Angela Reitsma Bick is a writer, speaker, and co-author of Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada (New Leaf, 2024). She teaches through the ICS’s Free to be Faithful program – dialogue-driven seminars that explore powerful themes of faith, deconstruction and hope in contemporary music and literature. In March 2026, Blessed are the Undone was released as an audiobook and is now available on more than 30 platforms.
Angela was the fifth speaker in Act Five’s 2026 Winter Learning Series.
Bearing Witness
I was driving to church last week just slightly over the speed limit, and imagining the conversation I’d have with the police when I got pulled over.
“No time to talk – sorry officer! I have to be at church for 10 a.m.!”
“That’s no excuse. Plus, it’s not Sunday.”
“I know. My friend is being . . . excommunicated, and I have to be there.”
Explaining excommunication would make me even more late, and it’s not really the right word for this scenario anyway – so that would be doubly frustrating.
But sometimes you drive too fast on a Tuesday morning, and walk in after a regional church meeting has already started, and slide into the pew beside your friend and her husband just in time to hear the final stage of her departure as a pastor in this denomination get announced as an item on the agenda, like it’s no big deal. Though she had already been ordained as a minister in a different denomination, making this more or less a formality, still . . . there are good (and bad) ways to say good-bye. It actually was a big deal. A debate and then a vote were going to impact the wording (not to mention the experience) of her official departure. And I wanted to hear all of it, even though I had no influence or role to play, other than to bear witness.
That’s why I was speeding.
It would have been pretty hard to summarize to the police.
And it’s also why I’ve started to think more about the places where language falls short.
It’s falling short in the denomination of my childhood and in my home church. It’s falling short in the conversations I’m having with friends and family, and in the ones I’m overhearing. There are membership classes and welcome cards for new people visiting church. What’s being offered to the people who are leaving?
Exit Interviews
In 2021, I began a research project with Peter Schuurman that looked for patterns contributing to decades of church decline in Canada. We interviewed 28 Canadians who self-identified as having gone through the experience of faith deconstruction, which we defined as having your affiliation with God, the Bible and the Christian faith fall apart, usually prompted by failures of the Church, while simultaneously being distanced from your religious family, community and tradition.
Our findings, published in Blessed are the Undone: Testimonies of the Quiet Deconstruction of Faith in Canada (New Leaf, 2024), did identify common themes in the experiences of Canadians going through faith deconstruction. But we added a second layer, which is that the stories of individuals deconstructing their faith are a prophetic call for the Church-with-a-capital-C to own up to its failures and seek restoration. Our book frames deconstruction as normative, arguing that people of faith are perpetually constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing various beliefs. Put simply, religion is a human activity lived out by regular people, trusting in God’s grace for the bits we get wrong. And – thank the Lord! — deconstruction isn’t the end of the story for a God who makes all things new.
Still, there are good (and bad) ways to say good-bye. “Cleaning up the membership list” is the closest thing I can think of to excommunication in my denomination; the phrase is shorthand for asking members with lapsed attendance to return or be deleted. There’s no easy category for hurt, questions, or concerns. I know that “excommunicate” has to do with communion, but I can’t help but hear in that word a kind of communication ban as well. Ex-member? No communication. Have you ever seen a good-bye package, round of applause or farewell prayer for departing members? When it comes to leave-taking, I wonder if even our theology falls short. And maybe naming that is a good place to start.
Sometimes you drive too fast on a Tuesday morning, and arrive a little late, and slide into the booth at a coffee shop where you’ve agreed to meet a friend. You don’t have an agenda or arguments lined up; you’re just going to say, “I haven’t seen you in a while. How are things going?”
And you’ll stay to hear it all.
Even if you have no influence or role to play, other than to bear witness.
Continue to follow along with us as we invite you into the learning of our community. We will share more reflections from speakers of this past year’s Winter Learning Series in the weeks to come, and the 2027 Winter Learning Series is already in the works!
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