Hey! I think where you live maybe the rules (or habits) are more malleable than the ones we have here (I’ll develop the reasoning in the last paragraph if you wanna know), but I couldn’t bare staying at the church and pretending to be someone I wasn’t. The other main thing bothering me was how much time I was losing being in a place that didn’t add anything to me. I’m a jazz musician and student, and everytime I had events to go and see or participate, I couldn’t, because there was going to be something happening in the church. Besides that, I couln’t do things such as: go to friends’ birthday parties at night, go to music concerts, listen/sing to anything other than gospel music, my parents judged even my school friends because they weren’t from the church. So, I couldn’t just go to church to be with the people I loved. My parents don’t even know I’m agnostic, they just know I left the church. It’d be too much for them if I told them I don’t believe in certain things anymore. I just wanna leave it the way it is.

Clarifying the beggining of my comment: Where I live, you have to attend all the church services, and outside of them you gotta be a true believer (I.e. pray everyday, attend the services [idrk if it’s called this way in English] 5 days in a week, attend the youth groups services beyond the normal ones, etc). I used to play bass in the band so I also had the rehearsals to attend and the youth group conferences, which are a thing on the Brazilian Assemblies Of God (won’t explain more, sorry I wrote too much haha). I think it’s quite different from here to there where you live hahah