Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Hey, welcome.

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 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, over this season, we’ve talked through deconstruction.

We’ve named doubt, grief, discernment, reconstruction, community.

But the question remains: what does faith look like on the other side?

Well, it’s not perfect.

It’s not certain.

But it is steady.

I think one of the things that we have to come to realize is that a mature faith is ultimately humble.

It is a faith that is comfortable with mystery, as opposed to an early faith that demands certainty.

You see, as we mature, we see the gray.

We see past the black and the white, and we see the spectrum of colors between those two ends.

And as a result, we become a little bit more comfortable with mystery.

I think a mature faith is one that is quicker to listen.

It is willing to hear and try to understand different perspectives because it has become humble.

It realizes that our theology, our doctrines, our dogmas are not often as clear as we think they might be when we are chasing an earlier faith.

When we are in that early faith stage, everything seems so clear and obvious.

But as we mature, we become quicker to listen, realizing that those things we think are crystal clear are not always as clear as we want them to be.

A mature faith is a little slower to speak because it’s humble.

It doesn’t carry with it the arrogance of an earlier faith.

An early faith so often has this sense of heroic arrogance.

But a mature faith is one that is slow to speak.

I think there’s a great quote from Eugene Peterson, and I’m paraphrasing it here, but he says that we ought not to take ourselves too seriously, but we ought to take God seriously.

And I think that is a sign of a mature faith, one that is less impressed with itself and much more impressed with the love, grace, mercy of God.

Because humility is not weakness.

What humility is, is strength without insecurity.

You see, mature faith, it can hold tension.

It is able to hold a sense of conviction without arrogance.

This idea that we can hold tightly to things that we know are essential, but not be arrogant about them.

A mature faith is able to hold the tension of doubt, right?

When doubts or questions begin to creep in, a mature faith doesn’t panic.

It realizes that faith and doubt go hand in hand, because a faith means that you’re trusting in something beyond yourself.

And so as a result, doubt is a constant companion.

And so when doubt comes in, there’s no panic.

The mature faith sees doubt as an invitation to go deeper.

And it can hold the tension of hope.

You see, so often in American Christianity, hope is coupled with denial, and that is a sign of an early faith.

But a resilient faith, a mature faith, is one that holds on to hope without denial.

It is able to see the world as it really is.

And because it does, it can look at the world and see the hardness, the pain, the suffering, the things that we don’t like to talk about at parties.

But it can hold on to a sense of hope because a mature faith has this clear picture of resurrection, this deep belief, this deep trust.

That someday all things will be made new.

It’s not a making anything great again.

It’s not building back better.

No, it is a making all things new that comes out of resurrection.

And that allows us to hold the tension of hope without denial.

A mature faith also allows us to suffer without collapse, because it recognizes reality.

Because it’s not living in denial.

Because it’s holding on to a true hope.

When suffering comes, it allows us to persevere.

It allows us to press on.

As a friend of mine would say, a true mature faith allows us to suffer well.

And I think that is something that as we grow in our faith, we are able to hold on to that tension.

What is beautiful in all of this is that God meets us in the tension.

God is able to hold tension with us.

And I think we see that in the life of Jesus.

We see one who suffered and conquered, one who died yet lived.

Everything about Jesus’s life is this holding in tension.

And because God holds on to the tension, we are invited to holding it too.

Faith does not eliminate tension.

It teaches us how to live inside it.

It teaches us how to go into the tension and see it as an invitation to love more deeply and to embrace greater grace.

We talked about the essentials.

We talked about the things that need to survive deconstruction, those things that we begin to identify as core to our faith.

And that is what a mature faith embraces.

We recall from an earlier episode, right, this reality that what survives deconstruction is Christ.

Christ is at the center because love is the measure, and there is nobody who loved more deeply or who loved more well than Jesus.

As a result of that, because Christ is at the center, grace is also at the center.

