Growing up in the country, Tom Tilley spent his childhood running wild in the outdoors, attending camps with church friends every holiday, and enjoying the security of a close-knit congregation.
The only shadow during this sunny time was the pressure to speak in tongues — a sign of the Holy Spirit that was a prerequisite for baptism in his church and securing a spot in heaven.
Tilley belonged to Revival Centres, a fundamentalist Pentecostal church established in Melbourne in the 1950s, and his father was pastor of the Mudgee branch.
So when he decided at 21 to quit the faith, he knew he wasn't just leaving behind a tight-knit community, but also risking a rupture with his family.
It was a life-changing decision – and like many others who have left Pentecostalism, Tilley found himself grappling anew with questions of his identity and his relationship with the world.
Doctrine, disapproval, and darkness
As Tilley recounts in his memoir Speaking in Tongues, his relationship with the church began to change during his teenage years when its rules became more onerous.
A ban on Sunday sport – previously overlooked by his father but now enforced by higher ranks of church leadership – put an end to his representative schoolboy rugby career.
After moving to Sydney to study commerce at Macquarie University, Tilley soon fell afoul of the Revival Centres' rigid doctrine that banned drinking, dancing and "fornication" outside marriage.
Breaking the rules meant possible dismissal from the church, cutting a person off from their friends and family in this life and — as church doctrine held — the next.
When Tilley and his brother Sam attended the Sydney Mardi Gras one year, word got back to the church leaders, who suspended the young men.
Later, his pastor's disapproval of Tilley's conduct in a romantic relationship with a church outsider saw him finally leave Revival Centres for good.
For Tilley, one of the hardest things about leaving the church was knowing he was disappointing his parents.
Another was "being alone and not having any direction," he says. The church services and meetings that populated his week had served as "light posts of connection and community".
In their absence, Tilley says, "it was dark, because I didn't really know anyone or have many connections".
"I was a country kid in Sydney, and I knew I was going to be starting to build a life from scratch. Not knowing where that would go … was kind of scary."
Pentecostalism in Australia
The Revival Centres might have constituted a young Tilley's entire world, but with around 5,000 members at its peak in the 1990s, it was small among Pentecostal churches in Australia.
It was only once Tilley attended other Pentecostal churches that he realised how strict Revival Centres was in its interpretation of the Bible and emphasis on speaking in tongues.
Pentecostalism – a form of charismatic Protestant Christianity characterised by a belief in the gifts of the spirit, such as speaking in tongues and faith-healing – arrived in Australia from the United States in the early 20th century.
The movement experienced sharp growth in the late 60s and early 70s and has since prospered, according to Andrew Singleton, a Deakin University professor who studies religious movements.
While the congregations of other Christian denominations are in freefall, Pentecostal membership has increased in line with population growth since the 1980s.
The 2016 census recorded 260,558 Pentecostals in Australia, including Scott Morrison and his family, who are members of Sydney Pentecostal church Horizon.
Growth in Australia has been driven in part by immigration, thanks to a boom in Pentecostalism in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. According to the census, 36 per cent of all Pentecostals were born overseas.
Pentecostals "demonstrate a high level of religious commitment and practice", Singleton tells ABC RN.
Why people leave
Pentecostalism offers a dynamic and energetic form of worship. People join churches like Hillsong and Planetshakers for the slickly produced music, the direct experience of God, and the promise of healing.
The flipside is a high turnover within congregations. "It's a high-demand form of religious expression," says Singleton. "It's hard to keep going to church each week."
Like Tilley, some people struggle to adhere to the church's restrictive moral code.
"People can often feel like it's exhausting to keep striving for that," says Singleton. They "feel a sense of failure" when they inevitably break the rules.
Departing Pentecostals are part of a movement in the United States known as "exvangelicals", a term coined by activist and podcast host Blake Chastain in 2016.
"Leaving an evangelical community can feel very isolating" and "has profound consequences for the individual," Chastain writes on the Exvangelical website.
Josie McSkimming, a clinical social worker and author, says it's common for people who leave a religious community to feel grief, guilt and fear as they adjust to life outside the church.
But over time, she says, "people's mental health improves considerably once they find a new community and friendship circle where they feel accepted and loved."
