different picture of church described, they liked it. The trouble was that it looked nothing like the version they believed they had to sign up for. Some of them had left a church they never needed to accept as the only option.
Why do the usual explanations miss?
When someone leaves, the familiar explanations come fast. They were never really committed. They wanted to sin. They got worldly in college. Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, names this reflex honestly. Some leaders assume people simply do not want to be there because of sin, and she grants that sometimes that is the case. But it was not what she and Berry saw on the panel.
The quick explanation does damage because it protects the church from having to listen. If every departure is the leaver’s fault, nothing in the congregation ever needs to change. It also adds a second wound to the first. A person who was shamed for asking a question is now blamed for leaving the place that shamed them.
Berry points out that many of the panelists learned their lesson about church without anyone ever stating it. Nobody stood up with a chapter and verse that said doubters are not welcome. They absorbed it from how things went. One message was that questions or doubts would put you on the outside. Another was that the world’s ideas were dangerous to touch. He recalls a man whose interest in sociology and social work was treated as studying the devil’s material, simply because he was in college. That reaction, Berry says, is what turned him away.
No sermon taught that man to leave. The posture of the people around him did. That is the hard truth under this whole subject: a church can preach sound doctrine and still teach something false with its tone.
What did Jesus say about people who make faith hard to reach?
Berry roots the question in the Gospels. “It fascinates me that Jesus was harder on religious people than he was with the sinners, quote unquote,” he says. He has in mind the sharp warnings Jesus gave to religious leaders who put obstacles in front of others.
The texts bear that out. In Matthew 23, Jesus speaks to the scribes and Pharisees, the respected teachers of his day: “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in” (Matthew 23:13). “Suffer” here is older English for “allow.” The charge is not only that these leaders were wrong. It is that they stood in the doorway and kept others from coming through.
In Matthew 18 Jesus uses some of his harshest language for anyone who causes a vulnerable believer to stumble: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). “Offend” in the KJV means to cause someone to stumble or fall away. The surrounding passage begins with a child and widens to humble disciples in general, and it moves straight into the parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety and nine to find the one sheep that went astray (Matthew 18:12-14). Berry draws on that same image of the shepherd as the posture leaders should model.
The weight of these passages falls on the one who causes the stumbling. That matters for how we read the stories of people who left. Scripture does not treat the wounded sheep as the problem to be explained away. It treats the shepherd who scattered them as accountable.
Doesn’t “safe” just mean a church with no standards?
This is the fair objection, and Berry raises it himself. “I am not one that’s here to say loving people means accepting everything that they do or not having any standards or any of those things,” he says. He appeals to the description of Jesus in John 1:14 as “full of grace and truth,” and to the woman brought to Jesus after being caught in adultery.
Jesus tells her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). Both halves are there in one sentence. He refuses to condemn her, and he calls her to a different life. (This account, John 7:53-8:11, is missing from many of the earliest manuscripts of John, and Christians discuss whether it was originally part of the Gospel. Its picture of Jesus holding mercy and holiness together is not resting on this passage alone, as the rest of the Gospels show.)
A safe church, then, is not one that stops telling the truth. It is one where truth does not arrive with contempt. Correction can happen. But it happens inside belonging, not as the price of it. The difference is felt long before it is explained. A person can tell whether their questions are being welcomed or merely tolerated until they can be shut down.
What changes when the pastor stops pretending?
Berry’s first practical step is uncomfortable for leaders. He puts the test to every congregation: “Are we a safe space for people to express their doubts, their questions, their reservations?” Or, he asks, are we the kind of place where admitting those things would cause someone “to feel alienated and isolated and alone?”
His answer starts at the pulpit. If the person up front never admits a struggle, everyone else learns that struggle should be hidden. Mental health is a clear case. Berry notes that the church has sometimes made it harder for people to get the help they needed, whether counseling or medication. So he makes a point of mentioning his own care. “I make it a point to share about the fact that I experienced therapy,” he says, and he will mention that he had a session that very week. He does it on purpose, because he knows many people assume therapy is something a Christian should be ashamed of.
That assumption is wrong. Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. A pastor saying so out loud, from his own life, does more than a policy statement could.
Lisa Fields adds why this matters. When leaders build a pedestal and stand on it, any failure or doubt becomes harder for people to process, their own included. She recalls going to her New Testament professor while wrestling with the problem of evil, especially the suffering of children. He did not reach for a large philosophical answer. “He just said, me too.” For her, that was half the battle. If someone with a doctorate in the New Testament still wrestled, she could wrestle too without thinking her faith was finished.
