HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, October 20, 2026 – Back when I was a student (and an atheist), I studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany on an exchange program. My German was good enough for basic needs, like going shopping or traveling around the country, but I struggled to understand the more formal German (“Hochdeutsch”, or High German) spoken in class. Noting my distress, a classmate suggested that I could attend any one of Heidelberg’s many churches, where Hochdeutsch was universally spoken. The idea was that I would go to church solely for the benefit of free German lessons.

And so, on my classmate’s advice, off I went to church one Sunday morning. My plan was to wait until all the parishioners had entered the building and then slip in unnoticed and take a seat at the back. I’d also planned to leave before the service was over.

That was my plan.

What I hadn’t planned was not being able to get through the door.

Not that it was barred. Not physically, anyway. After I’d waited for the last of the stragglers to enter, I walked up the church steps and reached for the door. I couldn’t open it. As soon as my hand touched the handle, I felt such a crushing weight of grief that I instinctively pulled back, like an automatic recoil. I stood there for a few seconds trying to make sense of what had just happened and then gave my head a shake and reached for the door again. The same crushing grief flooded over me, only this time I also started to cry.

Being the idiot atheist that I was at the time, I had no clue what was going on. But I did know enough to realize that I wasn’t going to get through the door that day, so I turned and walked away. A few Sundays later I tried again, and again I suffered the same results. Going to church to improve my German just wasn’t going to be an option for me.

From the perspective of a bornagain believer, I now know what happened to me at the door of that church all those years ago: I was being spiritually barred from entering. Scripture describes Jesus as “he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth.” The opening and shutting is a spiritual force, not a physical one. Although I couldn’t see them, a whole host of holy angels was standing between me and whoever in that building was worshiping under God’s protection, and there was no way those angels were going to let me in. I had no place there. Even as someone who saw church purely as an intellectual exercise, I had no place there. It wasn’t for me.

Fast forward to today and the YouTube algorithm that brought me news of a “former evangelical Christian”, now a self-professed Satanist, who enjoys going to church. My first response to the video headline was that this woman had never been a genuine follower of Jesus, because had she been, she would have suffered the same fate as Judas Iscariot within hours of renouncing Jesus. Judging by the thumbnail picture, her bowels were still intact under her portly belly, ergo she’d never been a Christian, evangelical or otherwise.

My second thought on reading the headline was wondering whether she actually was a Satanist or just imagined herself to be (the way she’d once imagined herself to be a Christian).

My third and lingering thought on reading the video headline was that I wasn’t surprised. Not one bit. Given the sorry state of today’s denominational churches, I could very well see a self-professed Satanist sitting in a pew week after week feeling as if she belonged there, because the sad truth is that she does belong there, much more than I do. My personal experience attending various denominational churches since my rebirth is that the woke, social justice-themed services they offer are more attuned to the spiritual needs of a Satanist than a follower of Jesus, which is why I no longer attend church. How ironic that years ago, as an unrepentant sinner, I was spiritually barred from entering a church building, and now, as a bornagain believer, I can’t sit through a service without feeling like an outsider, like the ministers are speaking a language I don’t understand. Spiritually, I’m a foreigner in today’s worldly church. This should not be.

And no, I never did master Hochdeutsch during my time in Germany, but I have since learned to speak God.