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"I would be genuinely interested in hearing (or reading) why you lost your faith."

Layman preacher I guess is as good a term as any, I often preached at the request of the pastor, or when we went on mission trips I preached as well. I led youth and young adult groups which involved teaching.

As to how I lost my faith, the question doesn't cause me discomfort or pain, any more than probably asking you how you gained yours does.

I can honestly say what triggered it was a desire to learn more about my faith. I wanted to know why I believed what I did, and how the church came to believe what it did, and make sure what I believed was founded on something rather than just because that's what I was taught by someone else.

So I studied church history. I studied the Bible, actually reading what it says rather than reading what other people say it says. Reading books by themselves rather than picking scriptures out of different books and combining them. I started to think about the big questions which I had that didn't seem to be addressed by scripture, think about observations which seemed to contradict scripture.

This took a long time, so there was no event.. no tragedy, no point or no day that I can point to and say "that is when I stopped believing what I used to believe", it was a very gradual process.

And the process hasn't stopped, I don't claim to be an atheist, and since I've changed my views once I'm willing to have them changed again.

But by learning about the history of the Christian church and the history of the Bible and the text of the New Testament itself I learned that the Bible is a very human document full of widely varying viewpoints and discrepancies, and the church is a very human organization.

Not that they are without worth, the Bible and religions show man's history of striving to understand himself and the world around him and have produced much beauty and goodness.

But I also concluded that the god specifically described in the Bible does not exist. There may be some other kind of god but that god is quite different than the one described in the bible.

Which is introspectively interesting to me, a great many Christians do not depend on "Sola scriptura" and still retain their Christian faith, but I could not.