Why Deconstruct?

**Note: For those of you who remember the phantom in my laptop…when I first typed the word “deconstruct” this morning, it came out “deconsuc”. 🙂

Among the lingo that surrounds me (and that I use frequently) is the word “deconstruction”. A lot of us are using this word to describe our spiritual walk as an attempt to get real about our faith. And what it usually means is that we are removing the institutional forms of Christianity from our lives, and/or leaving those institutions behind, without forsaking our faith.

Deconstruction in this context can be a very frightening word for a lot of Christians, especially a lot of spiritual leaders. There is an institutional structure that has propped up the church for many centuries, and to talk about “deconstructing” that, without proper context, can easily sound like sacrilege, rebellion, heresy, and a lot of other undesirable nouns.

For me, eight or nine years ago, if someone had talked to me about deconstruction this way, I’d have looked at them like they were crazy. Then I would have avoided them like the plague. I wouldn’t have had anything to do with many of the online friends I currently have reading this blog, because I would have thought you (and your blogs) were just plain dangerous to the church.

And now I are one. 🙂

So why? What is the point? Why do so many people feel the need to “deconstruct”?

Perhaps a way to bring understanding is to use a historical example. By the time of the advent of Christ (which we celebrate this month), Judaism had become a very elaborate religion. God had given them the Law (Torah), but over time, in the interpreting of the Law and trying to figure out how to live what God had intended, people began to feel the need to come up with new laws to help them keep the Torah. We would call this putting a hedge around the Law…moving the boundary further back in order to make absolutely certain that it didn’t get crossed. For example (and this is a primitive analogy), when the law said not to do any work on the Sabbath day, they would come up with specifics about what was called “work”–taking a certain number of steps, or doing certain types of tasks. All these little rules formed a hedge around the one rule to make sure it was kept. By the time of Christ, there were so many hedges, so much added on to the basics of the Law, that many people were missing the heart and intent of the Law because they were getting hung up on the semantics. All the additional structures were clouding the substance.

Enter the rabbi Jesus. Although He was God incarnate, His very presence rattled the cages of the religious system. By earthly standards He shouldn’t have been a rabbi because he left the educational system too early. The disciples He called were completely unqualified to be such. And He offended the religious wherever He went, both by His words and His deeds. But in His own words, “I have not come to abolish the Torah, but to fulfill it.” If you study His earthly ministry and the things He taught (especially the Sermon on the Mount), you’ll see a classic example of deconstruction. Jesus life, ministry and teachings deconstructed the extra baggage the religious Jews had tacked on to the Law, and then clarified the heart of God within the Law. (And then, of course, He fulfilled the Law by giving His life and ratifying a new covenant.)

I see something similar within our religious Christian structures today. We have the basic truths of Scripture and the principles of our faith, but over time we’ve built up so much structure with our institutions (many of which were established to serve good purposes) that we’re missing the point in many, many ways. Somehow we’ve confused the structure for the substance, and we spend too much time majoring on the minors. And if you take an honest look at the church today compared to when the church was born…you’ll see a stark difference in the amount of power in which we walk compared to the early believers. Too much has been lost in the translation.

And this is where deconstruction comes in.

Many of us are realizing that underneath all this clutter is a real, vibrant, life-changing, world-changing adventure to be found in following Christ. So we are, piece by piece, deconstructing the excess baggage, the stuff we added on over the years, in a quest to rediscover the heart of our faith. Sometimes the pieces we remove raise a fuss among other believers, and I think the reason for this might be that we have put our trust in the structure for so long that we fear that we might destroy ourselves in the process. But that’s not what the deconstruction is about. It’s not about destroying the church; it’s about making it real again. It’s about digging through all the clutter to find Jesus again, to find the heart and soul that first made this faith so powerful in the first place. It’s about getting back to what is truly necessary, and what the church really is about.

So deconstruction is not a threat to the church. In my opinion, it may be one of the greatest allies the church has at this time. For in this process, my hope is that Jesus will help us reclaim our legacy, our inheritance, our birthright as the children of God.