Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto-based Canadian writer, filmmaker, and researcher whose work moves across politics, history, faith, institutions, and the ways systems shape ordinary life. His writing has appeared in Canadian Dimension, The Galway Review, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety.
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The Most Welcoming Church Will Let You Leave
09-01-2026
The view of Mission San Jose from one of the exterior buildings, May 21, 2021, San Antonio, Texas. Credit: Reuters Connect/Edwin Remsberg/VW Pics via ZUMA Press Wire
Churches are obsessed with doors. Churches bless these doors, paint them red, hold them open, photograph them, and put welcome signs on them. We tell the frightened person, the estranged child, the gay man, the addict, the doubter, the refugee, the person who has been made to feel impossible: Come in; there is a place for you here.
I believe in that sentence. But to the end of that greeting we should add: “and you can leave whenever you want.”