Growing Up in the Church of Christ: What We Don’t Believe Anymore

There are certain things we can both still picture immediately: old hymnals, red velvet church pews, church camp, Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, and a whole lot of rules. For both of us, growing up in the Church of Christ gave us some of our closest friendships and a real sense of community. It also shaped our earliest ideas about what made someone good, what made someone bad, what women were allowed to do, what sexuality meant, and what it took to belong. We absorbed much of that before we were old enough to ask whether we actually believed it.

Now, our relationships with Christianity and spirituality look pretty different from each other’s and very different from what we knew as kids. This conversation isn’t about deciding whether the church was good or bad. It’s about looking back honestly at what we loved, what stayed with us, what we’ve questioned, and what each of us believes now.

What We Loved About Growing Up in the Church of Christ

Before we get into anything complicated, we want to be clear that we both have really good memories of church. Paige loved church camp and met some of her best friends through church. Jenna remembers youth group being a huge part of her friendships and social life, along with church camp and mission trips to Mexico and Honduras. There was also Yosemite Bible camp, which still holds really special memories for both of us.

There was something comforting about having this whole other community outside of school. You had people who knew you and your family, people who prayed for you, people who would show up when someone was struggling. Jenna remembers watching her church take care of families when someone was sick and reach out to people in the community who needed help. Looking back, she can see how much those experiences shaped the value she still places on service and thinking beyond herself.

Even the music holds good memories for Paige. The churches we grew up in were mostly acapella, so there weren’t instruments during worship. Now Paige goes to a church with what she describes as basically an amazing rock concert happening during worship, which makes it funny to remember how normal it once felt that instruments simply did not belong in church. But she also remembers how beautiful it was to hear a whole room of people singing together with nothing but their voices.

That’s part of why this conversation isn’t simple for either of us. We can genuinely love parts of how we grew up while also looking back and thinking, Wait. Why did we believe that?

There Were Also a Lot of Rules

Paige summed up growing up in the Church of Christ pretty perfectly: there were so many rules.

Some of them were explicit, and some were things we just picked up along the way. Dancing was one. Instruments in church were another. In many of the congregations we attended, women could be deeply involved in church life, but they couldn’t hold the same leadership positions as men. Jenna remembers this feeling completely normal when she was young. She didn’t sit in church thinking about how unfair it was that women couldn’t preach or lead. It was simply the world she knew.

Paige did have a slightly different experience for a period of time when her family attended a Church of Christ in Kentucky. A woman led songs there, and Paige even got to lead songs during a Christmas Eve service when she was around fifth grade. They sometimes had a piano, too. Even within the same denomination, our experiences weren’t identical, and that’s something we wanted to acknowledge in this conversation. We’re talking about the churches and communities we grew up in, not trying to define everyone’s experience of the Church of Christ.

What feels more significant now is the way those rules blended into our ideas about goodness. It wasn’t always someone explicitly saying, “Do these things and God will love you more.” But both of us absorbed some version of the idea that being a good Christian meant behaving correctly.

And we both really wanted to be good girls.

The “Good Girl” Thing Followed Us

Jenna describes herself growing up as a goody two-shoes, which will surprise absolutely no one who knows her. She didn’t drink or party, and she can see now that there was some judgment wrapped up in that, too. When your world feels divided into things good people do and things bad people do, it’s pretty easy to start sorting people into those categories without realizing it.

For Paige, cheerleading and dance complicated that identity a little earlier. Some of the things she was already doing could be considered “immodest” within the culture she grew up in. She wore cheer uniforms and danced. She remembers reaching a point where her attitude was essentially, Well, this is what I do. I love God. Who cares?

There were also comments about clothing that Paige remembers laughing off at the time. Her grandpa, whom she loved deeply, sometimes told her an outfit looked like something a “whore” would wear or that cut-off jean shorts made her look like “white trash.” She was around 17 or 18 and mostly dismissed it because she liked what she was wearing. Looking back, though, she can recognize the judgment underneath those comments and how differently they might have landed if she had internalized them more deeply.

Neither of us uses the phrase “religious trauma” to describe our own experience. We know other people who grew up in church and do use that language for what happened to them, but it doesn’t feel like the right description for either of us. What does feel true is that we both carried certain ideas about being good, being judged, and doing things correctly long after childhood.

For Jenna especially, being a “good Christian” became tangled up with her actual identity.

When Belonging Becomes Who You Are

Jenna has always been more likely to become the teacher’s pet than the rebel. She knows that about herself now. She likes approval, she can fall into people-pleasing, and when she becomes part of a community, her instinct can be to figure out how to be really good at belonging to it.

