Pew Pressure
Every Sunday morning, there is a phantom that haunts the hallways of thousands of homes.
It’s the “Should.”
You know the one. It’s the voice that whispers while you’re staring at the mountain of laundry you didn’t finish on Saturday, or while you’re nursing a migraine, or while you’re simply trying to find the emotional bandwidth to put on “people clothes” and a “people face.” The voice says you should be in a pew. It says that if you aren’t in a specific building with a specific steeple by 10:00 AM, your faith is somehow leaking out of the cracks of your busy life.
I get a lot of flack for this on Instagram. Every time I post a Sunday reel from my blue porch chair or talk about finding God in the middle of a weed-choked garden, the “Church Police” show up in my comments. They tell me I’m leading people astray. They tell me that “forsaking the gathering” is a spiritual death sentence. So I understand that pressure—the deep, systemic weight of being told that your devotion is measured by your attendance. Even if it is never said directly, you feel it by the worship leader’s disappointment when you have to miss a rehearsal or the head usher’s crestfallen face when you say you can’t serve that week.
But here is the truth we’re going to sit with today: If Sanctuary is a destination or a zip code, then God is only available to the mobile, the healthy, and the rested. If “Church” is a destination we have to travel to, then the single mom, the trauma survivor, and the woman with the chronic illness are effectively locked out of the Kingdom, sentenced for falling away from meeting together.
I’m here to tell you that the walls are a suggestion, not a requirement. Sanctuary isn’t a place you go; it’s a perspective you carry. It’s where your raw, unfiltered reality meets His presence—and that can happen just as easily over a kitchen sink as it can under a cathedral ceiling.
Most of us are nursing a sort of spiritual hangover, and we don’t even realize it. We’ve been conditioned by a “Sacred vs. Secular” divide that tells us God lives in the “holy” buildings—the ones with the hushed hallways and the polished wood—and we live in the “ordinary” world. We’ve been taught that the twenty minutes of a sermon are “spiritual,” while the forty hours of our work week, the midnight feedings, and the endless loop of dishes are just... life. We are instilled with this notion that we have to visit God’s house and sing and pray to beg for his presence among us because we are gathered together there.
This mindset turns our real lives into a distraction from our spiritual lives. We start to feel like we’re “missing” God because we’re stuck at home with the farm goats, the kids, or the never-ending piles of laundry. We think of our domestic chaos as a barrier to the sanctuary, rather than the very place the sanctuary is meant to be built.
For the un-pausable woman, “going to church” often becomes just one more performance on an already crushing to-do list. We have to “get ready” for God. We have to translate our messy, perimenopausal, overstimulated reality into something presentable before we step through those heavy oak doors. But when sanctuary requires a mask, it stops being a sanctuary and starts being a stage.
The “Institutional Hangover” is the lingering belief that God is a landlord waiting for you to visit His house, rather than a Father living in yours. It’s the lie that says holiness is found in the absence of crumbs and chaos. But if the incarnation means anything, it means that God moved into the neighborhood. He isn’t offended by your kitchen sink, and He isn’t waiting for you to “check in” at a specific address before He starts listening.
Biblical “Field Work”
If you look closely at the stories we claim to build our faith on, you’ll notice a recurring theme: God rarely stays inside the lines.
Take Moses, for example. He didn’t find his life-changing sanctuary at a temple or a theological seminar. He found it while he was literally at work, tending sheep on a mundane Tuesday. The burning bush didn’t happen in some kind of a designated holy space; it happened in the middle of a desert, in the dirt, while Moses was likely tired and smelling like livestock. God didn’t tell him to go find a sanctuary; He told him to take his shoes off because the ground he was already standing on was holy.
Then there’s the Road to Emmaus. After the most significant event in human history, the Resurrection, Jesus didn’t head straight for the temple to lead a formal service. Instead, He went for a walk. He joined two confused, grieving friends on a dusty road and had the greatest sermon ever recorded while they were just walking and talking.
In Celtic tradition, there is a concept called “Thin Places”—places where the veil between heaven and earth is so thin you can practically feel the heartbeat of the Divine. For the woman who can’t make it to a pew, these thin places are often found in the most human moments: in the garden where you finally feel grounded, in the quiet of the nursery at 2:00 AM, or in the hospital room where you’re holding a hand and saying a prayer at the same time.
Sanctuary isn’t something we build out of brick and mortar; it’s something God has already planted in the field of our everyday lives. Our job isn’t to travel to it; it’s to recognize that we’re already standing in it.