Grace that is amazing, that is poured out, that is undeserved, that is lavished on us because of God’s love for us.

Grace flows.

Resurrection is kind of the physical reality.

Death does not win.

Life wins.

Life finds a way, as that great theologian Malcolm from Jurassic Park would say.

And that is the beauty of resurrection.

It makes all things new because of grace.

It makes all things new because Christ defeated death, because Christ rose from the grave.

And all of that is centered and rooted in love.

The story of the Scriptures is the story of a loving God who is never content with his people to be left in exile.

It’s the story of a loving God who is never content to be estranged from those that God loves.

And so God does what God needs to do to redeem, restore, and And resurrect a deep, loving relationship.

You see, when we go through the Gospels, we bump into things.

You know, Jesus says at the end of the Gospel of John, By this all people will know that you are my disciples.

And what is this?

It’s that we would love one another.

It is interesting because even in John 17, he goes so far as to pray that those who would believe through the earliest disciples would come to complete unity, that they would have a complete sense of oneness.

And in that unity, in that oneness, the world would believe in him.

This is the great apologetic, and it is sadly the apologetic that we are failing.

But it is the reminder that everything is rooted in love, because how will people know we are his disciples?

If we love one another.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.

Because love is indeed the demonstration of who God is.

It is as we love well, as we love one another well, as we love our neighbor well, and as we love our enemy well, we demonstrate the heart of God.

We demonstrate the identity of God.

We demonstrate who God is to a watching world.

So if our theology grows sharper, but our love grows smaller, something has indeed gone wrong.

I want to say that again because I think it is very important, especially for people like me who have a You know, who are the professional Christian, right?

Who are the pastors, the leaders, who spend a lot of time wrestling with doctrine and theology.

If our theology grows sharper, but our love grows smaller, something has gone wrong.

The telos of theology, the telos of doctrine, the telos of dogma, the end of it all is to love well.

And if it results in us not loving well, then we need to go back to the drawing board.

Because what a mature faith does is it makes room.

It makes room for the tax collector, for the sinner, for those people on the fringes.

It builds a bigger table.

It seeks reconciliation.

It seeks to reconcile people to God and to one another.

This is what a mature faith does.

And as a result of that, it practices mercy.

It enters into empathy.

It seeks to walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes so that we might know a deeper, a deeper understanding of God’s love.

What faith becomes is not an answer book or a roadmap to explaining everything.

What faith becomes, what a mature faith becomes on the other side of deconstruction, is a participation in the life of God.

It practices presence.

It shows up.

You become a person who is there, who is with other people.

You become a person who embodies hope, and that real hope—not the hope that’s rooted in denial, not the hope that says, Oh, everything’s great, not some Pollyanna hope.

No, a hope, a hope that recognizes suffering, but knows that on the other side of suffering, there will indeed be life.

It is a—you become a person, as we participate in the life of God, who serves quietly.

One, again, who simply shows up, who is practicing presence out in the world, and when people need you, you happen to be the one who is there.

Because the goal of faith is not some sort of intellectual mastery of some set of dogmas and beliefs.

It is a participation in Christ.

It is to be with Him in those places where He would show up.

That is to say, in the lives of one another, our neighbors, and our enemies.

A mature hope that grows out of a mature faith is one that does not embrace naivete.

It is one that is not naive.

It is one that knows suffering is real.

It acknowledges that.

It doesn’t try to brush it under the rug.

It is a hope that grows out of a mature faith, is one that knows that at times institutions will fail.

These institutions that we put our trust in will fail us.

They will indeed fall apart.

We’re not naive to that.

A mature hope that grows out of a mature faith knows that theology can wound, and as a result, it is very careful with the kind of the way that a person communicates their beliefs and their theology.

And yet, in the midst of the knowledge of the reality of the world within which we live, a mature hope that grows out of a mature faith believes that resurrection is true.

It believes that there is life that will come after suffering, that will come after death.