“Me too” did not answer the problem of evil. It did something that has to happen first. It told a struggling person she was still inside the family.
What does support look like when someone has failed?
Berry tells two stories from his church’s end-of-year testimony service, a practice he credits to the older saints and thinks many churches simply forgot.
In the first, a woman described a season before the pandemic when her faith was failing. When the church reopened, she came back but could not bring herself to lift her hands or feel the words being sung. As Berry tells it, she said, “I was leaning on the other people’s faith.” Nobody required her to perform a confidence she did not have. The congregation’s faith carried her for a while. When she said it publicly, others in the room recognized themselves.
In the second, a young woman became pregnant after her baptism. She was carrying shame and was considering abortion. She met with the lead pastor, who encouraged her and promised the church would come alongside her. She had no family in New York, and Berry says the only way she could have cared for the baby was with help. So members, his wife among them, took turns babysitting and covering what she needed so she could work and get on her feet. Berry says she has been on fire for God ever since, and that the love she experienced as a mother helped her see God’s love.
That story reflects a conviction Jude 3 Project holds plainly: God forms both the woman and the child, and the church is called to meet a woman in crisis with compassion rather than condemnation, and with real, practical support. Paul’s instruction fits it well: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).
Berry’s conclusion from both stories: “when we lead with compassion and empathy, we see the floodgates open up to a degree that you could never imagine than if we lead with like judgment and criticism.” Lisa Fields puts the goal in plain words. She wants a church where people say, “I come to the church for refuge.” Compassion did not erase consequences for that young mother. It made sure she did not face them alone.
How should a church hear criticism?
When people describe what the church did to them, leaders often hear an attack. Lisa Fields urges them not to take it personally: “they’re talking about their experience. Don’t internalize that.” A defensive leader turns someone’s pain into an argument about the institution, and the person learns their story does not count.
Berry suggests a simpler first sentence: “I’m sorry you experienced that.” Not “the pastor didn’t mean it.” Not “you probably misunderstood.” Only after listening, he says, can you gently ask what the person thinks that experience means about God or about people.
He also separates two things that hurt people often hear fused together. Christians do not have to defend every church in order to defend Christ. As Berry says, “don’t think that you need to defend the people at a church in order to defend the gospel, because those are two different things.” Jude 3 Project says the same about church hurt: the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ.
Unanswered questions belong here too. Lisa Fields tells of a young man in Richmond who brought his pastor questions after being approached by Hebrew Israelites. The pastor said he would get back to him and never did. The young man concluded he had to go where people had answers, and he is now in Hebrew Israelism. Berry’s counsel is plain: if you do not know, say so, then do the work and actually return. A question left hanging does not disappear. Someone else will answer it.
If you are the one who left
Much of this is addressed to leaders, but the reader may be on the other side of the story. If you stepped away because of how you were treated, your experience is real. It does not need to be explained away, and it is not proof that you never had faith.
Not all church hurt is the same. Being judged for a question is painful. Being manipulated, controlled or abused by a leader is something more serious. If that is your story, your safety comes first. You are not obligated to return to that place or to reconcile with the person who harmed you, and abuse may need to be reported to people outside the church. A trusted counselor can help you sort through it.
For many, the honest next step is smaller than going back to a building. It may be one conversation with a believer who will listen before defending. It may be reading the Gospels again to see how Jesus treated people who had been pushed to the margins of religious life. What the panel discovered is worth knowing: the church that hurt you is not the only kind there is.
Is the door really closed?
Berry admits that pastors can grow discouraged, like Elijah believing he was the last faithful one left. God’s answer to Elijah was that he was not alone, that thousands had not bowed to Baal (1 Kings 19:18). Berry found something similar after the panel. The conversations kept going once the cameras stopped. People asked where he went to church. A few weeks later, one panelist showed up at Berry’s church in a different city, and they had dinner together afterward. Something in the process of being heard had made him want to explore again.
That is the reason not to treat every departure as final. Berry puts it this way: “Sometimes it’s just like leaning into a conversation and finding the fact that there are people who really are hungry and thirsty and just need some guidance to get them to the bread of life in the living water.”
The panel did not return because someone won an argument. A few began to reconsider because, for perhaps the first time in years, Christians listened to them without flinching. A church cannot undo past harm by insisting it was not that bad. It can become a place where the next honest question meets a shepherd instead of a closed door.