By fourteen I’d worked out that I wasn’t built for church, and I left.
Not in anger and not over doctrine. The other children seemed to understand behavioral expectations that mystified me completely. There was a right way to worship. A right way to interpret Scripture. A right way to live a Christian life. All of it assumed a capacity for stillness and sustained attention that I didn’t have.
By fourteen I’d worked out that I wasn’t built for church, and I left.
I concluded I was flawed in a way that made me unfit for spiritual community. That’s a heavy conclusion for a fourteen year old to reach on his own, and nobody argued with it, because nobody knew that was the conclusion I was reaching.
In December 2024 I was baptized.
What was the mismatch?
Between a set of practices and a brain that couldn’t perform them.
Sit still. Pay attention for an extended stretch. Maintain a daily discipline. Be consistent. Every one of those is reasonable, and every one of them is a direct request for the things ADHD doesn’t reliably supply.
The adults around me weren’t cruel. Their expectations were ordinary and they applied them evenly. That’s what made it worse instead of better, because there was no villain and no unfairness to point at. There was just a persistent gap between what was asked and what I could deliver, and the only available explanation was that the failure was mine.
The book on this: The ADHD Christian is the whole account of leaving, staying away for decades, and finding a version of faith with room in it for a brain that won’t sit still.
Why do people read leaving church as losing faith?
Because the setting supplies the vocabulary.
In another context, being unable to sit through something is a nuisance. In a religious one it looks like a lack of reverence. Inconsistent practice looks like weak commitment. A wandering mind during prayer looks like insincerity. Nobody intends any of those readings. They’re simply what’s available when the only structure on offer is spiritual and the actual cause is neurological. A child doesn’t have the second structure. I certainly didn’t in 1971. So the conclusion was that I was unfit, a much larger thing and much harder to revisit.
Why did returning to faith take decades?
Because nobody revisits a conclusion reached at fourteen. It becomes background. I didn’t spend those years arguing with religion. I wasn’t angry about it. The question had been settled long ago, the answer was that Christianity wasn’t for people who couldn’t sit still and couldn’t focus, and settled questions don’t come up again on their own. They’re lost to a quiet conclusion nobody ever tests, and they leave without anybody registering a departure.
What brings somebody back to church decades later?
I heard a version of Christianity that had room for people like me, for the first time in decades.
Not a technique for concentrating better and not an accommodation. A different account of what the requirement was. What I finally understood was that God’s love isn’t contingent on neurotypical behavior patterns, and that the same God who made me made the brain I was apologizing for.
I was baptized in December 2024. Not because I’d finally got my act together. Not because I’d learned to control my symptoms, which I haven’t. That distinction is the entire point of the book and it’s the thing I would have needed to hear at fourteen.
Worth adding, because it’s the sort of detail that gets left out of accounts like this: I waited a year to be baptized, because the church’s scheduling process was a high enough bar for my ADHD brain that I nearly didn’t do it at all. Fifty years of theological distance resolved, and the thing that almost stopped me was an administrative process.
What should you know if you are leaving a church?
That the requirement you think exists may not be the requirement. If you left because you couldn’t do the practices, it’s worth asking what you believed the practices were for. In my case I’d treated them as the test instead of the delivery mechanism, and once that flipped there was nothing left to fail at.
If you left because you couldn’t do the practices, it’s worth asking what you believed the practices were for.Share on X
I’m not going to tell anybody what to believe, and this book doesn’t do that either. What I can say is that leaving because you concluded you were unfit is a different thing from leaving because you disagreed, and only one of those is worth revisiting.
| Belief at fourteen | What he came to understand |
|---|---|
| I am flawed and unfit for spiritual community | Leaving because you felt unfit differs from leaving because you disagreed |
| The practices are the test | The practices are the delivery mechanism |
| God’s love requires neurotypical behavior | God’s love isn’t contingent on neurotypical behavior patterns |
| Symptoms must be fixed first | He was baptized without getting his ADHD under control |
| The question is settled | A conclusion reached at fourteen never reviews itself |
My take
Anyone who left church because they decided they couldn’t measure up should check that conclusion. A person who disagreed has a reason to stay gone. If you concluded you were unfit, consider whether you treated the practices as a test you had to pass. I did, for decades, and I was baptized in December 2024 without ever getting my ADHD under control. I won’t tell anybody what to believe. I’d ask what you thought the practices were for.
What should you tell a neurodivergent teenager about church?
Being unable to sit still isn’t a moral failing. It’s a description of your nervous system.
The practices are only a means. If a particular one doesn’t work for you, that’s information about the method.
The conclusion you reach now won’t review itself. Whatever you decide at fourteen will still be sitting there at fifty unless something forces the question.
Somebody else has this brain and stayed. I didn’t know that, and I would have believed the situation was different if I had.
Nothing has to be fixed first. That was the belief that cost me the decades.
Fifty-odd years between the leaving and the baptism. I don’t present that as a redemption arc, because most of it was simply a question that never got asked again. The useful part is that the reason I left was never true.
Church and an ADHD brain collided for my first fourteen years. The ADHD Christian is about faith with a brain that won’t sit still, starting in those hard wooden pews.
