Leaving Church, Entering the Wilderness

For your reading pleasure this week, we have invited Mary Ward to share one of her writings from her new blog, The Progressive Pulpit. I found this particular writing of upmost importance and very timely. I hope her words resonate with you and I invite you to read more writings from The Progressive Pulpit.

Blessings to you on this journey,

Rev. Dr. Kelly Jackson Brooks, LPCC, CEAP

Executive Director

I used to have a pulpit.

It wasn’t flashy. It was wood, acrylic, or sometimes just a music stand in a fellowship hall that smelled like coffee and creaky folding chairs. But it was mine for a time. Mine to stand behind, pray behind, weep behind. A place where I poured out words I hoped were holy, even when I wasn’t sure I still was. A place where the same prayer echoed from my lips each week: “Now God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable unto you, my Lord, my rock, and my redeemer.”

Now, I don’t.

Not because I lost my faith or stopped believing in God, the Church, or the calling on my life, but because sometimes the systems and walls we serve in can’t hold all of who we are, or all of what we’ve survived. Sometimes the institutions are too brittle to bear the weight of the living Spirit. Sometimes, staying breaks us more than leaving.

I stepped away, but I didn’t step down. Because even without a pulpit, I still preach.

Some days, it’s in writing. Other days, it’s in conversations over coffee, in DJ sets that echo shouts of freedom, in the soft bravery of showing up when it would be easier to disappear. I preach in playlists and poetry and protest. I preach with my heart when I refuse to grow hard and bitter. I preach because the Word is still like fire burning in my bones (Jeremiah 20:9). I cannot not speak.

I left the church as a job. I didn’t leave it as a love.

Which is confusing, honestly, because the wounds are real and the grief is sharp. And yet, so is the tenderness, the gratitude, and the part of me that still lights candles and whispers prayers that only God hears––the part of me still being sanctified, day by day, in the wilderness.

Because the wilderness has become my sanctuary.

And honestly? Preaching out here—outside the walls, outside the titles, outside the comfort of liturgical routine—might just be the holiest thing I’ve ever been led to do. Out here, I am stripped of status and structure, and learning again to depend not on routine, committee meetings, or an episcopal system, but on the Holy Spirit.

Not the approval of committees or the cadence of the lectionary, just the wild, relentless grace of God.

This season is refining me. Softening me. Sanctifying me. God is reshaping my heart into something more honest, more spacious, more like Christ, who never needed a pulpit to preach and never asked for a title to love.

I still miss the pulpit. I miss the rhythm of liturgy, the hushed expectancy of Sunday mornings, the sacred trust of hospital rooms and hospice beds. I miss children’s sermons and benedictions and the accidental holiness of potlucks. I miss the way Scripture used to surprise me mid-sentence, and I miss saying the words, “The body of Christ, given for you,” with every piece of bread that was shared. 

But this is not a eulogy.

The pulpit may be gone, but the voice is not. And neither is the call.

So if you find yourself far from where you started,

If the collar is packed away, but the fire still burns,

If your voice trembles, but you speak anyway,

You are not alone.

Take courage. Stay tender. Let the Spirit do her work.

The wilderness is holy ground, too.

In the peace of Christ, 

Mary