I hadn't read the Inferno portion of Dante's classic since I was an undergrad. At nineteen, of course, the freight those first few lines carried would have been utterly lost on me. Now, reading them with thirty-nine-year-old eyes, I wished I could call Dante up and schedule a lunch. I had a long list of questions for him.

Through the patina of condensation on the plane's window, I surveyed the Tuscan countryside below and knew that I had lost the "straight path" and entered a "dense, wild, and tangled wood." Two weeks earlier I'd been Chase Falson, founding pastor of the largest contemporary evangelical church in New England. My fourteen years in the ministry were a church-growth success story. I'd considered myself one of the privileged few the heavens had endowed with a perfectly true compass. I'd known who I was and where I was going, and I'd been certain that one day I would see the boxes neatly checked off next to each of my life goals. I'd liked myself. A lot.

These days, lots of people dismiss you when they discover you're cut from evangelical cloth. Once you've been outed as a conservative Christian, they assume you're a right-wing, self-satisfied fundamentalist with all the mental acuity of a houseplant. Every Christmas, my Uncle Bob greets me at the front door of my parent's house gripping a martini in one hand and a fat Cuban cigar in the other. He slaps me on the back and yells, "Look who's here! Its Mr. EEEeyah-vangelical!" It's disconcerting, but Bob's an idiot and can't help himself.

For many a year, the terms New England and evangelical have been almost mutually exclusive. My church history professor told me that Jonathan Edwards referred to New England as "the graveyard of preachers." Baleful as that sounded, it didn't dissuade me from heeding the call to head east after seminary. My three closest friends were incredulous when I told them about my decision to start a church in Thackeray, Connecticut, a bedroom community thirty-five miles from Wall Street.

"Have you lost your mind? Even God's afraid of the northeast," they said.

I laughed. "It's not so bad. I grew up there."

"But you could go to some mega-church in California or Chicago," they argued.

Truth be told, I wasn't interested in working for a church someone else had built. I wanted to be the pioneer who "broke the code" for the spiritually barren northeast, heroically advancing the cause of Christ into the most gospel-resistant region of the country. As a native, I was certain I knew the cultural landscape well enough to reach the Ivy Leaguers whose homes lay discreetly hidden behind stone walls and wrought-iron gates. A little self-important, but there you have it.

And yet, I had delivered the goods. I'd built a church where, at last count, over three thousand people came to worship every Sunday--a Herculean feat in a part of the world that's suspicious of things that are either big or new.

That world had detonated ten days ago. Gazing down on the terra-cotta roofs dotting the approaching Tuscan hills, I found myself on a forced leave of absence, and chances were good that when I returned home I would be out of a job.