Deconstructing Church

Deconstructing Church

A few months ago, I attended our church’s monthly “men’s breakfast,” which is billed as a chance for the menfolk of our congregation to gather for a meal, fellowship, and prayer. All in all, it was a fairly benign event, with mediocre pancakes and bad coffee, guys talking about guy stuff, awkward Bible study and prayer time, and an elder-led discussion at the end. The thrust of the conversation: how we men can help the church do better, which in this case meant waxing nostalgic about the church’s good old days and asking how to get more asses in seats on Sundays.

The guys ate it up, and there were lots of nods, earnest questions, and Promise-Keeper-esque ideas. Me? I wanted to pull out my hair in bloody clumps and scream.

(Elephant-in-the-room aside: like many churches, our new church has a thing for gender-segregated activities, often aligned with tired and harmful stereotypes about men and women. Because of a number of abuses and tragedies of my youth, I have a profound mistrust of Church patriarchal structures. In one of our BCP theses, I’ll do a deep-dive into how Church patriarchy has furthered systemic violence, abuse, and misogyny. For now, though, I’ll focus on what was heaping coals on my head that watershed Saturday morning.)

My thought: How the fuck, after more than two thousand years of church history, are we still asking how to make Church work better? Surely we’ve figured this out by now!

And thus, the Breaking Church Project was born.

The question kept me awake until I decided to find some answers. Now, I’ll sift through what I discovered more specifically as we explore the 95 Theses of Breaking Church, but I would like to focus on a larger theme that quickly emerged in my explorations: deconstruction.

If you google “religious deconstruction,” you’ll mostly find a lot of discussion about faith deconstruction, where individuals interrogate their faith and their beliefs and see how they align with and/or diverge from their lived experiences and where the world is right now. There’s a lot about good vs bad theology and whether deconstruction is helpful or not, whether good Christians should consume or spit it out, discern their way through it, and so on. You know the language.

In some ways, I felt like I found my tribe. I’ve long been asking many of the same questions, starting in my early teens when an abusive pastor was “forgiven” by the congregation and allowed to keep leading. (Instead of that motherfucker getting charged and convicted like the predator he probably still is. I can’t even Google his name to find out.) Basically, I’ve known for a long time that many of the big issues we’re taught to confront really aren’t that big of a deal and, in many cases, wouldn’t have troubled Jesus at all.

I’ll pause here to say that the roots of my faith aren’t in question: though my beliefs have evolved, I still believe in father, son, and holy spirit, I believe in Christ’s mission, and I believe in salvation. Establishing this baseline is very important, because while a lot of deconstruction content deals with the loss of faith, that’s not why we’re here.

What I and the BCP are trying to do is to deconstruct Church itself. True, you can’t separate faith deconstruction from the discussion, and nor should we (so much bad theology needs to be burned down), but I think there’s a need to tackle the question of institutional deconstruction. Simply put, not many Christians who’re exploring faith deconstruction are saying that the Church needs to undergo the same vigorous critique.

Why? First, because it’s hard to burn down what you’ve loved and wept over, invested your resources and time in, and built up with your bare hands. Second, because the task is huge and involves structural change and demolition, and abandoning Church can be daunting to imagine. And finally, because we’re afraid of what it might mean for our relationships — any true reformer becomes the target for mistrust, censure, abandonment/shunning, and outright threats.

And fear is Church’s best weapon against, well, everything. Fear of hell. Fear of becoming a pariah. Fear of exposure. Fear of ruin of every kind: social, financial, spiritual, and so on. So much of what has been drilled into us has been done so to make us afraid; so much of what we say is reflective of the fear and judgment we constantly experience in the places we should feel most safe. Not that faith should be easy — it shouldn’t — but gathering in Christ’s name shouldn’t be an exercise in fear and shame, either.

If those things drive the Church experience — and they do for so many of us, especially marginalized communities — the only rational response is to deconstruct why that is. And to be clear, the end goal isn’t to reform Church or its corrupt pillars, but to break it down and realign it with the biblical vision for how believers gather and what they do. Maybe we’ll fail, but we certainly can’t fail worse or harder than Church itself has, does, and will.

Keywords: Deconstructing Church; Faith; Deconstruction; Religion; Christian; Christianity; Church; Sin; Corruption; Scandal; Bible; Abuse