I Have Decided to Follow Jesus (Right Our the Back Door)
You’re Not Deconstructing, You’re Growing, Part Five
This morning, I read an article about how quickly AI answers our questions when we type into a search engine. We used to have to scroll and click through multiple results to find what we were looking for and very often, we would end up down some rabbit hole that we didn’t know existed.
This pursuit would expand our minds and help us to discover new questions and answers that we weren’t even looking for, much like going to a library or talking to several people once did. When we just read the AI summary and close the app, we close ourselves off to the experience of discovery and kill our curiosity.
That’s the difference between stage 3 and stage 4 faith. Stage 3 can be fine, as long as it doesn’t grow toxic, but it’s a summary of the work done by others. Stage 4 asks us to do the work ourselves.
As children, our parents, teachers, and pastors offer us up short summaries of the answers to our questions, like the AI summaries (stage 2). Then as teenagers, we test these answers but also feel the pressure to conform to our community (stage 3).
Churches really struggle with what to do with people after this point, because stage 4 is individualistic, but the church is communal.
Over the last several decades, the solution for adults has been small groups. I was once a strong proponent of small groups, but about a decade ago, I started to sour on them. Something didn’t sit right with me.
Small groups often have the effect of keeping us in a stage 3 faith. Instead of helping us grow and mature, they often promote conformity and reinforce the Sunday school content we got when we were 8.
People leave the Church for a lot of reasons, but a big reason is that the Church actively prevents the one thing they’re supposed to do.
One day, a man went to Jesus and said, “I’ve done all the things. I’m a good person. I sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, and served on all the committees, but I feel like I am missing something. What else must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus responded, “Go and sell all your possessions, give the proceeds to the poor and come and follow me.”
The man went away sad, because he had great wealth. (Matthew 19:16-22, my paraphrase)
We often make this story about wealth, but I’m not sure it is. Fowler called stage 4 the Individuative-Reflective Stage, today it is more commonly called “deconstruction.”
“Leave it all behind and come, follow me.”
Many people choose not to leave stage 3 faith behind and those who do find stage 4 can be lonely and challenging, but would never go back.
Christian deconstruction often begins when we choose to follow Jesus but realize that many of the answers that we were given over the years don’t align with his teachings.
Deconstruction is not demolition. It is the deliberate, careful examination of what we believe. It is not walking away or giving up when questions and doubts come up, nor is it converting to a different constructed religion. It is the rejection of the AI generated answers and the intentional search for truth.
It involves the deep study of Scripture and scrutiny of the doctrines and traditions that we inherited. Where did they come from? How did they develop? Are they merely justified by Scripture or are they the full expression of Scripture?
It is discipleship.
It is not done with arrogance, but from a posture of humility and the pursuit of righteousness. It is the asking, seeking, and knocking that Jesus invites into.
It is the willingness to say, “I was wrong,” and turn to go in a new direction. It is repentant.
Working through this stage requires us to flirt with heresies as we question the teachings of our Sunday school teachers and pastors, the Church, and the Bible. This makes participating in church difficult, as we become resistant to the conformity that church life often demands.
In my book The Alt King is Born, I explore believing in the virgin birth not because of what someone told me, but because that’s who I believe God is. The only way we get to the place of believing the latter is by rejecting the former. Sometimes we sit in that space for a long time.
The beliefs of a person doing the work of the individuative-reflective stage will always be in a state of flux as we follow Jesus all over the place. Jesus was not found in a fixed location. “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20, NRSVue)
The challenge is that even though this is individual work, it’s very difficult to do alone. A few years ago, I came up with a plan to develop cohorts for people to journey together through this wilderness inspired by John Wesley’s class meetings. “How is it with your soul?” begins a different kind of discussion than “So, what did you think of the video?”
The more I think about the roots of evangelicalism in the Great Awakenings, their language makes sense: “personal relationship with Jesus” and being “born again,” is the language of people who leave behind an inherited faith and enter into something new and different.
Some people are fortunate and have a smooth transition from stage to stage 4, but many people enter into stage 4 when they leave the oppressive state of Toxic Christianity, but what happens when an entire culture breaks free from the bondage of Toxic Christianity? We get periods like the Enlightenment.
The individuative-reflective stage of faith goes hand in hand with the idea of individual liberty and of liberalism.
Toxic Christianity views liberalism as the enemy of Christianity, it is not. It is however, the cure for Toxic Christianity.
I’m running this parallel to my series on The Bible and the Plot to Destroy American Democracy because this is what I want us to see. It’s fine to recognize the founders as Christians and even claim that they expected the United States to be influenced by Christian ideas, as long as we consider that they were not stage 3 Christians.
In Common Sense, Thomas Paine made the biblical argument for independence by reminding the people that kings were not God’s plan.
Stage 4 Christians pursue knowledge and the renewing of their minds. They believe that through this work, they allow the Spirit to work within them to make them holy and go on toward the next stage.
Next Week: Part 6, Blessed Assurance
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