I Stopped Believing In God After Pastoring A Megachurch

- In order to belong in this tribe, you have to conform, and if you have doubts, you're a dangerous person. How many leaders have been built up in these mega churches that fall because the pressure's just too much. And as I look back, we were two kids trying so hard to get it right. My name is Lisa Gungor. I'm a recent author, I'm a musician and a songwriter. My mom and I found this wild church. They called themselves the Holy Rollers, and from the moment you walked in, it was loud and people were running around the church. I just think it's awesome. So while a lot of people think it's crazy, filled with crazy people, I loved it and I was in. I ended up going to college and I start dating this boy who's super Christian. We get married really young. We're too young to even rent a car when we're married. We didn't drink or cuss. So we end up getting a job at a really big church in Michigan. And this church was the size of a mall, it's huge, it was about 10,000 people. We built a house out in the country. They paid for our car, for our gas. They paid for Michael's school. We were 20 years old, and we had this dream job. We didn't have sex with each other before we were married. We waited to kiss, we did it all right, we had this transactional ideal of God and that's why we landed this really great, awesome job. We started trying to get pregnant and couldn't get pregnant and people would tell me, well, just pray and believe. Like, just say it and it will happen. And I thought, I just don't know how that can be true. We were traveling the world, we were going overseas and playing to sometimes 60,000 people in arenas. The more we ran into other people's stories, the more we started doubting what we'd been given. Michael and I took this trip in Europe. From Rome, we took trains up to Krakow. We visited the concentration camps. We walked through the crematoriums. And it's real hard to come back to America and pray for something when you have these images of people's hair in piles and children's shoes in piles. Your ideas on what a good God is can change pretty dramatically. So I came back and found myself trying to pray for us to have a baby or pray for our church or pray for these different things, and I just kept thinking about the concentration camp and how my whole perspective on my faith has been a transaction. If I'm good enough or if I pray enough or if I believe enough, then I get blessings and I get a baby or a good life. It's not how life is. We all have this perspective on who is in and who is out. For Michael and I, that began to change slowly. You have to conform and if you have doubts, you're a dangerous person. I remember looking around going, what am I doing here? What am I building with my life? We realized we're no good for this place that we're at because our ideas had changed so much and that we needed to leave. I started weeping and crying and freaking out, going, what are we doing, we don't know what we're doing. Do you realize what we just left? We left all of our security. And we started becoming heretics, you know. We go up to Denver, we end up starting a little house church in our apartment. Our whole goal for it was that it was inclusive and that it was vulnerable and that it was this place that we'd always dreamed of church being. More questions and more doubt were arising for Michael and I. Our heretic levels kept shifting and changing and kind of one-upping each other. Eventually, Michael and I, we get pregnant and I was really glad for that because it didn't feel like our daughter was this answer. We really went through this trial and this suffering and now we're getting this baby girl. Our ideas of God are deconstructing. What is that we still believe? But Michael looks at me and just says, I don't believe in God anymore, like I can't believe any of it, and he just ends up talking more. And I remember just freezing in my whole body 'cause there's always been, I was okay with the questions but I wasn't okay with that. I end up getting pregnant again and we go through a whole tour with me being pregnant and for Michael, he feels all this freedom in atheism because he's not struggling anymore. For me, I'm feeling all this anxiety because I want him to believe a certain thing and I want myself to believe a certain thing. And I'm still just struggling hard to belong and to be okay. And I ended up having to quit a tour early because I'm having, our baby's having difficulty growing. She's born a month and a half early. She is just beautiful and like with our first daughter, we're both crying and it's just this beautiful, beautiful moment, and then she turns blue. I remember this nurse coming over and she's shaking and looking really worried. And she tells us our daughter has Down Syndrome. And so in the days that follow, we find out that Lucy has two heart issues and she has to have a heart surgery her second day of life and then she has to have another heart surgery when she's six months old. Everything really changed for me. So I feel like this story that I've been living my whole life kind of came to this climax with Lucy's birth. When Lucy was born, we had this huge social media blowup. And there's stories in magazines and all over the Internet about our heresy, and we were completely pushed out of the church world, of this tribe that we really loved, and really painful and devastating at so many of times. Looking back on all of it, I'm deeply grateful for all of the things that happened and I don't want what we used to have. We live in a different head space now, it's a completely different perspective. And the connection I feel with my daughters, there's no us verus them, there's no you and I, there's no winners and losers. Part of my dream is that people wouldn't be so afraid and so scared. I know a lot of people are still in this very conservative, fundamental bubble and they can be so afraid to break out of that for fear of what will happen to their lives. And this happens in any religion, so my dream is that we're not so afraid. (contemplative music) - Hey guys, we're Pero Like! - Do you know it's Hispanic Heritage Month? (speaking in foreign language) - For more Latino content-- - Subscribe here.