What to (Not) Do When a Member is Deconstructing/Deconverting
A guide for churches and the people around them
When a person deconverts from a lifelong faith, their entire internal architecture collapses. It is an existential car wreck — inducing a level of grief and dysregulation that mirrors acute trauma. 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 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 confirming their fear that the relationship was always conditional on their belief.
Think of it like an emergency room. When someone comes in from a car wreck, the first goal is to stop the bleeding and stabilize the patient, not to begin rehabilitation. Your goal in this situation is the same: stabilize the emotions and the family first and foremost. Everything else comes later, if it comes at all.
What you should do: Listen to their story of why they became a Christian. Ask them honestly about how they felt about God and how they related to him. Their ego is fragile. 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. There are different levels of people in crisis, and sometimes a resource is genuinely what someone needs. But this guide is for people who have decided they are leaving. For most of them, the real issue isn’t arguments. It’s grief, identity collapse, and relational pain. Sending resources signals that you want them to come back, not that you want to understand where they are.
What you should do: Ask questions instead. Ask what started to shift for them. Ask what they’ve lost. Sit with them in it. Really listen. They need this more than you know.
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 instinct to feel personally rejected when someone deconstructs is real, and it shows. When a pastor or community responds with defensiveness, hurt, or withdrawal, it confirms what the deconverting person already fears. That the love was conditional.
What you should do: Be honest about how you feel without making them carry it. “This is hard for me and I’m going to need time to process it too” lands very differently than going cold or pulling back your investment in them.
4. Don’t treat them like a project or a crisis to be managed.
There is a version of pastoral care that is really just damage control, where the goal is to keep the person inside the building and preserve the community’s sense of itself. People who are deconstructing 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 in the faith, that’s worth examining before you engage. They don’t need another person to abandon them in one of their most vulnerable moments. Individuals leaving the faith don’t love leaving. Deconversion is not a casual preference; it is an agonizing and painful choice. Much like a divorce, no one escapes the emotional wreckage unscathed.
5. Don’t share their situation with others without permission.
Prayer requests are one of the most reliable vectors for gossip in church culture, not because that is the intention, but it inevitably operates in that manner. When someone confides in a pastor or a close friend that they’re doubting, having that information surface in a small group or through the pastoral grapevine is a profound breach of trust. It also signals to them, often correctly, that the institution’s management of the situation matters more than their 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, when their friends get a little quieter, when the social gravity of belonging starts to fade, the message is received loud and clear. For someone already grieving the loss of a God they felt loved by, losing their community at the same time is compounding trauma. They are not just losing a belief system. They are losing their social world, their weekly rhythms, and in many cases the only close friendships they have ever had as an adult.
What you should do: Make a conscious, deliberate choice to keep showing up for them as a person, independent of their theology. If you can’t do that, find someone who can. This person’s mental health is in serious jeopardy, and withdrawing support is the worst thing you could do. Put aside the need to change their mind about the faith. That is God’s job more than the individual’s.
7. Don’t disappear when it becomes clear they’re not coming back.
A lot of people report that their church relationships evaporated entirely once it was obvious they weren’t returning. Years of community, suddenly gone. That experience doesn’t just hurt. It retroactively poisons every memory of belonging they had. It confirms the 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 in. I know this feels risky. The fear that they will be hostile toward the faith or influence others 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 fielding questions from people in the congregation who don’t know what to say. 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.
Statistically, most marriages in which both partners were serious believers and one leaves the faith do not survive, particularly when both would have previously identified as committed, biblically serious Christians. This is not meant to be fatalistic, but the church should enter this situation with clear eyes. The partners are not just navigating a theological disagreement. They are relearning who each other is, renegotiating 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, not to hold the theology together, but 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 and if my life would get better. 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. I understood why. It’s a little like calling a business and asking them to recommend a competitor who does things completely differently. 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.
If you want to understand where this desire to write this article and understand my full story of how my worldview collapsed, click below: