The Rest of the Story: Deconstructing Deconstruction | Menlo Park Service 10:30 Live Stream

Small group discussion guide for "Deconstructing Faith: A Journey to Authentic Belief"

Bible Passages:
1) Matthew 19:23-26
2) James 2:14-17

Directions:
Begin by reading Matthew 19:23-26 and James 2:14-17.

Observation Questions:
1) In Matthew 19:23-26, what is Jesus trying to convey about wealth and entering the kingdom of heaven?
2) How does Jesus respond to the disciples' astonishment in Matthew 19:26?
3) In James 2:14-17, what is the relationship between faith and deeds according to James?

Interpretation Questions:
1) How does Matthew 19:23-26 challenge our understanding of dependence on God versus self-reliance?
2) What does James 2:14-17 suggest about the role of action in demonstrating our faith?
3) How do these passages relate to the idea of faith deconstruction and reconstruction?

Application Questions:
1) How can we apply the teaching of Matthew 19:23-26 in our daily lives, especially in the context of self-reliance and dependence on God?
2) How can James 2:14-17 guide us in living out our faith in practical ways?
3) How can these passages help us in our personal journey of faith deconstruction and reconstruction?

Well, good morning, Menlo Church, and welcome to the final weekend of our series, "The Rest of the Story," which, as I was thinking about, is legitimately one of the longest sermon series I've ever done in my life. And some of you are like, "Tell me about it," which is hurtful, I just want you to know that. But I hope that it's been helpful along the way, and maybe you've been with us every weekend, or based on the number of people in this room and across our campuses, I'm guessing you've played a little bit of catch-up. But I hope it's been helpful this summer as we've sort of dissected this together.

I also want to offer a special shout-out to our Bay Area campuses in Saratoga, Mountain View, Menlo Park, San Mateo, and those of you joining us online. I'm so honored that you would spend part of your weekend with us. This series has been talking about the stories that many of us learned as kids, but our understanding didn't grow up as we did. And the whole series has been related to something called deconstruction, even though I haven't necessarily specifically called it out today, that's exactly what we're going to do.

If you're unfamiliar, faith deconstruction has become a movement of people more closely examining assumptions around their faith that they grew up with. Oftentimes, and many times, they're leaving Christianity as a part of that process. Even if that isn't your story today, I bet it's someone's story that you know, and I hope that this conversation will be helpful. Mark prayed just a moment ago for this, but we're also thinking about and praying for friends and family members, people that I know many of you are connected to on the island of Maui. As we were grieving and praying and just thinking about people and places that we've been, our family was just literally in Lahaina a couple of weeks ago, and to see those pictures is devastating.

And you may not know this if you're a part of Menlo, but your financial generosity at Menlo, whether we're meeting budget or like right now kind of playing catch-up, 10% of all of the giving that goes towards Menlo or more goes to support the work that God is doing not just in the Bay Area, but beyond around the world. And so if you give to support the work of Menlo Church, actually this week you gave $20,000 to support the work in Maui, to be able to immediately get that into the hands of a partner church that we have there, and relief organizations that are on the ground making a difference. So, thank yourselves, Menlo Church, for taking that step this week. Thank you.

Now before we dive in, I'm going to pray for us and certainly pray for those on the island of Maui. And if you've never been here before or never heard me speak, I pray kneeling, and look, I know that this issue that we're going to talk about around deconstruction is a concern for many, and my hope is that we can humble ourselves, no matter your perspective, no matter how you're entering into this conversation, and we can see a better path forward for ourselves and a faith that grows, or maybe for some of you, the faith that you hope will grow in someone that you love and care about. Would you pray with me?

God, thank you. Thank you that doubt and questions, those are not problems in our faith, those are avenues and vehicles, if we'll see them that way, to better inspect and inject a real faith into our real lives. Would you help us, God, to be able to trust you in a new way today? Would you help us to see just how strong you are and just how much faith that is slowly being formed can still be found in you? It's in Jesus' name, amen.

So, something that I've noticed that's a little bit different in California, and specifically the Bay Area, is the way houses work. They're slightly more expensive, that's a joke. But there is a spectrum between people who have houses that are decades old and they basically just left it alone, and so over the decades, it kind of deteriorates. And then, there are houses where people are renovating them in real time, so they maybe look like they're a little older on the outside, but if you get inside, you can see that work regularly is being done to them.

And then, there are those houses that are demolished, and we build like mansions on top of...I mean, I don't, but like, I see some people who do, right? And you're like, I know those people, they're in my neighborhood, you know? And that is a big thing that all of us see all the time, every day. And there are reasons for all those different decisions, I don't know every specific reason, but I think deconstruction can function kind of the same way.

Now, to be clear, deconstruction as the process of examining and maturing our faith isn't new. For the last 2,000 years, what we call deconstruction today has just been called spiritual formation. And in my metaphor, it's usually the process of renovating the faith home of your childhood faith. But modern deconstruction, in the landscape of identity-driven culture and a race for what is often now called the "oppression Olympics," in that context, it's like a home that we've demolished and walked away from in rubble.

Now, rather than understanding our lives through the framework of faith phases of construction to deconstruction to reconstruction, we settle for simple narratives. We settle for simple narratives that we were lied to by one all-knowing tribe of altruistic pseudo-intellectual people on the internet, for a different group of all-knowing altruistic people on the internet.

Now, there are many things that drive us to this kind of process. Maybe it was a college professor teaching you something you'd never heard before, a romantic relationship that you felt disenfranchised to, a disconnect around...maybe it was a tragedy in your life or the life of someone you love. But somewhere along the way, you decided that growing up meant growing out of the faith that you grew up with.

The problem for many of us is that we believe that we either have to embrace that extreme of abandoning our faith entirely, or the extreme that we just don't look harder at our faith, even when difficult questions come, when the objections rise, we just look away, we just pretend that it's not a problem, we have to investigate. But that isn't an option, neither one of those, really, for a faith that we want to grow up meaningfully in because, as we'll discover together over the next few minutes, a faith we don't inspect, we will likely reject; it's just a matter of time.

For many, it won't be leaving vocally; it will be a slow drift to the back of the room, metaphorically, where we care less and less, until our faith is just an artifact of our childhood.

There are several major reasons that people deconstruct their faith and don't reconstruct it again, and one of the main reasons is doubt. But I have good news: doubt can be development and not just destructive. This is very intuitive in other parts of our life. As we grow up, we learn things about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny that are unquestioned and understood quickly. But over time, our understanding of those characters grows and evolves, and yet we still celebrate those days and milestones.

As a matter of fact, even the Apostle Paul called out this important progression in the development of the faith at the church in Corinth 2,000 years ago when he said, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." To some extent, we need to understand the natural maturation that we are all experiencing everywhere in life will also extend to faith, that we are inspecting along the way, as long as we are integrating that faith into our everyday.

Those words that we just read from Paul about growing up, they come right after the section in 1 Corinthians where he's talking about love. You've probably heard it at a wedding, whether you're a Christian or not, whether you wanted to hear about it or not, right? And it's as though Paul is saying that this idea of growing up and maturing is a prerequisite. It is necessary in order to live that kind of counter-cultural love.

But doubt, it creeps into our process of growing when the answers that we were given in faith don't answer the questions we are facing in life. And we all face that. For some of you, that's right now. You don't understand what you are facing or how God could help. But doubt isn't the enemy; it's what we do with it.

The late, great pastor Tim Keller put it this way: "A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blindly go through life, too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do, will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection."

I don't know about your family, but with little kids, the moment a little while ago when mask mandates dropped, it wasn't really coveted in our context where we lived at the time, but we caught every cold that had been waiting for us for two years at the same time. I felt like I had a cold forever after that. We were being careful, and we were being careful for a good reason. But our immune systems, they needed to play catch-up. And I don't know about your family, but as little kids or maybe even as young Christians, it makes lots of sense to insulate us from some of the harder conversations, from some of the challenges we aren't ready for. But eventually, we have to be willing to engage in some of those difficult things that we weren't ready for before, even maybe before we're all the way ready for it.

There are two ways that I believe doubt can be a part of your development as a person of faith. And the first is when we understand the difference between the foundation of our faith and the authority of our faith. If you've been around for a little while, you've heard me talk about this. The foundation of the Christian faith is the person and work of Jesus, the fact that he really lived, fully God and fully man, really died on your behalf, and really came back from the grave, so that today, even thousands of years later, we can turn from our way, believe, and receive the gift he's made available to us, and choose to follow him and experience this incredible abundant life with him today and eternal life waiting. That's the foundation of our faith; that's the reality that unleashed the early church to go into the world with a message of life-changing hope that can only be found in Jesus.

And the authority of the Christian faith is the scriptures applied in our life. And that might seem like a distinction without a difference, but give me just a moment.

When the way that we've been taught is about how we think about a specific passage or the Bible in general, when that's the foundation of our faith, all it takes is one argument about one story that you either don't know all of the information, don't understand it in context, or feel powerless to defend for our faith, like a house of cards, to become fragile and fail when that's the foundation and not the authority of our faith. When the foundation of our faith is in Jesus, then we can acknowledge, you know what, I need more information about that, I don't understand all of that either, let's pursue it together. We can be glad to know Jesus personally, even as our knowledge grows over time. Questions don't become threats to our faith; they become vehicles to greater faith. Do you see the difference?

The second way that I think doubt can be a part of our development as followers of Jesus is when we understand the difference between closed-handed and open-handed issues. We spent lots of time over the course of this summer studying these stories together, but what I would really encourage you to do is to be careful how many people, how many things you put into the closed-handed, these are non-negotiables of my faith, these are the bare minimums of my faith. Be careful how many things you put in that hand.

Now, it's worth mentioning, for some of you, if you're considering or maybe you're heading into your own process of deconstruction, it's likely because doubt wasn't seen as dangerous when you were growing up. Your questions themselves represented a threat to your faith. And I just want to say, I'm sorry about that. That's not true, and God can handle your questions, no matter how big or scary they are. Doubt becomes destructive when we delay it so long that we end up searching for the same level of certainty in our new claims as we had in our old ones. Deconstruction often trades one caricature of an all-knowing tribe that's worth rejecting for another caricature of an all-knowing tribe that is also worth rejecting.

If you are familiar with the fundamentals of the faith and you're wondering, man, how can I grow a little bit more, or maybe you're not even a follower of Jesus, and you're wondering, I'd just like to know what some of these basic things are, there's a classic that I would recommend to you. It's called "Mere Christianity," it's written by someone named C.S. Lewis. If you're wondering, where could I go learn a little bit more, what are some of those fundamental building blocks of faith, that's a great place to start. It's helpful without being heavy-handed.

Now, keeping your doubts hidden from others, it will keep your faith hidden from your own life, and eventually, like that deteriorating house, you may not see the cracks, but other people will. You can't hide it forever because the faith we don't inspect, we will reject eventually.

Another major reason for the mainstreaming of deconstruction today is the hypocrisy that we see in religious people and communities. And this one is really painful, but the good news is that hypocrisy can humble you; it doesn't just have to harden you if you let it. Let me put this simply: we all know this to be true, churches are filled with hypocrites, even this one. In a place where people who have missed God's standards over and over again, what the Bible calls sin, when those people get together, hypocrisy comes with us. It's why we need Jesus, especially when it feels like failure is fatal in the community of faith, when it looks like honesty is not the best policy. Well, all of a sudden, hypocrisy grows. Hypocrisy always grows faster in the dark.

Having been in ministry as a professional Christian for more than 20 years, I know this far too well, unfortunately. I have lost count of the number of times people claimed to be something, believe something, or value something, only to ultimately be revealed as hypocrites. Early on, this tempted me towards bitterness and cynicism, but life has a way of humbling you, and so do those moments.

Pastor and author Eugene Peterson wrote it this way: "Christian churches are not, as a rule, model communities of good behavior. They are rather to be places where human misbehavior is brought out in the open, faced, and dealt with. That's the way it's supposed to be." I think as we grow older, sometimes we feel the increasing pressure to have it all together, or to at least look like we do, to be perfect and have the perfect answer and never show our cracks. But that's not what Jesus invites us into. And more than that, we should understand just how dependent on him we really are. And when you pretend to have all the answers, you're only depending on yourself.

At one point, Jesus wanted to share this very idea, and he said it this way: "Truly I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven." When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, "Who then can be saved?" But Jesus looked at them and said, "With man, this is impossible, but with God, all things are possible."

Lots of scholars have spent lots of time studying the specific nuances of this "eye of the needle" and a camel trying to figure out what that's all about. But for our purposes, Jesus does a great job of giving us the headline, which is, if you are rich, which you are by nearly every historic and global perspective, you have a uniquely impossible time entering the kingdom of heaven. Now, the problem was the disciples understood that the rich people had an easier time getting into this kingdom, and so they're like, wait a second, if they can't get in, how does this work for any of us? And Jesus reassures them, he says, "What's difficult/slash impossible for you is only possible with God." That was the point.

Jesus welcomes us into a place of humility by helping us see the real scale of our need, that you and I, we did not need a small booklet to get to heaven. We didn't need someone to give us spiritual vitamins. We were dead, and Jesus needed to resuscitate us and give us new life again. That's what the gospel represents.

When our hearts are hardened because of painful experiences and hypocritical people, we will often look for data to fix the disconnect. Maybe we believe the wrong thing, maybe we listened to the wrong pastor, maybe we're in the wrong denomination. But we are often missing a step, even as we download one more podcast or one more book. For many of us, we're tempted to dive into this; we're auditing doctrinal courses without getting our masters in maturity first. More information is easier than more faithfulness. It's not that these conversations or the content can't help you; they can. But we will always be tempted to avoid the difficult work of applying what we already know. That's true for all of us. By embracing new information rather than old transformation.

It's why you hopefully put restrictions on how young children use technology, because they aren't ready for the full access yet, regardless of whether or not they think they are. It grows as their capacity to understand it grows with greater maturity.

Now, if you're wondering where to go for more information on how to apply some of these ancient lessons, and maybe even how to build or rebuild your own faith on the other side of a deconstruction process, I would really encourage you to check out a book called "After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It" by a professor up in Portland named A.J. Swoboda.

Now, perhaps the most glaring example of this hypocritical divide from my younger years was this thing called "purity culture." And a couple of decades ago, in church culture, there was a book that was written called "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," and I've just triggered some of you just by saying the title, and I'm sorry. But it was this idea of how to change approaches to romance and dating. And I remember several local youth pastors when I was a kid teaching these very ideas, passionately preaching them, only to be discovered as men who were compromising personally in those very same areas. Twenty years ago, it hardened my heart; today it humbles me. Because just like we talked about last week, compromise is in all of us. We're all capable of one step and another step and another step and another step but for the grace of God.

So, where have you written off God because sinful people reminded you that they were sinful? Where have you stopped examining faith because trusting someone else to help you with it feels impossible? I get it. But remember, a faith we don't inspect, we'll likely reject. Just putting the earmuffs on and the blinders on is not the answer.

I also want to add one more disclaimer around hypocrisy, and that is, if the way you experienced that showed up as abuse in the church or from church leaders, please don't face that battle alone, whether God forbid it was recent or a long time ago. It's never too late to get help. We partner with an organization called Zero Abuse to help make Menlo the safest place that it can be and to help make sure that even if it was another church, this can be a safe reporting path for you to get help. Take a step now.

The third reason that I want to talk about as to why people are deconstructing their faith is politics. And, yeah, for sure, but here's the thing, politics only have as much power as you give them. Politics can actually motivate your faith and not just manipulate it. You are more than a voting block. You are bigger than a party, as long as you believe that to be true of yourself.

I don't know if you've noticed this lately, but things have gotten a little tense in America recently, have you noticed? And the days of political collaboration across party lines and charitable discourse between people with opposing views, they feel like distant memories, never to be seen again. And the way the church in America, capital C, has responded has not always been helpful. I don't know if you've noticed, for many that grow up in church contexts, there is a localized assumption in each church about which political party your church tradition or denomination aligns with, and the agendas that flow from your political party are accepted as doctrinal non-negotiables.

Now, here's the thing, if you're like, "Phil, when are you going to say the thing in your sermon that I want to write you an email about?" It's right now, okay, so just get your phone out. Here's the thing. The problem is that neither political party in America has the moral high ground in the Kingdom of Heaven. We seek to make the compassion of Jesus into one political party, advocating for the poor, the disenfranchised, and the refugee, while ignoring the convictions of Jesus. The other major political party takes the convictions of Jesus towards conversations of social issues, personal responsibility, and the unborn, but often without the compassion of Jesus.

If you can't acknowledge the disconnect between your political party of preference and the person of Jesus, it's time to look closer at both. I told you we should have political convictions and we should vote those convictions, but there are going to be some of us that follow Jesus and are a part of Menlo Church that are Democrats, some of us who are Republicans, some of us who are independent, and we can still follow Jesus together. I think it will actually help us follow Jesus together better when this isn't stated explicitly; we create a wake of evangelicals who can't see how to reconcile this issue in their personal faith.

The Apostle Paul, writing to a young pastor in the first century, clarifies the posture that we're all called to have as Christians in our culture. He says, "First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way." That means the leaders that you voted for, you should thank God for, and pray for. The leaders that you didn't vote for, you should thank God for, and pray for.

That means the call to a loud, social-media-forward cancel culture life is at odds with the peaceful, quiet, godly, and dignified posture that we are all being formed into by the work that God is doing in us as followers of Jesus. In order to combat political extremism and the fact that, in America, this is just a true statement, politics has become the new religion of choice, period. In a world where we are trying to combat that, we must stop picking teams because it turns out the lesser of two evils is still evil. And so, you can acknowledge the weaknesses and worries you have with your team, even as you vote for them, even as you have conversations, even as you demand more from our elected officials.

Finally, as a part of inspecting our faith, I want to challenge you to consider what areas of faith pursuit come easily to you and what ones will require more work, but it's worth the effort to do it in the first place, even as you maybe pursue a reconstructed faith for yourself or advocate it in the life of someone else.

There are three spheres of the Christian life that we live if we are followers of Jesus, but we don't always know their names and we don't always function with all three of them in view. And the first one is called orthodoxy, which is right living and/or right thinking and right believing. This one is really important to Presbyterians; if you didn't know that Menlo is a Presbyterian church, we are real pumped about orthodoxy. We spend lots of time thinking and praying and focusing on, and we should. In the book that I mentioned earlier, A.J. Swoboda offers this important clarification: "Faith is a gift; beliefs are not. Forming beliefs takes time and often hard work."

And while this is true, a faith that only lives here becomes detached from life and the implications of our beliefs. You know people like this; I know people like this. They can break down everybody that they've read, they can break down all kinds of different ways that they think about or believe things, but that's where it stops. You're like, I would never know by anything other than your intellect that you're a follower of Jesus. Orthodoxy alone is not enough.

