You know the moment. The prayer requests start going around the room. Sister Johnson’s knee surgery. Deacon Williams’s nephew heading off to college. Somebody’s job interview on Tuesday. Then the microphone gets closer to you, and the whole sanctuary seems to lean in. Do you say it? “Pray for me. I’m going through a divorce.” Or do you pass that mic like it’s a hot plate and mumble, “Unspoken request”?

Brother, if you’ve ever claimed “unspoken,” you’re in good company. For a lot of divorced men of faith, the place that was supposed to be the hospital starts to feel like the courtroom. The couples’ ministry you helped build has no seat for one. The brother who used to greet you with a hug now offers a careful handshake. And the same people who prayed over your wedding go strangely quiet about your divorce.

Whether your house of worship is a church, a mosque, a synagogue, or a temple, or you stepped away from organized faith years ago, stay with me. The silence I’m describing shows up anywhere you once belonged as half of a couple.

So what do you do when your faith community doesn’t know what to do with you?

If you’ve felt like slipping out the side door, the research says you’re far from alone.

In 2015, LifeWay Research conducted a study sponsored by Focus on the Family that surveyed Protestant pastors, churchgoing Americans in healthy marriages, and churchgoing Americans who divorced in the past five years. Before the split, the divorcing folks looked like everybody else in the building. Three months before their separation, 7 in 10 regular churchgoers who divorce were attending church once a week or more.

Then the divorce happens. Nearly half of those who divorce (47 percent) leave the church they attended before their separation. Twenty percent drop out of church entirely.

Here’s the part that stopped me cold. Nearly 8 in 10 churchgoers, and 94 percent of pastors, say their church is a safe place to talk about marital difficulties. Yet 31 percent of the divorced churchgoers told no one, which LifeWay’s Scott McConnell called a troubling sign of church culture.

Read that again. The church believes the door is wide open. A third of the people walking through it are keeping their mouths shut.

And for men, the drop-off gets steeper with age. A family profile from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, using 2016 data from the Health and Retirement Study, found that divorced men aged 65 and older had the lowest rate of weekly religious service attendance of any group studied: just 16 percent, roughly half the rate of divorced women.

Somewhere between the front row and the exit, a lot of us are disappearing.

Let’s be honest about the awkwardness. Most of that silence comes from fear. People in a congregation are afraid of saying the wrong thing, so they say nothing at all. Some worry that sitting with you means “taking sides.” Others simply have no script for a grown man who is hurting.

That doesn’t make it hurt less. Sociologists of religion have studied this for decades. Neal Krause, Christopher Ellison, and Keith Wulff published “Church-Based Emotional Support, Negative Interaction, and Psychological Well-Being” in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion back in 1998. A later study from the same research circle, “Does Negative Interaction in the Church Increase Psychological Distress?”, found that negative interaction within a congregation appears to foster or worsen distress over time. When a cold shoulder comes from the people you worship beside every week, it lands harder than a cold shoulder at the office.

A 2009 study by Ellison, Krause, Bryan Shepherd, and Mark Chaves, “Size, Conflict, and Opportunities for Interaction,” added another useful piece. Drawing on the National Congregations Study, which covers congregations of every faith, they found that people who attend very large congregations tend to expect less support, and that congregations without a set time for informal socializing before or after services leave members expecting less support too.

Translation: if your house of worship runs you in and out of service with no fellowship hour, no men’s group, and no time to linger, there’s very little room for anybody to notice you’re bleeding.

I’ve been married and divorced three times. I know what it is to walk into God’s house carrying a story I’d rather leave in the car.

I’m a born-again Christian, and I’ll tell you plainly: my faith has been tested in that pew more than once. During one of the hardest seasons of my life, I’d lost a job after the single worst relationship I’d ever had with a supervisor. My fear of financial ruin ran smack dab into my faith that God had my back. I sat in church that next Sunday, and of all the people in the Bible, my pastor preached on Job.

He highlighted the moment when Job finally gets his chance to speak to the Most High, and God answers him with questions of His own. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?”

Job took a big step back. So did I.

That sermon reminded me that my faith lives between me and God. The congregation is the family that helps me carry it. Some Sundays that family carries me well. Some Sundays they’re awkward and quiet and have no idea what to say. Either way, God has seen me through every trial. I’ve fallen, but I’ve never hit the ground.

When your faith community feels cold, leaving looks like the easy fix. Before you make that call, consider what you may be walking away from.

In 2020, researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published “Religious Service Attendance and Deaths Related to Drugs, Alcohol, and Suicide Among US Health Care Professionals” in JAMA Psychiatry. They followed tens of thousands of health care workers and found that men who attended religious services at least once a week had a 33 percent lower risk of these “deaths of despair.” The authors noted that religious participation may serve as an important antidote to despair and an asset for sustaining a sense of hope and meaning.

Hope and meaning. Those are two things a man in the middle of a divorce cannot afford to run short on.

I saw that hope with my own eyes at a men’s conference at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, where I was a member. Over a thousand men registered for that weekend. In small rooms throughout the church, we stood in circles, held hands, prayed, laughed, and told each other we loved and respected one another. I remember walking past one of those circles and thinking: this is what good men look like.

Every one of those men had a story. Some of them were carrying the same one you are.

Your faith community may not know what to do with you yet. That’s okay. Many congregations are still learning how to love divorced men well, and some of them will learn it by watching you.

Your faith has carried you through every hard season you’ve survived so far. It can carry you back through that door. So walk back in. Sit down. When the mic comes around, maybe this is the week you say it out loud. And if your path leads somewhere new, find the circle where you can say it there.

Your move, brother. Who are you going to tell this week?