A little over two months ago, I decided I'd spend my three-month sabbatical not going to church, which might seem like a perfectly normal thing to do -- except that I'm a minister. I've had some strange and wonderful experiences that I've written about, but possibly more strange and more wonderful than the experiences are the responses I've received.
From the very beginning the most frustrating response I get is not when folks telling me I'll lose my faith if I leave church (and they have), or the ones telling me I can't begin to understand what it's like to be Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR) in three short months (lots of those were also disturbingly aggressively worded), but rather the ones that say, "Oh, 'sabbatical!' Thanks. Now I have a word to call what I do! I stopped going to church years ago."
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