Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Hey, well, this is The Pastor Next Door.

This is a podcast for honest conversations about faith, especially when faith feels complicated, uncertain, or worn down.

I’m not here to give you easy answers or to fix anything.

I’m here to sit with you for a bit, ask some good questions, and make room for grace and honesty along the way.

Wherever you’re coming from today, I’m really glad you’re here.

Let’s get started.

Now, when something in your faith begins to unravel, the next question isn’t, Is it all false?

The better question is, What is essential?

Or, What was cultural?

Or, What was fear-based?

Or, What was truly the gospel?

Deconstruction without discernment feels like collapse.

Deconstruction with discernment can become clarity.

We need to determine the difference between what is core and what is packaging as we walk through a season of deconstruction.

I think, quite simply, we can look at some core ideas like the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, grace, covenant love, the call to love God and love neighbor, the reality of a new creation.

These, I think, are the core of our faith.

And then there’s the packaging: political alignments.

Cultural assumptions, personality-driven theology, fear-based interpretations, and certainty as maturity.

These things function as packaging around the core ideas of faith.

Not everything we were handed is equally central.

We are not discarding in our deconstruction the historic Christian faith.

We are distinguishing center from scaffolding.

So, what might be some signs that something needs to be released?

Well, I think we can maybe ask some diagnostic questions.

For instance, if a belief produces chronic fear, that might be something that needs to be released.

Or if a belief requires the denial of reality.

If we look around the world and we have this—there’s a belief that we have been told we have to hold on to, and yet it requires us to deny the very things that we see with our eyes, that is something that we can let go of.

Or if a belief cannot tolerate questions.

Any belief that can’t tolerate questions is one that we can let go of.

A healthy, resilient faith is one that is not only open to questioning, but welcomes questions.

Any time a belief elevates control over love, that is something, again, that we need to let go of.

Because when we look at the teaching of Jesus, as we look at his life and the way that he loved, the way that he pointed us, he said we would be known by our love.

He said the new command that he gives is to love one another.

And so if a belief leads us to a place of control over love, then it is something to be let go of.

Or if a belief makes Jesus smaller instead of clearer.

And what I mean by that is the love of Christ is one that is sovereign and good.

It is a love that is bigger than we could possibly ever imagine.

And so, as a result of that, if a belief makes that smaller, if a belief kind of takes Jesus and makes Jesus’s love and grace and mercy, compassion, empathy into something manageable, then it’s probably something to let go of.

Because a healthy faith clarifies Christ, clarifies the reality that Jesus is the great lover of our souls, that Jesus is the one who demonstrates for us self-sacrificial love.

Any belief that kind of falls short of these questions.

May not be a core belief.

Anything that shrinks the goodness of Christ deserves re-examination.

But we also need to wrestle with what we should hold fast, and this is important because we need stability.

Richard Rohr talks about in his book Falling Upward the necessity to build a foundational box that shows us these places where we can push and stretch and question and doubt, and yet we have a foundation, a good, healthy, strong foundation from which to question, from which to grow out of.

And so we need to know, we need to know what is it that we are to hold fast.

Well, we anchor ourselves in essentials.

God is most clearly revealed in the person of Jesus.

And I think Paul and the other writers in the New Testament make that very clear, that if we really truly want to have a good and understanding of who Christ is or of who God is, we are to look into the face of Christ.

God is revealed in the face of Jesus.

We also learn, I think, from the New Testament writings that grace precedes performance.

We don’t have to do anything.

We don’t have to act in a certain way to receive grace.

It is simply offered and given to us out of self-sacrificial love.

This is, I think, the definition of grace, and I think this is the very thing that makes it so amazing, is that we do not earn it.

We do not have to chase after it.

It is simply offered to us.

Out of a place of unconditional, self-sacrificial love.

I think another core is that resurrection anchors hope.

We have a hope that is anchored in the resurrection of Christ.

Because we believe that Christ has been resurrected, we can hope that there is something more, something greater than, something bigger, something beyond ourselves that we can look towards.

This hope, this hope of resurrection, this hope of life to come, allows us to persevere.

It allows us to press on.

It invites us to love unconditionally and sacrificially in the way that Jesus did.

And then I think we also need to recognize as a core that love is the end of theology.

Love is the purpose of theology.

Any thought theology that leads us to a less loving place is a theology that needs to be questioned and needs to be deconstructed.

When we look at the life of Jesus, and he is in that upper room, he tells his disciples, A new command I give you: love one another.

He did not stutter.

This is the telos.

This is the end, the way of love.

And in all of this then, what we are reminded is that God keeps his covenant promises.

God is enduringly faithful.

And it’s here that we are able to find and discover and be reminded again and again of God’s overwhelming grace.

