Deconstruction

I know, I know. It’s a big scary word. But hear me out. I grew up a church kid. While other kids were playing tee ball, I played the prayer corner. While other kids played mommy and daddy, I was playing alter calls. (alter calls are when you repent for sins in front of the church on your knees in prayer…it’s…fun) While kids were playing superheroes or cops and robbers, I fantasized that God would call me to go on mission trips to tell poor kids about Jesus and then they would kill me. (You know….fun) While 18-year-old kids tried to go clubbing or making out behind the bleachers, I was planning my second mission trip and leading a Christian club at my school. Yeah, I know, I was a rebel. People always looked at me as a good person but honestly, we never had time to do anything else. Church stuff kept us busy or that’s what we told ourselves. But looking back on it I wasn’t any more obedient than any other kid. I was never more in touch with God than anyone else. I just stayed close to places people associated with God. I knew bible verses like kids these days know phone apps.

I remember the world being perfect. Growing up in church, everything the preacher said was right. Everyone in my world agreed on everything. The Bible made sense. God was all-powerful. People who left church no longer had real faith. Bad people always got what they deserved. Good people were always delivered or helped in some way. Prayer always worked and if it didn’t then those stories were only talked about for a minute. The bad times were pushed aside as testing moments for deeper spirituality. It was like we were afraid God wouldn’t answer more prayers if we dwelt too long on His unanswered prayers.

I’m older now. Things are more complicated when you know the full story. King David wasn’t that great of a guy. King Solomon was wise but ran his people into the ground until they had nothing left to give. Samson who was the strong human alive was a legit jerk. All the heroes I modeled my life after turned out to be the worst of the worst people. Also, my allergies are trying to kill me. Everything gives me diabetes. (Apparently, you’re not supposed to eat 18 bags of gummy bears in one sitting). Good people do the most evil things behind closed doors. Evil people aren’t so bad they just think differently. So most things aren’t a matter of good or evil but of how you treat people. The things I thought were bad to do were just tradition and taboo, not sins. In fact here are list of things I thought were sins but are not actually in the Bible at all.

Smoking, drinking alcohol, partying, desiring women sexually (we called it lust but its just basic biology, it’s not a sin, obviously), listening to non church music, dating outside your race (more of a taboo not a sin. Church people aren't racist but a lot of people share the race of their pastor, white men tend to only listen to white men, black men tend to listen to mostly black men, and women are all of over the place. This is mostly just my experience, not concrete numbers. However this isn’t a sin either, just a taboo.), not paying tithe (10% of your earnings), There were always a million sins you would need to avoid. In fact, for me, Christianity just became a sin avoidance therapy group. Of course, the best Christians lived in constant worry of sin. You weren’t really saved until you were never good enough or you were so good it was downright impossible for you to ever sin again. (Which is a real sin by the way because…pride…)

You might think I mean this all in a negative way. But I don’t. I’ve spent countless hours listening to one person tell me about a God you can never see. It’s just the truth of my life. This is where I grew up and came from. And then one day I walked away from it all. Here is the thing that people don’t tell you about deconstruction. Most people aren't deconstructing away from faith, you’re deconstructing your faith without one way of seeing God. Apart from your usual circles, the scope of faith is massive and endless. There is no one way of understanding God or the Bible. Everyone sees the same bible verses differently and God doesn’t correct them. In fact, in the Bible, it says God sends rain on the just and the unjust.

I have deconstructed my faith to see the world as it is and not as I want it to be. To see God as He is and not how people say He should be. To see myself as I am and not what I was. Don’t get me wrong I still pray at night and I still feel terribly guilty If I don’t read my Bible on a consistent basis. Christianity taught me more guilt and shame over my weakness and very little boasting as The Apostle Paul talked about.

Here’s the thing, deconstructing your faith doesn’t make you a better christian. I’m not more spiritual than the churches I used to attend. It doesn’t make you more right than anyone else. If anything I find that I can see how wrong I am about things more often. I remember one day I was at my moms house with a few of her friends. They were the church mothers I grew up with. They have no idea but as we talked about life and old times I marveled about their faith and how strong it was. It made me see that my own faith had so much more room to grow and I still have more to learn. No matter how much I read and grow church mothers still have the best lessons about life.

What I’ve come to understand through deconstruction is that disagreements don’t mean disunity. Just because I think differently doesn’t mean I have to hate people who don’t like me. The media teaches you about that hate. Social media feeds off that hate. Politics is a breeding ground for destroying each other for being different. But Jesus doesn’t. Take the disciples that Jesus chose. Peter was uneducated. Matthew was a tax collector who everyone hated back in that day. A few of the guys were zealots who were crazy devout to their religion and disagreed with everyone. There was a prostitute who kept coming back to interact with Jesus’s teachings. A teacher of the law, Nicodemus called him Lord.

Jesus was a deconstruction monster. Every person around him was forced to deconstruct the way they saw themselves, each other, and the old testament. Even the way they saw God changed. For the first time in history the spiritual children called God Father. So I’m not saying that everyone should join me and deconstruct your faith. I’m not saying that I’m a perfect christian because I don’t go to church every Sunday. That’s not the point of saying you’ve deconstructed. The point of deconstruction is understanding that everyone is wrong about something. We just never talk about it. Oh and Adam was wrong for blaming Eve for why he ate the fruit, David raped Bathsheba, Paul was not right about everything he wrote. In fact some of the things he wrote were not his writings. Someone just put his name on it and most people just accept it because its impossible to know who wrote it.

Literally Paul wrote “I don’t allow women to lead men” and then in another book wrote, have the apostle Priscilla read my letter aloud to everyone and thank the apostle Junia. (WOMAN LEADERS). That book called the Bible is complicated. May we all give each other grace for the way we learned it.