Finding the Altar in the Ordinary
If we accept that God isn’t confined to a zip code, then we have to change how we view our homes. We have to start seeing our porch chair as a legitimate pew.
For the woman who is overstimulated, chronically ill, or simply exhausted by the demands of an inescapably busy life, that blue chair (or the garden bench, or the kitchen stool) isn’t “Church-lite.” It is a front-line meeting with the Divine.
When you sit there with your coffee and your mess, you are participating in what I call the Liturgy of the Mundane.
We’ve been told that liturgy is something printed in a bulletin, but real liturgy is the rhythm of a life lived in God’s presence. Weeding the garden becomes a physical prayer for growth. Feeding the chickens becomes an act of stewardship. Holding a crying baby at 3:00 AM becomes a vigil more sacred than any candle-lit service.
For many of you, the traditional walls of the church haven’t just been a hurdle; they’ve been a barrier. You’ve stayed away not because you lost your faith, but because you were trying to survive. Maybe the noise of a contemporary service triggered your sensory issues. Maybe the performance of Sunday morning felt like a lie you couldn’t tell anymore. Or maybe the building itself carries the weight of past trauma or the sting of not fitting in.
I want you to hear this clearly: The Sanctuary of the Ordinary is the place where the masks come off. It’s where you can talk with your mouth full, cry without being fixed, and admit you’re tired without being told to pray harder or that you are lacking in anointing. In this sanctuary, you aren’t a guest; you’re a child. And the altar is as close as your own heartbeat.
The Open Door
As part of my doctoral project, I’ve been wrestling with a question: How do we provide a sanctuary for those who have been locked out—or pushed out—of the traditional walls? How do we create a space for the person who loves God but can’t handle the pew pressure?
In a few weeks, I’ll be launching Streams of Grace Church.
This isn’t just another website or a social media group. It is a Digital Sanctuary designed specifically for those of you who need the connection of church without the barriers that keep you out. Whether it’s your physical health, your mental health, a history of trauma, or just the deep-seated feeling that you don’t fit the Sunday morning mold—Streams of Grace is for you.
It is a sanctuary without walls, designed for real life.
You aren’t “away” from the sanctuary because you’re at home today. You are the sanctuary. The Spirit that hovered over the waters at the beginning of time is currently hovering over your kitchen sink. So, go put the kettle on. Take a deep breath. You’re already in church.
The Garden Notes
📚 On the Nightstand
Gerald May’s “The Dark Night of the Soul” translates John of the Cross out of 16th-century mystical theology and into the language of a psychiatrist who spent decades sitting with people in spiritual and psychological unraveling — which makes it unusually well-suited for deconstructing readers carrying trauma, doubt, and depression alongside the faith questions. May is honest about what John left implicit: the dark night is messy, often indistinguishable from clinical depression from the inside, and rarely feels like progress while you’re in it. If you want a companion for the road rather than the source text itself, start here.
🌿 From the Shop
If you want to look at the soil of your heart, I wrote ‘Seeds Weeds and Soul Soil’ with you in mind. Available for free for Kindle Unlimited.
Quote of the Week
Sanctuary isn’t a place you go; it’s a perspective you carry. It’s the radical realization that the veil is thinnest right where your raw reality meets His presence.
The Greenhouse Preview
If today’s article felt like a deep breath of permission, Friday’s Greenhouse is where we move from the “why” to the “how.” For my paid subscribers, I’m opening up the Friday Greenhouse where we’ll be building a “Portable Sanctuary”—including a 3-minute liturgy designed specifically for your kitchen counter and the 5 journaling prompts that will help you map out the “thin places” in your own home. Plus, I’m sharing the first look at our Monthly Field Guide and the Sabbath in the Cracks Tracker—a tool designed to help you stop performing and start noticing God in the grit. Upgrade to the paid tier to join the conversation and get your survival kit for the weekend.
The Closing Question
In the Comments: If we’re honest, most of us have spent years trying to "get to" a sanctuary. But if your current, messy, un-pausable life was actually a cathedral, where would the altar be? Is it a specific chair, the view from your kitchen window, or that quiet spot in the garden? Tell me where your "portable sanctuary" is located this week—I’d love to hear where God is meeting you in the weeds.
P.S. 🎓 Doctoral Project Update: The Return of Streams of Grace
My project proposal has been approved! We are just about ready to open the virutal doors to Streams of Grace Church. We are focusing on how we build a ‘sanctuary without walls’ for the church-less. Want to be the first to know when we launch? Sign up here!