Behind the Book: The ADHD Christian

I grew up in the Church of Christ. Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday night, for the first fourteen years of my life.

I couldn’t sit still through the sermons. My mind left during prayers that seemed to run forever. Four verses of Amazing Grace couldn’t hold me. I fidgeted with the communion cups, dropped hymnals into quiet moments, and asked the wrong questions at the wrong times. When adults said pay attention or sit still, what I heard was that I wasn’t good enough. Watching other children follow expectations that mystified me, I concluded I was flawed in a way that made me unfit for the community.

It took until my sixties to find out that was wrong.

What does rejection sensitivity do inside a church?

It converts ordinary correction into a verdict, and a church is a place with a great deal of ordinary correction in it.

Rejection sensitivity is part of the ADHD picture and it’s the piece least understood by people who don’t have it. Criticism doesn’t arrive as information. It arrives as something closer to a physical event, and the response is out of all proportion to the input, and you know that while it’s happening and it doesn’t help.

Sit a child with that wiring in a pew three times a week. Every sit still, every pay attention, every quiet correction from an adult who means nothing by it and has already forgotten it by lunchtime, lands as evidence. What I concluded, watching other children manage expectations that mystified me, was that I was flawed in a way that made me unfit for the community. That’s a large conclusion for a child to reach and I reached it early and carried it for decades.

Nobody in that building intended it. That’s worth repeating because the instinct on reading this is to look for a villain, and there isn’t one. A room full of well-meaning adults, a standard set of expectations, and a child whose nervous system converted every one of them into a judgment.

When should you write about a new diagnosis?

Immediately after the diagnosis, and before the autobiography. This was the first thing that came out once I understood what my brain had been doing all along.

That order matters. I wasn’t looking back across a lifetime from a settled position. I’d just been handed an explanation for fifty years of confusion and the first thing I wanted to look at was the room where I’d felt it most.

What happened at the church in The ADHD Christian?

I was attending a local congregation with a pastor I liked, and for a while it worked well. Then the pastor’s son began taking over more and more of the responsibilities. Nothing dramatic happened, no announcement, no split. Responsibilities simply migrated. What changed with them was the shape of the thing. There was more advertising and more promotion, worked into the service and around it. The sermon itself shifted tone, toward punishment and toward obligation. It stopped engaging me.

And I eventually worked out that a large part of why it stopped engaging me had nothing to do with the son, or the theology, or the promotions. It was that I’m ADHD, and the room wasn’t built for me and never had been.

What makes a church service hard for someone with ADHD?

Start with the crowd, which people underestimate.

I don’t like crowds. That’s wiring instead of preference. I especially don’t like crowds that are chanting and humming with everybody waving their arms.

It’s enough of the outward characteristics of a cult that sitting inside it comfortably becomes hard. That congregation wasn’t a cult. It wasn’t close to one. But the form of the thing produced a response in me I couldn’t talk myself out of.

When I was there I sat in the back row, way up high, so I wouldn’t have to sit near anybody. That’s the detail I’d put in front of any pastor reading this. Being in close physical proximity to a large number of people for a couple of hours is more than I can take, and the standard arrangement of a church puts you shoulder to shoulder with strangers for exactly that long. Then there’s the delivery. And then there’s the music.

The music is terrible in a great many churches. Let’s sing at the beginning, and out come the singers, and they’re sort of a band.

Sort of, because they present as one and the presentation isn’t supported by the performance. For a brain that can’t filter background sound the way most brains do, that’s twenty minutes of something you can’t tune out.

How does The ADHD Christian end?

I was baptized there about a year and a half ago. Then I stopped going.

I didn’t talk to anybody about it. That isn’t the way I do things. I simply stopped attending, and as far as I know nobody there knows why, and I doubt anybody worked it out.

That one is the ordinary version of this story and it’s why the book exists. People don’t usually leave with a confrontation. They leave by degrees, and the congregation records it as somebody drifting away, and the actual cause never gets named because the person leaving assumes the problem is them.