It believes that love indeed wins.

It believes that God is faithful.

It embraces what Paul writes in Romans chapter 8, that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ.

Nothing.

Hope, and maybe this is the thing about hope that is so powerful after deconstruction, is that it’s not naive, but it is chosen.

A hope that comes out of a hard-fought season of deconstruction is one that is chosen.

We choose to look at a world that is hard, that is painful, that is real, and we still choose hope because we believe love wins.

We believe that there will indeed be life after suffering.

In John chapter 6, and we’ve talked about this passage before, where Jesus talks about, you know, people needing to eat his flesh and drink his blood as they come to him after the feeding of the 5,000 and wanting him to feed them more, and he challenges them.

And he plunges those closest followers to him into an early season of deconstruction.

And what happens is that many leave.

They are confused.

They are frustrated.

It is hard.

It is a hard teaching.

They say, This is a hard teaching.

Who can accept this?

And so Jesus looks at his apostles and he says, Will you leave too?

And Peter’s response is, You have the words of eternal life.

To whom else would we go?

Where else would we go?

And I think that is the beautiful end of all of our seasons of deconstruction, is eventually we return back to the person of Jesus.

We return back to God the Son.

And in him we see what gracious love looks like, what self-sacrificial love looks like, what true mercy looks like, what real empathy looks like, what real strength looks like, what a hope that is rooted in resurrection looks like.

It’s not because we understand everything.

It is because we come back around to trusting the person of Jesus.

I think that is the ultimate end of the rotation that we go through of deconstruction and reconstruction, is this constant flow of coming back to a deeper knowledge and understanding and trust of Jesus.

That is indeed mature faith.

So as we wrap this season up, I think we need to just remember a couple of things.

First, deconstruction is not the enemy.

Deconstruction is not the enemy.

Deconstruction is an invitation to grow deeper in our relationship with God.

We need to remember that when faith stops working, it’s not failure.

It is, when faith stops working, it is not a loss of faith in Christ.

It is a recognition of the various beliefs and things that just do not hold, that do not carry the weight of a real world.

We need to embrace the reality that discernment matters.

We need to trust the work of the Spirit of God in us, and that we can indeed discern what is real and true.

And so as we bump up against institutions that may be failing, or we bump up against theology that is a construct that doesn’t draw us deeper into loving one another, loving our neighbor, or loving ourselves, we can discern that, and that matters.

We need to remember to reconstruct honestly.

It is not chasing down a false reconstruction to try to eliminate the discomfort or the cognitive dissonance that we feel.

No, it is an honest reconstruction that seeks to move beyond a new kind of fundamentalism, because too many of us just get rid of a Christian fundamentalism and we go and we embrace another fundamentalism, and we walk down the exact same road as we were walking before deconstruction, just with different words.

We need to remember, or we need to acknowledge the reality that community after deconstruction, or even in the midst of deconstruction, is indeed possible.

There are people out there who will love you through your season of deconstruction.

They will walk alongside of you.

Some may even be willing to guide you through it.

I would love to guide you through your season of deconstruction.

I would love to enter into the journey with you.

And then finally, we need to remember that a mature faith is humble, loving, and hopeful because it is rooted in the relationship and trust of Jesus.

You don’t have to get back to where you were.

That is not the goal of the rhythm of deconstruction and reconstruction.

No, what you do is you become someone deeper.

You become more and more of who you are.

That, that is what deconstruction and reconstruction allows us to do.

If you’ve walked through this season with me, thank you.

If you’re still in the middle of sorting things out, take your time.

Nothing here requires urgency.

A faith that can carry you forward is not louder; it is steadier.

It may still have questions.

It will still carry scars, but it stays.

And if you can say, even quietly, Even hesitantly, even with quivering voice and shaking hands, Lord, to whom shall we go?

Then that, my friend, is enough.

Grace and peace to you.

And until next time, love well.