Growing up in the Church of Christ, she wasn’t constantly asking herself, Is this really me? Do I actually believe all of this? Her sense of self was already wrapped up in being a good Christian. She wanted to fit in, and the church was connected to her friends, her family, her community, and eventually even her college. She attended a Christian university after high school, so Christianity remained part of the environment around her well into adulthood.

Looking back, that’s the piece she’s had to unravel. There were beliefs she adopted because they were around her long before she was old enough to examine whether they felt true. The harder work came later, when she began separating what she actually believed from what she had learned she was supposed to believe.

Sex is probably one of the clearest examples.

The Things We Learned Not to Talk About

Growing up in the Church of Christ, the message around sex felt pretty straightforward: don’t have sex before marriage. Sex outside of marriage was a sin. But beyond the rule itself, both of us remember a larger silence around sexuality.

Paige put it this way in our conversation: “We don’t have sex, we don’t talk about sex.” That silence meant there wasn’t much room for curiosity or honest conversation. When something is both forbidden and difficult to talk about, it can very quickly become connected to secrecy and fear.

For Jenna, some of that messaging followed her into adulthood as guilt and shame. She can see now how hard it is to spend years internalizing the idea that sex is sinful and then expect that association to magically disappear once your circumstances change. Even if the actual religious teaching is more nuanced than that, the message a kid absorbs can be much simpler.

There were other beliefs that felt just as black and white. Paige remembers the idea that if someone wasn’t baptized, they were going to hell. There were messages about suicide and salvation that were presented with the same kind of certainty. It created this feeling that there was a clear line and everyone was either safely on one side or dangerously on the other.

As adults, neither of us sees faith or people that way anymore.

How Our Paths Started to Change

Our relationships with church began shifting at different times and for different reasons. For Paige, one turning point came when her family moved to a very small town in Texas when she was 16. It didn’t feel comfortable being vulnerable in youth group because the church and school communities overlapped so much. What if something she shared at church could become something people were talking about at school the next day?

Paige eventually stopped going to youth group and spent about a year and a half away from church, although she still read her Bible and even flew back to Washington for church camp. Later, she started attending church again when she moved to California as a nanny, but after getting married she drifted away for a while. She hasn’t regularly attended a Church of Christ since she was around 19.

Jenna stayed in that world longer. She went to a Church of Christ through high school and then attended a Church of Christ university, but college was also when her experience of Christianity started getting broader. Her friends went to other denominations. She went to churches with instruments and women in leadership. Later, after getting married, she and her then-husband attended different community churches and a Presbyterian church for a period of time.

The bigger shift for Jenna came through therapy and through watching her ex-husband begin to question his faith. At first, his questions scared her. Christianity had been such a foundational part of her identity that hearing someone close to her question it felt destabilizing. It wasn’t just a conversation about religion. It touched this whole structure of who she believed herself to be.

Therapy eventually gave her space to start examining that structure for herself.

What Do I Actually Believe?

As Jenna became more self-aware in therapy, she started noticing the beliefs and thought patterns she carried and asking where they came from. Sometimes the answer was church. Other times, it was the Bible as she had understood it. Or, it was simply the culture around her.

Then came the harder question: Does this actually feel true to me now?

Over time, Jenna stopped going to church regularly. She’s been to Christmas services and churches for family events, but she hasn’t found a Christian church community that feels like somewhere she wants to belong. She still considers herself deeply spiritual, though. In some ways, spirituality has become a bigger part of her life as her definition of it has expanded.

Therapy is part of that. Group therapy, in particular, can sometimes feel strangely church-like to her, not because there’s anything religious about it, but because there’s a group of people gathering to look honestly at themselves. They become mirrors for one another, help each other grow, and try to become more whole. For Jenna, that feels deeply spiritual.

Yoga has become another part of that exploration. Through yoga teacher training, she became more interested in yoga philosophy as well as Buddhism, Taoism (Daoism), non-dualism, meditation, and the idea of the divine existing within all of us. She still finds beauty in many of the stories and teachings she grew up with, but she engages with them differently now. There’s more room for interpretation, mystery, and the possibility that no one tradition has to contain the entire truth.

Paige’s path looks different, but interestingly, there’s a lot of overlap in where we’ve landed.

Paige Still Goes to Church. She Just Has More Questions.

Paige and her family currently attend a large non-denominational Christian church. There are instruments, there’s a big worship team, and her kids go to youth group every week. She still believes in God and Jesus, she prays every day, and she describes wanting to be Christ-like in the way she lives.

