Doug’s Deconstruction Journey
My deconstruction journey started many years ago before I knew to call it deconstruction. I labeled it repentance. I know that word is loaded. Many of you may have been wounded with that word, but hang with me. I’ve come to see it as a beautiful thing.
I was baptized at 17 into a conservative Christian church. Two years later I transferred from a public university studying chemical engineering to a Christian college studying preaching. Just a small change in majors. There’s a God story in there. The next eight years of my formation were in seminaries. Both were conservative, but one taught me what to think while the other taught me how.
In 2004, I started my first church. For the past twenty years, I’ve either been starting a church or helping others start churches. As a church planter, I travel in the waters of what the future of the church will look like. So I’ve always sensed there was something amiss in the church. Things that didn’t quite feel right.
One of my first big deconstruction moments was around leadership. Top-down authoritative leadership was the norm. I climbed the ranks and sat in a position of power and authority. I hated it. To me it was ugly. And God spoke to me and said you don’t have to lead that way. I left the leadership of my organization and demoted myself to a middle management position. This was a trigger event for me. A moment I began to actively deconstruct. We’ll talk more about trigger events later in this series.
I began to model a collaborative style of leadership. I hadn’t always led that way. I had been mentored to be an authoritative, top-down leader. I had to repent. I could say a lot about what God taught me about the role of power through those days, but I’ll save that for another time.
There are a lot of stories like that in my journey. But perhaps the most central and defining moment came when I read Sinners in the Hands of A Loving God by Brian Zahnd. I’d grown up with an angry God. That wasn’t all my church’s fault. It was just in the cultural waters where I grew up. But it left me with a low view of myself and humanity in general. It left me playing a game of sin management.
As I read about God as a Loving God, I came alive in a new way. Zahnd’s book put words to feelings I didn’t know how to express. It liberated me. And it led to a lot of repentance. But now repentance was different. With the angry God, repentance was what I had to do in order to appease God’s anger. But now repentance itself was transformed.
I began to see that I wasn’t a worthless annoyance who couldn’t ever get it right in God’s eyes. I was fearfully and wonderfully created. I was made in the image of God. Sin had messed that up pretty badly, but God was doing a healing work in me. He was healing the wounds sin had inflicted. He was restoring the beautiful artwork that I was created to be.
That shifted how I viewed repentance. Now when God speaks and convicts me of sin, it’s the loving God who is saying, “Hey I believe in you and I think you’re ready for this. I want to heal you some more. Can we talk?” And while I know the healing is likely to be painful, I’m excited to hear what God has to say because I know God’s going to restore me some more. I don’t fear repentance anymore. I embrace it.
As we dialogue over the next couple of months about deconstruction, if you take nothing else away, my hope is if you haven’t met the God of Love, that you’ll begin to look. Deconstruct the angry God. You’ll have to wade through a lot of mess to get there. And you’ll have to repent (in a good way) along the way. You are a beautiful masterpiece, created in the image of a loving God who wants to restore you, to heal you. So, deconstruct my friends. I pray what you find on the other side is beautiful.