On Sunday (May 17), songwriter and former evangelical worship leader Michael Gungor took to social media to share that he spent the morning singing in a church choir near his home in Pasadena, California.
Gungor, who rose to fame in the early 2010s with his band’s award-winning album and title track “Beautiful Things,” publicly deconverted from Christianity some years ago. Nevertheless, since that time, Gungor has expressed continued interest in worship and worship music, albeit defined by his new set of beliefs.
“When I say ‘worship,’ I’m not talking about the shamey, homage-paying to some other being somewhere else,” Gungor said in 2021, “but the experience of love and connection that can happen when people get together and sing to their Source.”
In 2023, Gungor revealed that he was searching for a church to attend that would “have enough spaciousness to allow someone like me, who doesn’t necessarily believe in the exclusivity of any one religion but is open to God everywhere.”
In a new social media post, Gungor reflected on his experience with one church.
“I spent the morning singing in the choir and leading a song at a sweet little church near my hometown in California,” said Gungor in a caption beside a picture of himself wearing a choir shawl. “This pic would have surprised me even a few years ago, as I spent a lot of years decisively outside of any formal church walls. But things have been shifting for me.”
Gungor expressed that throughout his deconstruction process, he has “seen a lot of people set free from restrictive religious containers and oppressive communities, and that’s been beautiful.”
“But I’ve also noticed that a lot of us just end up wandering around by ourselves outside the camp,” said Gungor. “And there’s something that feels off about that to me as well.”
Gungor expressed that he has been “increasingly compelled by the importance and beauty of ritual and communal spirituality.”
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“Early on in my search, I was pretty idealistic. I hoped to find a community of people that was as close to perfectly aligned to my own perspectives and values as possible. But I never found anything that matched exactly,” he recounted. “And even in the spaces that were more aligned on paper than others, I also found the simple truth that egos are going to do what egos do, regardless of what people say they believe or how enlightened their values seem to be on the surface.”