And anything that really begins to pull us out of that, that begins to shift us from that, these are things that we can and should question and set aside.

Because here’s the thing.

If you hold to Christ, you are not drifting.

You are centering.

If you hold to Christ, if you are centering your life around the way of Jesus in the pursuit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, then, my friends, you’re not drifting.

You are centering on the one whom you ought to be centered in.

Even if some people look at you and say, Oh, they’re falling away.

If you’re centering yourself on the way of Jesus, then, my friends, you are in the right place.

Now, we oftentimes deconstruct around the issue of Scripture because Scripture has been used as a weapon, because Scripture has been so weaponized to point us away from this way of love.

It’s been used as a cudgel to hammer people, say, Ah, I’m pursuing truth, and they swing a Bible at you.

Here’s the thing.

Scripture, yes, it is authoritative.

It is authoritative within its narrative.

It is authoritative as it points us to Christ.

When Scripture is used to scaffold political regimes, when Scripture is used to build other people’s power, when Scripture is used to create a place of power over another, then it is not authoritative.

But when Scripture points us to Jesus, when Scripture points us to loving more deeply, to loving more authentically, to embracing a greater sense of grace and mercy, then it is authoritative.

For it is not a codebook detached from story.

It is not a rule book or a recipe book on how to get to heaven or how to make God happy with us.

It is not a hack to figure out who we are to love and who we are to hate.

No.

It is a story that points us to Jesus.

And in that it does, in that it points us to Christ, it is authoritative.

But as it is used as something else, it is not authoritative.

See, we need, we need to release distorted readings.

And as we release distorted readings, that is not a rejection of Scripture.

It is seeking its truest center.

We can, I think we can embrace a reality together that authority is safest when it serves love.

Authority is safest when it serves love.

Now, as we let go of things, as we let go of the scaffolding, as we begin to set aside some of these beliefs that have wounded us, that have hurt us, there’s going to be grief.

There is going to be grief in letting go.

Letting go can feel like a betrayal.

It can feel like maybe we’re betraying others, or maybe it can even feel as though we have been betrayed by people we have trusted to point us to the way of Jesus, and all they have done is pointed us to a way of power or pointed us to a particular political party.

And so we feel betrayed.

As we let go of some things, we may feel a great sense of loss and hurt because we may lose relationships.

We may lose some sense of what we have always known.

Maybe we lose a little community.

We may feel disoriented as we let things go because all of these things that we used to know for absolute certainty, we no longer know in that way.

Certainty is lost, and it is replaced.

By faith.

I think sometimes we also will feel angry.

We’ll feel angry because of the betrayal, the sense of betrayal.

We’ll feel angry because of the sense of loss.

We will feel angry in the midst of our disorientation.

We will feel angry because, well, maybe we feel like we got duped.

Maybe we feel like we have lived a lie.

There’s all kinds of reasons we might feel angry.

Because here’s the thing: even unhealthy theology can feel like home.

Even unhealthy theology can feel like home because it is what we have always known.

For there is grief in reconstruction, and grief is not proof you’re wrong.

Grief is proof that you care.

And so how do we maybe square some of this with Scripture?

Well, in Hebrews chapter 12, beginning in verse 25, it says, See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks, him being God.

If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven?

At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, ‘Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.’ The words ‘once more’ indicate the removing of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

And he goes on to say, keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.

But this thing about what cannot be shaken remains in Hebrews 12:27 is so important.

We shake it up.

We ask the questions, and the core that remains cannot be shaken.

That is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

That is self-sacrificial love.

That is grace and mercy.

Those are the things that cannot be shaken.

So, how do we reflect on this?

How do we discern where we are at in this deconstruction process?

How do we discern the things that we are to keep or that we are to let go?

Well, I think there’s four questions we can ask, and we want to keep it simple.

We don’t need some massive checklist.

Four simple questions that we can use as reflective tools in our spiritual journey.

The first is, does this belief draw me toward love?

Second, does this reflect the character of Jesus?

Third, does this produce humility or superiority?

And finally, does this increase trust or fear?

Now, these four questions require us to do some work.

We need to know what does real love look like?

What does true Jesus-centered love look like?

What is the character of Jesus?

What is humility?

What is superiority?

How does that actually look?

And what is the difference between trust and fear?

We have to do some work on those things.

We need to study some of that.

These are not flippant, easy questions that we simply go by a flash-in-the-pan emotion.

These are things to wrestle with and to think through.

So I’d encourage you to wrestle through those questions.

So if you are in the middle of sorting through what to keep and what to release, be patient with yourself.

It’s a process.

Not everything has to be decided today.

So in the next episode, we’ll talk more about reconstruction, what it looks like to build again without pretending nothing happened.

For now, stay close to Christ.

The center will hold.

And we’ll talk again next time on The Pastor Next Door.