The second sphere is orthopraxy, which means right living. This one focuses specifically on how those thoughts and beliefs shape the decisions that we make and the involvement that we have in the areas of justice, righteousness, and applied mercy in our daily life. Formation that exclusively focuses on this ends up looking more like a social justice pursuit that wants the world to approve of it and not necessarily God. And so, as a result, we can jettison every controversial belief, every controversial thought of Jesus or core belief that we had before. And we know people like that, too. People who are passionate about serving people, who love a specific cause that they're a part of, but it has become detached and disconnected. They don't do it because God told them to do it; they'd do it because they want to do it. That's where their belief stops, and the social justice movement, called the social gospel movement in the early 20th century, left churches in Europe completely destroyed because orthopraxy without orthodoxy is destructive.

And finally, orthopathy, or right feeling and right affection. Every pursuit in our lives has corresponding emotions, especially our faith. Without emotional presence to our beliefs and behaviors, they become cold and compassionless. Your feelings and my feelings, they should never steer our lives, but we need them as God steers our lives. What are you actually passionate about? What actually moves you? Fellas, let me just put it this way: if you are more interested in your fantasy football team as a passion subject than the savior of your life, you may have an orthopathy that's been redirected away. It doesn't mean we can't be passionate about other stuff; it means, God, would you make me most passionate about you?

As a matter of fact, one of the movements that I see in our nation and around the world is an orthopathy where high emotionalism and worship, high emotionalism and gathered faith like this, is so fun and so cool and so electric. But it's disconnected from a thinking, thoughtful way of pursuing Jesus, and it's disconnected from a life where we are thoughtful witnesses in our everyday. We need all three of these things. Each of these three needs to be understood as layers of our faith. Too much or too little of any of them is a problem. It's about the three of them coming together.

And look, I get it, this series and this talk, it can't solve all of your faith dilemmas, but I hope it has provided some breadcrumbs for you, some breadcrumbs for your own faith, some breadcrumbs for your kids or your grandkids, for your neighbor, for your coworker, for somebody that you have a conversation with. You go, "Oh, have you read this book? Can I have a conversation with you about this thing I've been listening to?" I hope that it gives you something so that the faith that God really wants to be formed in your life through the fight of your life, you can find in him. Flannel graph faith may have gotten you to this point, but what if God has something better for you ahead? Something that requires effort and energy and focus, something that, even for you, as you think, "I'm pretty connected to one of those things you talked about, but there's another one I really need to grow into," what if this is an invitation from your Savior to grow into that very thing today?

Can I pray for you?

God, we are always living in a world with crisis and tragedy. As we think about our friends and family on the island of Maui, we're always living in a place of tragedy where we're trying to know who to vote for and will it make a difference. And how do we navigate this life in our moment without cynicism taking over? And, God, I would just say, we are so profoundly, profoundly, profoundly dependent on you. If we will realize how much we need you in moments like this, and God, would you free us up so that the choice in front of us of faith is not, "I'll be a stupid Christian or a smart atheist," but that, God, we can pursue you with our whole heart, our whole mind, our whole life, our whole affection. My God, you can handle our questions; you can handle our objections. God, free us so that Jesus as our foundation and your word as our authority could help us be people whose faith is built for the long haul. That people who see us at work, people who see us in our neighborhood, even family members, God, who are not walking with you, they would say, "I know some people that don't have all the answers, but they have deep convictions as they continue to explore them, even with me." God, give us that conviction together to be the safest place for people to find you in faith construction, faith deconstruction, faith reconstruction. It's in Jesus' name, amen.

1. "What if this is an invitation from your savior to grow into that very thing today?" [59:32]
2. "Keeping your doubts hidden from others will keep your faith hidden from your own life." [43:06]
3. "Hypocrisy can humble you, it doesn't just have to harden you if you let it." [43:42]
4. "Your feelings and my feelings should never steer our lives but we need them as God steers Our Lives." [57:19]
5. "We must stop picking teams because it turns out the lesser of two evils is still evil." [54:18]