I found my father dead on a Sunday morning.
His family had been faithful to that church for over fifty years. My father’s brother. His sister. Decades of 7:30am service, family breakfast after, ushers in white, trustees in their seats, the whole architecture of Black church life built into the bones of our Sunday mornings the way breathing is built into everything else.
I called the church office and asked them to pull my aunt and uncle out of service to tell them their brother was gone.
And then we called the pastor to preach the funeral.
He was busy.
We reached out to a family friend who had recently left our church and started his own congregation. He agreed immediately. What we did not know was that he and our pastor had bad blood between them. The moment our pastor found out who was being called to stand at that pulpit, he suddenly found time.
A man who could not make time for a family who provided 50+ years of loyalty and tithes decided he could not afford to let someone else have the moment either.
It was disrespectful and hilarious in equal measure. And it was not the first time the institution had revealed itself.
The institution and the faith are not the same thing.
My family is religious. Not in the performative, conditional, politically convenient way that organized religion has largely become. Spirit-led. Quietly. Without the infrastructure of commercialism or the pageantry of institutional approval.
My mother’s side has two AME pastors. My father’s side gave fifty years to the Baptist church without hesitation or complaint. God and family were the organizing principle of how we showed love. That was real. That was genuine. That is not what I am questioning.
What I am questioning is the building.
The Black church was never just a place of worship. It was the first institution Black Americans owned entirely. The first place where our leadership was legitimate on its own terms, uncontested by white authority. It was where political organizing happened, where social safety nets were built, where the children of sharecroppers learned to read and the children of those children learned to lead. The church was infrastructure. It was power. It was ours.
And somewhere along the way, for too many congregations, it became something else. A platform. A business. A vehicle for the ambitions of the person at the front of the room dressed in the authority that the faithful granted him.
Why people are leaving – and where they are going.
Black church attendance has been declining for years. People are leaving because they paid attention. Because they watched the institution that was supposed to hold the community prioritize its own expansion over the people it was built to serve.
But here is what the conversation is missing. Many Black people are not leaving faith at all. They are going further back than the church ever took them.
Before the church was our institution, the earth was our sanctuary. African spiritual practice did not begin with a building or a denomination or a pastor with a title and a salary. It began with the land, the ancestors, the elements, and a direct relationship with the divine that did not require an intermediary to be legitimate.
That practice never fully disappeared. It went underground during enslavement. It survived in the syncretic traditions that blended African spirituality with the Christianity that was forced upon us. And it is surfacing again now – in the growing curiosity around Hoodoo, a closed spiritual practice rooted specifically in the African American experience that is being discussed, explored, and reclaimed more openly today than at any point in recent memory.
People are pulling back toward how their ancestors actually worshipped. Toward a spirituality that is simpler, more direct, and more personal than what organized religion has been offering. True monotheism without the politics. Sacred practice without the capital campaign. Building a relationship with our ancestors – our grandmothers, our aunties, the elders who now exist only on the spiritual plane – and asking them to pray for us in intercession. Not devil worship. Not the ridiculous Hollywood foolishness that gets attached to anything outside of organized Western religion. One God. The veneration of our elders and the belief that their love and their prayers did not stop when they left this earth. That they are still available to us. Still listening. Still interceding on our behalf.
That is not a departure from faith. That is faith in its oldest and most personal form.
Disillusionment is not the same as faithlessness. Sometimes it is the beginning of a deeper search.
What I kept.
I walked away from organized religion. I did not walk away from God.
What I kept is quieter than what I left. Less visible. Not easily monetized or organized or leveraged. A personal faith that does not require a building to be real or a pastor’s approval to be valid. A relationship with something larger than the institution that was supposed to point me toward it.
My family still carries the faith that built those Sunday mornings – the 7:30am service, the family breakfast, the love organized around God and each other. That did not leave with the building. It traveled with us.
I think about my father found on a Sunday morning while his family was in service. I think about the pastor who was busy until he was not. And I think about the family friend with no institutional obligation who showed up immediately. Ready. No politics. Just a man who understood what the moment required.
That is the faith I recognize. That is the thing the building was supposed to be housing.
Sometimes you have to leave the building to find it again.
Where are you in this – still in the church, finding your way out, or somewhere in between? Drop it in the comments.
