The apostle John makes it clear: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us” (1 John 2:19).

To abandon the bride of Christ is not a side path in the Christian life—it is to abandon Christ Himself. There is no way around this truth. You cannot sever yourself from His people and pretend to cling to His Person. The bride and the Bridegroom are inseparably joined. Reject one, and you reject the other.

For years, Jen Hatmaker has been on a slow, steady march toward this very point. The warning signs were always there. She was once paraded as a darling of Evangelical women’s ministries, a bestselling author, published by the SBC’s publishing arm, Lifeway, a podcaster, even a brief HGTV star. Yet beneath the bright veneer, compromise grew like mold.

Her affirmation of homosexuality was the first public crack, justified conveniently when her own daughter announced she was a lesbian. Soon came her calls for “inclusion,” her denouncements of biblical teaching on marriage, her cozying up to liberal “pastors” who deny the cross, and even her flirtations with a feminine “god” that bore no resemblance to the God of Scripture.

In 2022, Hatmaker expressed that viewing Jesus as a male makes it difficult for black, brown, and LGBT people to feel safe around Him.

So the writing has been on the wall the whole time. Each step was explained away as compassion, while it was excused as “following Jesus into love.” But love without truth is not love.

In her latest interview with Time, Hatmaker has cast aside the pretense. She admits plainly she has left the church, and she doesn’t know if she will ever return. She says she needs “a break from the machine.”

She describes her upbringing—her father a pastor, her husband a pastor, her whole life under the steeple—as “indoctrination,” and she says she knows “too much” to ever be a part of it again.

What does this mean in plain terms? It means she has divorced herself not only from her husband but from Christ’s bride. Of course, like every good liberal feminist, she blames patriarchy, misogyny, purity culture, “body shame”—every conceivable bogeyman—while refusing to face the simple, piercing reality.

Her marriage failed because of sin.

And sin cannot be healed by rage at the church, by reinvention, or by running away. Sin can only be healed by repentance and faith in the crucified and risen Christ. But instead of falling on her face before God, Hatmaker has chosen to stand up and point her finger at men, at doctrine, at structures, at anything and everything but herself.

It is telling that her bitterness toward biblical marriage has morphed into bitterness toward marriage itself…and bitterness toward the bride of Christ. She says the church has “idolized” marriage and thereby ruined it.

She paints herself as the victim of a system rather than a sinner in need of grace. Her theology is not centered on Christ crucified—it is centered on Jen Hatmaker vindicated.

And of course, her story ends exactly where all public apostasies end. We have seen this script before, played out by countless others over the last decade. Hillsong’s Marty Sampson to Christianity Today’s Mark Galli.

The road always leads to the same intersection—an embrace of everything God hates. Same-sex “marriage.” Abortion. Feminist theology that dethrones God and enthrones the self. A Jesus who isn’t the sovereign Judge of the nations but a relaxed, permissive therapist nodding along to our every desire.

This is not new. It is the same old rebellion against God, but dressed up in trendy attire. Israel did this when they traded Yahweh for Baal. The early church faced it when false teachers crept in to proclaim “another Jesus.”

The Reformers battled it when Rome sought to drown the gospel in ritual and indulgence.

And today, we face it in the polished words of deconstructing influencers who weep into microphones about how hard purity culture was, then laugh off biblical authority with a THC gummy in hand.

Jen Hatmaker’s story is not just her story. It is a parable of our time. A warning shot to a church that thinks it can flirt with compromise and not reap corruption. “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Gal. 6:7). She has sown rebellion, and the harvest is plain.

I read her words and feel grief—not just for her, but for the countless women who have followed her voice into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. They will read her memoir, nod along, and believe that rejecting Christ’s church is the path to healing. But outside the vine, there is no life. Outside His body, there is only death.

She says she may never return. And unless God grants repentance, she will not. The church was never her prison—it was her lifeline. And by cutting it, she has expressed her severance from the only hope she ever had. Christ.

You cannot love Christ but hate His bride.

This is what apostasy looks like in real time. Not a dramatic renunciation of Jesus’ name, but a steady, smiling, therapeutic dismantling of His truth. And behind the smile lies a sobering reality. When you abandon the bride, you abandon the Bridegroom.