When a person deconverts from a lifelong faith, their entire internal worldview is collapsing. People are messy, and no one in this situation will handle it perfectly. But being prepared to walk alongside someone through it is one of the most loving things you can do for both the person leaving and the family they’re leaving with. A therapist should be involved if at all possible. This list is not exhaustive, but it comes from my own experience and is meant to be a place to start.
Don’t Make it About Theology
1. Don’t try to argue with them about facts, and whatever you do, do not hint at where they are going now that they’ve left.
This is almost never the real reason people deconvert. The same is true for why people become Christians. Arguing at this level will almost certainly make the situation worse. Of all people, they know about hell. They have felt the weight of that reality for most of their life in the faith. Raising it now will only drive them further away and damage whatever relationship remains.
I understand the tension here. If you don’t address it, aren’t you failing in your pastoral responsibility? Isn’t the gospel fundamentally about what Jesus saves us from? That may be true, but this person already knows that and is choosing to leave despite it. Repeating it accomplishes nothing except isolating them further in an already incredibly vulnerable situation.
Your goal is to stabilize the emotions and the family first and foremost. Everything else should be pursued after and the reason for helping shouldn’t depend on the returning.
What you should do: Listen to their story about how they became a Christian. Ask them what God meant to them and how that relationship changed. Remember, they just lost something that they held deeply. They are navigating not only the loss of a relationship with a creator they felt loved them, but also the growing isolation from the friends and family who defined their world.
2. Don’t immediately refer them to books, podcasts, or apologists.
The moment you hand someone a resource to help them not lose their faith, you’ve communicated that their problem is intellectual and that you have the answer. This happened to me in so many different ways. I felt I was being handled before I was being understood. For most of us, the real issue isn’t arguments. It’s grief, identity collapse, and pain they feel towards God and his lack of presence. Saying read this book or this resource says that you want them to come back more than that you want to understand where they are.
What you should do: Ask questions. Ask what and how things started to shift for them. Ask what they’ve lost. Ask how they are doing emotionally. Sit with them in it. Really listen. I needed this more than I could communicate.
Don’t Make It About You or The Institution
3. Don’t make it about the church or how their leaving reflects on you.
The natural desire is to feel personally rejected when someone is leaving or seriously doubting that the faith is real, and it shows. When leadership or their community responds with defensiveness, hurt, or withdrawal, it confirms what they already feared. That their continued presence is conditional upon asserting things they no longer can assert.
What you should do: Process how this is landing with you before you choose to engage with them. Do the work of sorting out what you are making their change of faith mean about how you feel about yourself. Doing that work beforehand will allow you to have a better presence and ability to sit with them.
4. Don’t treat them like a project or a crisis to be managed.
Sometimes engaging with the person who is leaving feels closer to damage control than to actually caring about how the person is doing. It can feel like the goal is to keep the person inside the faith and preserve the community rather than to ensure the person is doing well emotionally and psychologically. People who are struggling can smell this from a mile away, especially if they’ve been in the church long enough to understand how it operates. It will drive them further out.
What you should do: Ask yourself honestly whether your care for this person is contingent on the outcome. If you’d only stay close to them to get them to stay, that’s worth examining before you engage. They don’t need another person who will abandon them in one of their most vulnerable moments. Going through a serious reworking of your faith is not a casual choice. It is an agonizing and painful experience. Similar to a divorce, no one escapes the situation without sustaining emotional damage.
5. Don’t share their situation with others without permission.
Prayer requests can operate like gossip in church culture, not because they are designed that way, but because it can allow people to hear about struggles others are having without permission from the person that is going through it. When someone tells a pastor or a close friend that they’re seriously doubting, having that information travel through a small group or through the church leadership is a profound breach of trust. And it communicates that the church’s management of the situation matters more than the person’s dignity. They already feel ostracized because no one knows how to talk to them or what to say anymore. To the person leaving the faith, it feels like being diagnosed with a terminal illness. They sense that people are talking about them when they’re not in the room, and then don’t know what to say when they are.
What you should do: Ask explicitly whether they want anyone else to know, and honor that.
