AP Photo Beth Moore is photographed in the Living Proof Ministries library on March 17 in Houston.

HOUSTON (RNS) — For Beth Moore, leaving the Southern Baptist Convention was like falling off a cliff and not knowing if anyone would catch her.

At times, she’d walk through the woods near her Texas home and have some pretty candid conversations with Jesus.

“I would say to him over and over, I hope you know where we’re going,” she told Religion News Service in a recent interview. “I hope you know where we’re going, because I don’t have a clue where we’re going, and I don’t know where I’ll ever belong again.”

It’s been five years since Moore, bestselling author and Bible teacher, left the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, a church that had been her refuge while growing up in a troubled home and that gave her a life she loved. Since then, Moore has found a new church home as an Anglican, rebuilt her ministry, written a memoir, recovered from spinal surgery and kept doing what she’s always done — helping women learn how to dig deep in the Bible.

But last month, Moore announced she’d begin winding down Living Proof Ministries, the nonprofit she’s run for 30 years, and will stop hosting major public events. Next spring, she’ll hold her last major event, in Nashville, Tennessee. She plans to still accept some speaking engagements, but it’s the first step toward retirement for Moore, who will turn 70 next year.

“I could not turn back the hands of time,” said Moore, acknowledging that all good things come to an end and it’s time to pass the baton on to younger leaders and to cheer them on. That’s not an easy thing to do — especially for Christian leaders who have long been in the spotlight.

“I’m getting closer and closer to the day that I’ll see his face,” she said, referring to Jesus. “What are we going to do? Take our big old egos with us?”

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Houston in mid-March, Moore sat in the study at Living Proof. Lined with commentaries like the New Interpreter’s Bible, the Anchor Yale Bible, a series of Bible Dictionaries from InterVarsity Press, a host of other scholarly works and numerous translations of the Bible, the study is a one-room theological library.

By her side in the sunlit room with a vaulted ceiling were her trusty Christian Standard Bible and a cup of Starbucks.

Moore said she was undone by the decision to walk away from the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination that had been her whole life. She worried she was betraying the people she loved, even as church leaders and former friends turned against her — mainly because of her outspoken criticism of the actions of Donald Trump and her advocacy for survivors of abuse.

“It’s such a strange thing to have known people so well, and to look across the table at one another, and I mean this both ways, and truly not be able to understand what the other is thinking,” she told Religion News Service. “Honestly, you can’t wrap your mind around it. I thought we were all on the same side.”

Moore has spent a lot of time thinking about the things that divide her fellow Christians in recent years, and how values like telling the truth or loving your neighbors are now seen as suspect by conservative evangelicals. Even repeating the words of Jesus, who told his followers to love God and their neighbors, is now viewed with suspicion.

“What has happened to us?” she said. “We have lost all sense of nuance. Everything is so polarized.”

She said she longs for more focus on discipleship — the idea of being a Christian is not just to be saved but also to be changed and to become more like Jesus in how you act. Being less kind and more hateful – no matter what your party or what side you are on – is not becoming like Jesus.

“We’ve gotten so brutal and so mean and turned into bullies from every side and certainly every extreme. And that could not be more oppositional to carrying a cross and following Jesus,” she said. “To emulate the love and the truth and the grace and the word of Christ, that ought not be idealism.”

Finding a new church was difficult. Though women from all kinds of different churches had attended her events and read her books, almost all of her church experience had been among Southern Baptists. They were her people, her home, the place she felt safe, and the rhythms and songs of the Baptist world helped her make sense of the world. There are times when her Baptist heart still stirs. Like the Sunday when the congregation at her new home church sang “Blessed Assurance,” a beloved hymn of her childhood.

It took her back to sitting with her grandmother and other family members in the pews at First Baptist Church in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where she had grown up.

“The things that were dear are mine forever,” she said. “I refuse to give it up.”

She said the thought of quitting her faith has never occurred to her. “It was too late. By the time all this happened, I was already completely enamored and devoted to Christ.”

Still, she’s not been able to escape the past. About a year and a half after she left the SBC, someone tracked her down and found her on a livestream at her new church. She was in a robe and had been the lector that day, so she was reading the Scripture. The photos went viral. She feared her past troubles would haunt her new church.

“I thought I found a safe place,” she said.

Moore called church leaders, who she said tried to reassure her that things would be all right. She recalled that one of the women in the congregation took her aside and told her the church had her back. “You will never, ever have to fight for yourself here,” she recalled the church member saying.

That incident, she said, reminded her of what she lost. She had so many friends in the SBC and felt no one had stood up for her.

“Sometimes you leave a place, not because you don’t love them anymore, but because you do,” she said.

Even as she plans for the last Living Proof events, Moore says there’s still nothing better than cracking open a good Bible resource and digging in. She believes there’s a difference between teaching the Bible and being a preacher, something she still has no desire to do.

“What I love and feel most called to do is open those pages with a group, encourage them to get into it with me,” she said.