Our reasons for staying, leaving, and returning to church are as complex and layered as we are. They don’t fit in the boxes we check in the surveys or the hurried responses we deliver at dinner parties. How easy it is to judge when we don’t know all the details. How easy it is to offer advice when what is needed is empathy. How easy it is to forget that, in the words of novelist Zadie Smith, “every person is a world.”
