Bart Ehrman, Joshua Harris, and Timmy Gibson spent their working lives inside the church – one as a scholar, one as a pastor, one as a preacher – and all three eventually told the world they no longer believe what they used to teach. That’s not a coincidence you can wave off. When three men who built careers explaining the Bible end up walking away from it, something is worth examining closely.
This isn’t about mocking them or writing them off. It’s diagnostic. If there’s a recognizable pattern behind these departures – and there is – every pastor, parent, and friend watching someone they love drift deserves to know what it looks like before the drift becomes a fall.
The Three Stories Behind the Pattern
Bart Ehrman, Joshua Harris, and Timmy Gibson didn’t lose their faith overnight. Each one followed a slow unraveling that stretched across years, and each unraveling had its own trigger – but line the three up, and the shape of the fall starts to look remarkably similar.
Bart Ehrman and the Weight of Unexplained Suffering
Ehrman’s departure from Christianity had almost nothing to do with the scholarship he’s known for. He trained at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College as a committed evangelical, then spent roughly fifteen years as a liberal Episcopalian before settling into what he now calls agnostic atheism. He’s been consistent on one point: his loss of faith traces back to the problem of evil, not to the textual criticism that made him famous. A world with so much unexplained suffering, he concluded, doesn’t fit with a good and all-powerful God. He now identifies as both a humanist and an agnostic, with no public reversal reported.
Notice the sequence, though. Ehrman didn’t walk straight out of evangelicalism into atheism. He passed through a theologically thinner version of Christianity first – a stop that, for him, turned out to be a waystation rather than a destination.
Joshua Harris and the Life That Stopped Matching the Label
Harris, the former pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, announced in July 2019 – shortly after his marriage ended – that he no longer considers himself a Christian. His own words were direct: “By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian.” He later said he walked out of his Christian community on his own, after recognizing that the way he was living no longer matched what his church held as the Biblical standard. No public return to the faith has followed.
What stands out in Harris’s case isn’t a crisis of ideas so much as a crisis of alignment. The theology didn’t change first – his life did, and the label stopped fitting.
Timmy Gibson and Thirty Years of Routine Ministry
Gibson spent three decades in charismatic and Pentecostal ministry in the Kansas City area after Bible college, teaching and preaching the gospel he’d once given his life to. He now describes that whole trajectory as having run from devoted evangelical to agnostic atheist, and he views Christianity as a man-made myth rather than revealed truth. He runs a wedding-officiant business in Kansas City today, and he’s kept talking about his deconversion publicly, including an appearance on a deconversion podcast as recently as March 2026.
Thirty years is a long time to stand behind a pulpit. Long enough, it seems, for the holy to start feeling routine – and for routine to quietly become hollow.
Once Saved, Always Saved, or Is Salvation Something You Can Lose?
Scripture holds two truths together that look like they’re in tension but aren’t: God keeps those He has truly saved, and the Bible issues real warnings against falling away. Jesus said of His sheep, “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.” (John 10:28-29). Paul adds that nothing in all creation “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). That’s the once-saved-always-saved side of the ledger, and it isn’t a slogan – it’s a promise grounded in God’s own faithfulness, not ours.
At the same time, Hebrews warns soberly about people who were once enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, and shared in the Holy Spirit, and then fell away (Hebrews 6:4-6). That’s a real warning, and the Arminian and Wesleyan traditions have long read it as evidence that genuine believers can forfeit salvation through settled, final unbelief.
The historic evangelical answer to that tension doesn’t split the difference – it reads the warnings as one of the very means God uses to keep His people, and it reads apparent apostasy as evidence that the faith professed was never the faith possessed. John puts it plainly about those who departed from the early church: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they are not all of us.” (1 John 2:19). On that reading, Ehrman, Harris, and Gibson didn’t lose something they once had so much as they revealed, over time, what they had never actually held.
The Common Threads That Predict a Fall
These three stories aren’t a statistical sample, but the overlap between them is hard to miss, and it points to attributes worth watching for in anyone drifting toward the exit.
First, each man’s faith became primarily professional before it ever became personal again – a career, a pulpit, a classroom – and the devotional life that should have anchored that work seems to have thinned out underneath it. Second, each one hit a real crisis – unresolved suffering for Ehrman, a collapsing marriage for Harris, three decades of repetition for Gibson – without a community close enough to hold him through it. Third, in each case the public renunciation came after a long private drift, not before it; by the time the world heard the announcement, the actual departure had already been underway for years.
Jesus described exactly this kind of unraveling in the parable of the sower:
As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away. (Matthew 13:20-21)
Joy without root. Endurance without depth. A fall triggered by exactly the kind of pressure – intellectual, relational, or simply the grind of years – that each of these three men eventually met. None of this means long tenure in ministry, intellectual engagement with hard questions, or personal struggle automatically ends in deconversion. Plenty of believers wrestle with suffering, marriage failure, and decades of routine ministry and come out the other side more rooted, not less. What it does mean is that these pressures are where the depth of our roots gets tested, and a faith that was never planted deep enough to survive the test will eventually show it.
What the Church Should Do With This Pattern
The practical answer is simple to state and hard to live out: don’t wait for the public announcement. Pastors and leaders need people close enough to notice when devotional life has quietly been replaced by professional competence, and close enough to ask hard questions before a private crisis becomes a public one. Churches that treat suffering, doubt, and burnout as topics for a sermon series rather than ongoing conversations are leaving their most exposed members – often the very people teaching up front – to process the hardest questions of their lives alone.
If there’s one safeguard that shows up in its absence across all three stories, it’s genuine accountability – not oversight of doctrine or schedule, but someone with permission to ask how a leader’s soul is actually doing, and press for a real answer. That kind of relationship doesn’t prevent every fall. But it catches far more of them than a pattern of public ministry with no one watching the root.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: Deconversion stories spread fast online, but almost nobody asks why the people most trained to explain the faith are often the first to leave it.