The Sunday my congregation left me was the second Sunday in April, which I remember because the dogwoods were flowering outside the windows of Calvary Road Community Church and I had taken that as a hopeful sign that morning, which teaches you something about the reliability of dogwoods as omens.
I had been the pastor of Calvary Road for fourteen years. It is a small church, as churches go — the building seats eighty, we rarely filled it, and in the later years we were down to forty to fifty regular attenders. It sat on a two-lane road outside a town of three thousand in the rural south, surrounded by the kind of landscape that makes it easy to believe in something large and patient. I had married couples there. I had buried their parents. I had baptized their children in the creek behind the property and witnessed, over fourteen years, the slow accumulation of ordinary life that constitutes a congregation’s actual meaning, which has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with who brings the casserole and who drives the widow to her appointments.
I lost them over a decision. I won’t detail the decision fully — not because I’m ashamed of it, but because the specific content is less important than the shape of what happened, and I don’t want the specifics to create factions in the reading of it. What I will say is that I made a choice about who was welcome in my church that was consistent with my reading of the gospel I’d spent my life with and inconsistent with the expectations of a significant portion of my congregation and the denomination’s regional leadership. I was given three options: reverse the decision, take a leave of absence for reassessment, or tender my resignation. I tendered my resignation.
The Sunday after my resignation took effect, I showed up at the church anyway. Not to reclaim anything — the building wasn’t mine and never had been — but because I didn’t know what else to do on a Sunday morning. Fourteen years of Sunday mornings had created a gravity in me that pulled in one direction at seven AM and I’d followed it without thinking it through.
The building was locked. The sign out front had already been changed — my name removed, a Sunday Service TBD in its place, which is a kind of erasure that is minor and enormous at the same time.
I sat on the front steps for a while. The dogwoods were still flowering. They have no opinion about human affairs, the dogwoods.
I don’t know exactly how word reached the Iron Road Brotherhood. I have a theory that it went through a woman named Shirley, who cleaned the church twice a month and who was the aunt of a man in the club, and that it traveled through whatever network such information travels through.
What I know is that on the following Sunday — my second Sunday without a church — I drove to the building out of the same unreasoning gravity, sat on the same steps, and twenty minutes later heard the sound of motorcycles.
They came in twos and threes, over about fifteen minutes, until there were eleven of them parked in the church lot. Men I’d never met. They were wearing their cuts, most of them, and a few had made some concession to the occasion — one wore a collared shirt under his cut, which touched me for reasons I couldn’t immediately account for. They gathered on the steps and in the lot and there was a brief consultation between a man named Garrett, who was their chaplain — I hadn’t known clubs had chaplains; many do — and then Garrett came to me and said, straightforwardly: “We heard you got a raw deal. We thought you might want to preach.”
I looked at him.
“There’s nowhere to preach,” I said. “The building is locked.”
He looked at the building, then at the lawn, then at the sky, which was clear and warm and April.
“Outside is fine,” he said. “We’re not picky.”
I preached on the lawn of Calvary Road Community Church to eleven bikers on a Sunday morning in April. I had no pulpit and no notes and no particular plan. I preached about the story that I had been living that week — the story of the man who found the lost sheep, the ninety-nine left in the field, the one pursued into wilderness. I preached about what it costs to act on what you believe when the cost is concrete and immediate and the belief is abstract and long. I preached, honestly, about doubt — not the productive theological kind but the dark, animal kind that had been with me since I’d handed in my resignation and wondered if I’d done the right thing and would probably be wondering that for years.
Eleven men in motorcycle vests stood or sat in the morning sunlight and listened. Garrett bowed his head when I prayed. A man named Wesley, who had a cross tattooed on the back of his right hand, closed his eyes and moved his lips slightly, which is the posture of someone who has their own relationship with the words and doesn’t need to perform it. A young man near the back — a prospect, from his patch — looked slightly overwhelmed, which I took as a sign that something was landing.
When I was done, Garrett shook my hand and asked if I was all right.
I said I was. Mostly. Working on it.
He told me about the Brotherhood’s chaplaincy work — that they served as a non-denominational ministry presence in communities that formal churches didn’t reach, that they ran a ministry in the county jail, that they worked with veterans who had complicated relationships with institutional religion. He asked, carefully, whether I’d ever be interested in doing something like that.
I didn’t answer that day. Too much was still raw.
But I thought about it. I thought about it a great deal over the following months. I thought about the question of what a ministry is for, what it has to have to be real. I thought about the collared shirt under the vest and Garrett’s bowed head and Wesley’s moving lips and the young prospect’s overwhelmed expression.
I am not going to tell you I’ve resolved everything. The circumstances that led to my resignation are still circumstances. The denomination’s position hasn’t changed. My position hasn’t changed. There are conversations that remain unfinished and perhaps won’t be finished in this life, which is itself a kind of theological position, though not a comfortable one.
What I will tell you is this: I now do pastoral work with the Iron Road Brotherhood’s outreach ministry. I work in the county jail on Tuesday afternoons. I work with three veterans’ groups that the Brotherhood connected me to. I preach, still, but in garages and parking lots and the occasional backyard more often than in buildings with steeples.
The congregation that left me has a new pastor. I pray for them sometimes. Not in a performance of magnanimity but genuinely — they are people who taught me things, who gave me fourteen years of their trust, and who made a decision I disagree with for reasons that were real to them. They are not villains. The people who hurt us rarely are.
My friend Garrett told me once that the Brotherhood had a saying: The road matters more than the destination. I told him I found this theologically challenging and he laughed in the easy way of someone who has heard pushback from clergy before.
But I have been thinking about it. And I think what I’ve come to believe is something like: the destination matters, and the road matters, and you don’t get to choose your road with much precision, but you do get to choose who you travel it with. I chose to resign when the alternative would have required me to be someone other than who I am. I chose to preach on a lawn because eleven strangers showed up and offered me the chance.
I’d make both choices again.
The dogwoods will be flowering again soon. I’m still trying to learn to stop reading them as signs. Maybe this year I’ll manage it.
Probably not, though. Some habits of faith are older than reason.