Don’t Abandon Them
6. Don’t let their relationships within the church quietly disappear.
This one is subtle but devastating. Whether it’s intentional or not, when a church community slowly stops inviting someone to things, the message received by the person who is leaving is that they are no longer welcome. For someone already grieving the loss of a God they felt close to, losing their community at the same time is compounding trauma. They are not just losing a belief system. They are losing their community, their weekly structure, and in many cases the only close friendships they have ever had as an adult.
What you should do: Make a deliberate choice to keep showing up for them as a person regardless of where they land on their theology. If you can’t do that, find someone who can. This person’s mental health can be in serious trouble, and withdrawing support is the worst thing you could do. Please put aside the need to change their mind about the faith and see the person for who they are, a friend needing continued presence.
7. Don’t disappear when it becomes clear they’re not coming back.
Many of my church relationships stopped engaging once it was obvious I wasn’t returning to the faith. That experience doesn’t just hurt. It retroactively changes every memory of belonging they experienced. It reinforces a fear that the love was transactional.
What you should do: Stay. Keep reaching out. Not to re-evangelize, but because they were your friend and they still are. Ensure they have found a new sense of community, and if they haven’t, consider inviting them to dinner or to hang out regularly to process. I know this feels risky. The fear that they will be hostile toward the faith is real. But my own experience is that I didn’t want to attack the faith. I only wanted people to see and understand me. I had arguments about why I left, but I didn’t need to voice them. I only felt pressure to do that when I was being challenged. The moment I felt genuinely seen, the defensiveness dissolved. Jesus sat with people who deeply doubted. They need that from you too.
8. Don’t neglect the partner who isn’t leaving the faith.
Many times only one spouse leaves the faith while the other is left to navigate the transition alone. They are sitting through sermons every week in a seat that used to be shared. They are answering questions from people in the congregation who many times say things that are hurtful. They are going home to a marriage that feels destabilized in ways they didn’t choose and couldn’t have prepared for. This is a deeply lonely place to be, and it is easy for the church to overlook them while focusing on the person who left.
What you should do: Assign someone within the church to reach out to this spouse regularly, not just once, but weekly, for as long as they need it. Make sure someone is saving them a seat. Make sure they know they are not walking through this alone. The small gesture of a reserved spot in a pew carries more weight than most people realize.
9. Don’t stop checking in on the marriage.
Many marriages in which both partners identified as committed serious Christians, and only one partner chooses to leave the faith, end in divorce. This isn’t always the case, but many partners are not just navigating a theological disagreement. They are relearning what it’s like to be married to someone who in many ways sees the world differently than they do. They are relearning how to negotiate the values their family was built on, and doing that in real time while both of them are in pain.
What you should do: Assign people within the church to stay in close contact with both spouses individually. This will be a volatile season and whether or not the marriage survives will depend in large part on whether both partners feel genuinely heard and supported. The church has a real role to play here to hold the people together long enough for them to find their footing.
10. Don’t assume the person who left is doing fine just because they appear to be.
People are remarkably good at masking how they are actually doing to avoid hard conversations and spare the people they love. The person who just left the faith has lost their entire worldview. They are adrift in a way that is genuinely difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. And depending on the level of support they receive from family and friends, they are at real risk of suicidal ideation.
I know this was true for me. Even though leaving my family through suicide was something I never wanted, there were moments when I couldn’t see how I could keep supporting them in the ways they needed or whether my life would get better and I felt incredibly isolated. I wanted my wife to have someone who could share her faith, sit with her at church, and help raise our daughters in what she believed. I felt like I had failed her and I didn’t know if the pain would stop.
What you should do: Help that person connect with others who have been through this and come out the other side. I remember reaching out to a pastor after my own faith collapsed, asking if he could recommend anyone who had navigated this kind of loss well. He never responded. But this is bigger than how you feel about your church or your theology. This is about the physical and emotional safety of a real person and their family. Your goal is triage. Stop the bleeding first.
My hope is simple. I want the person leaving the faith to feel less alone, I want the spouse walking through it to feel seen, and I want the church to have something practical in their hands when this happens in their congregation. None of this comes from a place of having it figured out. It comes from having lived it and wishing someone had been there on the other side of it sooner.