But she doesn’t feel like she has to pretend she has everything figured out.

There are things about the history and interpretation of the Bible that she wonders about. She’s curious about other religions and spiritual traditions. She has ordered other spiritual texts with her husband because she genuinely likes learning about what other people believe and why they believe it. For her, being open to those ideas doesn’t necessarily threaten her Christian faith. Sometimes she thinks it might even deepen it.

That openness has also changed the way she talks to her kids about faith. If one of them tells her a friend isn’t sure they believe in God anymore, her response isn’t that the friend is bad or doomed or needs to be fixed. Paige talks to them about how everyone has their own path and eventually has to figure out what they believe for themselves.

She wants there to be room for questions because she remembers what it felt like when there wasn’t.

“I mostly just try to lead from, really truly, from love,” she said in this conversation. “Is this coming from a place of love and what is best for others and myself and the world as a whole?”

That has become a much more meaningful measure for her than whether she’s succeeding at being a “good Christian.”

Jenna’s Spirituality Looks Different These Days

Jenna doesn’t really pray in the traditional way anymore, but she meditates. She has a morning practice that helps her connect to what she describes as her deepest self, the part underneath personality, ego, anxiety, and all the other noise we accumulate around ourselves.

Every morning she meditates with prayer beads. She repeats a mantra that was translated to her as I bow to the divine in me (inner true self). That idea has become central to how she thinks about God now. As a kid, God felt more external to her. It was like there was something she had to do to earn God’s love. Now she thinks more about God as something present within her and within everyone.

Books have helped shape that shift, too. The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer is one Jenna has returned to so many times. She describes it as almost like a Bible in her own life. She also talks about The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, the Bhagavad Gita, and the work of Alan Watts as books and ideas that have influenced the way she thinks.

One idea she especially loves from Michael Singer’s work:

Life itself can become the spiritual practice. Spirituality isn’t only something that happens while meditating, praying, reading, or sitting in church. There is something spiritual about living the life in front of you and allowing it to transform you.

Jenna thinks about that in terms of the life she hopes to have lived when she dies. She wants to be able to look back and know that when difficult people, opportunities, obstacles, relationships, and experiences showed up, she let herself learn something from them. She wants to feel like she really worked her edges and tried to live whatever purpose was hers to live.

And then, because this is us, we somehow got from there to houseplants.

Maybe the Plant Store Is a Spiritual Practice Too

We were talking about spiritual practices when Paige admitted that routines are not exactly her thing. She prays every day and meditates sometimes. She’s tried journaling and other practices, and there are things she’d like to make more space for, but doing the same ritual every single day has never come especially naturally to her.

So Jenna asked a different question: when Paige is stressed or in a funk, what actually helps her feel grounded?

“I like to go walk in a plant store.” Of course she does.

Paige loves walking through the indoor houseplants, being surrounded by living things and breathing in that fresh, green air. Her husband, Alex, knows this about her so well that sometimes he’ll look at her and say, “You need to go to the plant store.” She also loves walking outside, standing barefoot in the grass, and basically anything that helps her get close to nature again.

This probably explains the roughly 55 houseplants in her Arizona home. Jenna calls it a jungle. Paige’s daughter, Brooklyn, used to think the sheer number of plants was a little embarrassing until friends started coming over and commenting on how calm the house felt. Considering Paige describes her family as loud and busy, “calm” was not exactly the adjective Brooklyn expected. Eventually Brooklyn told her, “I think it’s the houseplants.”

From Church Pews to Houseplants

At one point near the end of this conversation, Jenna laughed and said, “I love that we started off with Church of Christ and we’re ending with houseplants.”

But actually, that felt like a pretty perfect way to end it.

Growing up in the Church of Christ shaped both of us. We still carry pieces of it in our friendships, our values, our memories, the ways we think about community, and probably in patterns we haven’t even noticed yet. There are things we’re grateful for, things we’ve questioned, things we no longer believe, and things we’ve learned to understand differently as adults.

We also didn’t arrive at the same answer. Paige is still part of a Christian church and believes in God and Jesus. Jenna’s spirituality now lives more outside traditional Christianity and has been shaped by therapy, yoga, meditation, and other spiritual traditions. Neither of us needs the other one to end up in exactly the same place.

Maybe that’s one of the biggest differences between where we started and where we are now. There’s more room. More room for questions, more room for uncertainty, more room for somebody else to believe something different without it automatically meaning one of us has to be wrong.

And apparently, there’s also more room for houseplants.

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