'The whole world forgets you'
That was the experience for Heidi Bennett, a mother-of-two from the Central Coast who grew up in Revival Fellowship, a Revival Centres offshoot.
Like Tilley, Bennett says she had a happy childhood in the church, busy with church activities and always surrounded by friends.
When her mother died by suicide when Bennett was six, the church community supported her father and helped raise his three girls.
However, as a teen, she began to chafe under the group's strict rules. Bennett – who is 185 centimetres tall – began to attract criticism for her appearance. Her shorts were too short, her skirt too sheer, or her pants too tight.
When, at 19, she started dating someone outside the church, she was told the relationship could only continue if he came to church and received the Holy Spirit.
The demand was too much for Bennett, who was tired of being told how to live her life. "I never showed up to a church meeting again," she says.
Living in Sydney with no family nearby, Bennett was on her own.
While she was "very lonely for a few years," she says she "never regretted" the decision to leave.
It wasn't until she moved to London two years later that she began to love her life.
"I came alive … I made so many amazing connections and friends," she says. "I feel like my life didn't properly start until I was 21."
A 'revolving door'
Gabby Love says her mum liked to call them "revolving door churches – a lot of people come in, but a lot of people go out as well".
She grew up in a practising Anglican family in the Hunter Valley and joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of God as a teenager.
When she moved to Sydney a few years later, she joined a new Pentecostal church in the inner west suburb of Petersham.
"I liked the spiritual side of it," she says. "It helped me with my own personal faith."
However, she struggled with the church's stance on some social issues.
The church's position on issues such as same-sex marriage led her to leave and join the LGBTQ+ affirming Leichhardt Uniting Church.
It was a difficult decision that cost her the friendships she'd made in the church, but one that was ultimately liberating.
"I felt like I was really censoring myself when I was at the church," Love says.
"I couldn't fully be me and speak what I thought because I knew it didn't align with their values."
Zero tolerance for homosexuality
In Speaking in Tongues, Tilley writes that the church "had zero tolerance for homosexuality – anyone who was gay hid it or left".
Mark Jennings, a senior lecturer at the University of Divinity who has interviewed many current and former LGBTQ+ Pentecostals, found something similar in his research.
Some were cast out, or encouraged to undergo conversion therapy. Others were accepted but excluded from ministry unless they remained celibate.
Jennings also has firsthand experience of the Pentecostal faith, growing up in the Apostolic Church Australia, now known as Acts Global Churches.
After leaving the church several times, he quit for good in 2016.
"I stayed in my Pentecostal church for as long as I did because of the relationships that I had built there," he tells ABC RN.
"The pastor was a good man, and he gave me quite extraordinary support during a really awful marriage breakdown."
But with the departure over time of the pastor and other friends, Jennings felt less at home in the congregation.
"A lot of the stuff that I had always found problematic – most particularly a moral conservatism on LGBTQ+ people and issues – remained or had intensified," he says.
Life after the church
Eighteen months after he left the church, Tilley quit his job in banking and spent a year travelling through Africa and living in Amsterdam.
The decision to leave the church – and change careers – meant he had to rebuild his sense of self.
Travel was central to this process. At home in Australia, Tilley felt trapped. "I felt really bound by the expectations of the people around me," he says.
Away from home, he had the space to "work out what I really wanted to do, what made me tick, the kind of people I wanted to connect with, the things that really mattered to me," he says.
Finding his place in the world became a decade-long undertaking.
"It wasn't until I got my job at triple j … that I really felt like, right, this is my life, this is my career, I resolved that question, and I'm getting a sense of who my people are," he says.
When Tilley's father found himself ousted from Revival Centres, he turned to his eldest son for support.
Today, Tilley's parents and brothers have all left the church, and the family is — once again — close.
Many families don't survive an ordeal like this, acknowledges Tilley, who became a father himself in 2021.
"My heart goes out to any families that are split on either side of any church divide," he tells RN.
Just why his family stuck together when so many fall apart is something Tilley addresses in his book.
"The deciding factor for us, I believe, was that my parents always tried to stay emotionally connected with us kids, even through the difficult years," he writes.
"More importantly, their hearts had stayed open to change."
He hopes to do the same in his new role as a father.
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