The faith continued. It was never in question. What failed was the presentation, and those are separable things. (See also a daily devotional built for a restless brain) That’s the single most useful sentence I can offer anybody in this position. One more thing about the way people leave, since it’s the part congregations most need to understand.

Nobody sends a letter. There’s no meeting, no complaint, no conversation with an elder about accessibility. Attendance thins, then stops, and from the front of the room it looks like somebody losing interest or getting busy or drifting off into the world.

From the back row it looks entirely different. It looks like a person who tried for a long time, found the cost of each service higher than the last, and eventually couldn’t justify it. They don’t say so because saying so would require explaining something they may not have language for, and because they assume the fault is theirs and complaining about your own defect isn’t a conversation anybody wants to start.

So the information never reaches the people who could act on it. That gap is most of the reason this book exists.

What does The ADHD Christian say about how churches are built?

That churches are built for people who aren’t neurodivergent, and it shows everywhere once you know to look.

Large crowded rooms, people packed close, long stretches of required stillness, sound you can’t escape, sermons that assume one particular kind of attention, and social rituals before and after that assume you want them. Every one of those is a small tax, and the person paying it three times a week is the one who gets blamed for looking tired of it.

None of that is malicious. Nobody designed it to exclude anybody. It’s simply a set of assumptions about how a typical person functions, made by people who function that way, and never examined because nothing forced an examination.

Then it gets uncomfortable. The failure to accommodate is generally not recognized by Christian organizations at all. Neither, in a great many of them, are mental health practitioners. There’s real resistance in some quarters to the entire structure, and a person who can’t manage a consistent quiet time no matter how hard they try gets read as having a spiritual problem instead of a neurological one.

I think that reading is false. What the book argues instead is that you have to accept people as they are. Some people are neurodivergent, and neurodivergence isn’t a defect to be prayed through.

Why does The ADHD Christian speak directly to pastors?

Because they’re the only people who can change the room, and most of them have never been told there’s anything to change.

The chapter opens with an assumption made in good faith: that if somebody handed you this book, they trust you, and the trust counts for more than whatever they underlined. It also names the obvious objection: that the language of neuroscience and diagnosis can feel like importing a secular model into sacred space. That’s a legitimate concern and it deserves an answer instead of a dismissal.

The answer the chapter gives is that the God who knit a person together knit their neurological wiring too, so caring about how somebody’s brain works is an extension of pastoral care, not a concession to psychology. Then it does something I’m still pleased with. It walks through scripture.

Moses had a speech impediment. Elijah collapsed under a tree and asked to die. David wrote songs that swing from despair to exultation inside a few verses. Peter acted before he thought, almost every time. Paul described a thorn in his flesh so persistent that he pleaded three times to have it removed.

Neurodivergent believers are as old as the church. What’s new is that we now have language and research explaining what’s happening, and why criticism lands like a physical blow, and why somebody who loves God can’t hold a routine that everybody around them finds effortless.

Who should read about ADHD and faith?

Christians who have trouble going to church and want to go anyway.

This is the person. Not somebody who has left the faith, and not somebody looking for permission to stop attending. Somebody who wants to be part of the group, and can’t be, because the group without meaning to has arranged itself so that they can’t.

That’s a painful position and it’s lonely in a particular way, because the barrier is invisible and everybody else appears to manage. You sit in the back row way up high and you assume the failure is yours.

It isn’t. The room was built for somebody else, nobody meant anything by it, and it can be built differently.

The book gives alternatives, and there’s a guide for groups and leaders at the end for people who want to try. But the first thing it gives is the reframe, and it runs through everything I’ve written since the diagnosis. The thing that makes you difficult in a room is a mismatch between you and the room, and mismatches have two sides.

What I can’t accept is a church that loses people this way and never asks why. Every one of those empty seats in the back row belonged to somebody who wanted to be there, and a congregation that writes it off as drift is failing the very people it says it exists for.

From the author

The ADHD Christian
Fourteen years of hard wooden pews in the Church of Christ open The ADHD Christian. It is about faith with a brain that won’t sit still.

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