My deconstruction journey began in my freshman year of college. My zoology professor delivered a series of lectures on evolution. I was mesmerized. Maybe I was asleep when this was taught in high school. That’s possible. The earth was billions of years old. Seriously? Animals, including the human species, developed over a span of millions of years? What?

I stopped by my pastor’s study and asked him about it. His response: “You can’t trust science.”

Seminary was a process of daily deconstruction. My professors challenged everything I was sure of — from the Bible to women and Queers and on and on. My hometown Elders had warned me: “Don’t let them change you.” Well, they did.

Dr John Piet stood on a chair and held a Bible above his head and the lecture table. He then dropped it. The noise and the act itself startled me. Then he said: “Vis, is this how the Bible was given to us?” 

I have been disordering/reordering, to use Richard Rohr’s language, ever since.

For me, deconstruction is like repentance. It’s not a one-time movement. Repentance is a lifestyle. We move through life realizing that we are going to bring hurt into the lives of others. And when we do, we recognize the offense, and we make things right. We do this throughout every single day of our lives. It’s a lifestyle.

Or we do something stupid, something destructive to ourselves and others, and so we stop, and we change our behavior. And this too is an ongoing aspect of living. We don’t stay stuck in our addictions, our dysfunction and our destructive ways. We change because we can. That’s the good news.

“Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand” (John and Jesus). Things don’t have to be the way they are. We can change. There is fluidity in a healthy life.

For me, deconstruction is exactly like that. It’s a lifestyle. Deconstruction is critical thinking. It’s a way to walk through life with curiosity, courage and trust that God is loving and gracious, and not thin-skinned and capricious.

I find that many church leaders want to define deconstruction in terms of doubt. “You doubt the truths we embrace,” is how I often hear it said. I don’t look at it that way. I simply don’t believe everything that others embrace as absolute truth. I may doubt what I believe, but as regards the absolutes, I simply don’t accept them all as true.

I don’t believe that God created the world in six 24-hour days and then rested on the seventh. The Noah and the ark narrative is a great story, but it’s just that, a story. God did not destroy all living things because he was displeased with what he had created. God is not a hothead lacking both restraint and creativity.

The Book of Joshua implies that God ordered a genocide. I don’t believe God ever sanctions a genocide. Not then, and not now either.

And David as “a man after God’s own heart?” I don’t think so.

I’m wrestling with what I believe about a virgin giving birth. I want to believe that, as I love Mary, and the story of Gabriel’s visit is gold! However, I believe that the narrative came late into the Jesus story and is more Greek than Hebrew.

I believe similarly about the cross of Jesus. I do not believe that God needed a human/blood sacrifice to be in relationship with us. That too is foreign to the Hebrew mind and to mine as well. All Hebrew writings denounce human sacrifice as an abomination, as the one action that separated them from the nations around them. What changed?

I believe that Jesus was a gift from God meant as a living word showing us the best way to live our lives. Humankind rejected the gift because it was too hard to unpackage, and asked too much of us. We killed the one who was sent. God raised him, gifted us with a second chance through the presence of the Holy Spirit. What will we do differently, knowing what we know about what others have done since? This is the one question that I wrestle with every day.

The people who scare me the most are those who are certain they know what is true and what is not. That’s not me. I’m constantly rethinking, recalibrating, and reconciling my beliefs with my experiences and learnings. It’s a lifestyle.

In her book Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions, Rachel Held Evans wrote:

It seems that a whole lot of people, both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian and have questions about the Bible, you can’t be a Christian and be tolerant of other religions, you can’t be a Christian and be a feminist, you can’t be a Christian and drink or smoke, you can’t be a Christian and read the New York Times, you can’t be a Christian and support gay rights, you can’t be a Christian and get depressed, you can’t be a Christian and doubt. In fact, I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals.

She goes on – “False fundamentals make it impossible for faith to adapt to change. The longer the list of requirements and contingencies and prerequisites, the more vulnerable faith becomes to shifting environments and the more likely it is to fade slowly into extinction.”

People like me, deconstructors, are pushing the edges of what exactly are the “false fundamentals.” More importantly, what are the “fundamentals” that are true? We’re never going to agree on those. Do we have to be 100% aligned to be in community?

If so, then people like me have no place to be, not authentically at least.

What is it I want? I can only speak for myself as a retired pastor. I’m not the enemy. I have no desire to “empty your pews,” as I’ve been accused of wanting. I want churches to thrive. And my hope is that people who are where I am can find a place to be in the church.

You can start to reach out to me by reaching out to me. Now I’m not talking personally here, but as one of millions. You want to know what people like me are thinking, why we are walking away from something that we have loved for our entire lives. Buy one of us a cup of coffee or a draft of beer and ask us. Don’t assume you know us!

And yes, we should do the same. 

Here’s Rachel again:

Love. It’s that simple and that profound. It’s that easy and that hard. . .Taking the yoke of Jesus is not about signing a doctrinal statement or making an intellectual commitment to a set of propositions. It isn’t about being right or getting our facts straight. It is about loving God and loving other people. The yoke is hard because the teachings of Jesus are radical: enemy love, unconditional forgiveness, extreme generosity. The yoke is easy because it is accessible to all—the studied and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the religious and the nonreligious. Whether we like it or not, love is available to all people everywhere to be interpreted differently, applied differently, screwed up differently, and manifested differently. Love is bigger than faith, and it’s bigger than works, for it inhabits and transcends both…