I got theological training from Andrew Wilson (author of Incomparable, God Stories, and more).
That sentence probably doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the UK evangelical landscape. Andrew Wilson is a teaching pastor at King’s Church London (at the time he was Eastbourn based, IIRC), a theologian in the Newfrontiers network, and (for one year of my early twenties) the person who taught me big chunks of theology during the volunteer year at The City Church Canterbury. He’s sharp and generous and I’m so grateful for his contributions. That said, the tradition he represents, the evangelical world that trained me, tends to view deconstruction as a cultural phenomenon worth being worried about.
The apologetic framing goes something like this: people leave the faith because they want to sin, or because they’ve been seduced by intellectual pride, or because the secular university dismantled beliefs that were never properly grounded. Deconstruction is a crisis to be managed, a detour to be corrected. I spent more than a decade inside that framing. I knew what I believed and why I believed it, and I would defend it against anyone who asked (and I did with confidence indistinguishable from arrogance). That was the point of the training: to build a faith that couldn’t be knocked over.
Then I had a stroke. Unrelated, but that coincided with Covid-19 measures that left people inside and increasingly online, and somewhere in the disorientation I started hearing about biblical scholarship for myself instead of reading it through the apologetic filter of the church bubble I was in. And then the thing that had been built to withstand pressure discovered it had been built on foundations that weren’t as solid as I’d been told.
But the bubble had been cracking for a while. I was deeply embedded at The City Church Canterbury. I volunteered constantly, and I expected it to become my life. I wanted a job there. I wanted the satisfaction of doing church work and being useful and never having to leave. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, it was genuinely heartbreaking. I had to focus on earning a living instead, so I got a job in London and eventually moved up because the commute was eating me alive. I joined Emmanuel Church in Greenwich, another Newfrontiers church, but it took me a long time to really get involved. I was burned out. I did small group, but I never got around to serving.
Then they started a New Cross branch: not quite a church plant, not quite a multisite, more like an offshoot, meeting at the Goldsmiths student union on Sunday afternoons. That became my church. It was small and good. I got into serving again, every week. I didn’t carry the same expectations I’d had in Canterbury, but it still pulled me away from sitting with Charlotte (girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife) on more Sundays than I’d like to count.
Bringing us back to the stroke, and lockdown. Recovery coincided with other things: we moved out of London to Weston-super-Mare in early 2021, we had our first daughter. Our local parish church here is an ecumenical setup, contributed to by the Church of England, the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, and the United Reformed Church. Don’t ask how it works because they don’t really know either. In the five years we’ve been here I haven’t served: partly the child, partly inconsistent attendance. But we’ve also been attending my mother-in-law’s parish church in Bristol, where she’s a lay minister and we serve occasionally as youth leaders. That church is actively involved in Christians at Bristol Pride, openly LGBT-affirming. Our Weston church isn’t, or at least hasn’t needed to take a stance, which presents its own problems and is something I want to address with them at some point.
I haven’t left the faith, I’m still very much here. But the faith I hold now bears significant difference to the faith I was trained to defend, and the process that got me from there to here (the critical re-examination of inherited beliefs against scripture, reason, and experience) is the same process that gets called deconstruction by the people who are worried about it.
Here’s what I’ve come to think, and it’s taken years to get here: deconstruction, properly understood, recovers something the tradition has always done when it was at its healthiest. The church has always argued with itself: had people who looked at things everyone assumed and said: I don’t think that’s right, and here’s why. That’s what theology looks like when it’s alive. Christianity has never been a monolith. We’ve had schism after schism, denomination after denomination, people finding identity in what they believe to be true or what they find comfort in. Sometimes the comfort people settle into flattens a rich and complex history of thought into a throwaway line: the minute testimony, the elevator pitch. Even the branding of WWJD. What would Jesus do? Let’s look at what Jesus actually did, then compare it to what a lot of churches and Christians, especially fundamentalist and evangelical ones, do and say. That gap is one of the things that drives me.
The difference now is that we’ve given it a name people are afraid of, the people doing it are doing it in public, and the institutions that used to manage the process: denominations, seminaries, publishing houses, have lost their grip on who gets to do it and how. That’s a crisis of gatekeeping. And gatekeeping is not the same thing as faithfulness.
Now, I want to be precise here, because the apologetic strawman is easy to knock down and I’m not interested in knocking down strawmen. Some people do deconstruct their way out of Christianity entirely. Others replace one set of certainties with another, and then some people use deconstruction as cover for abandoning commitments they should have kept. But those aren’t arguments against deconstruction. They’re arguments against doing it badly. And what I’ve noticed, across three years of reading, and drafting material for this project, is that the people doing it well are doing something the tradition itself has always done. They’re reading honestly, holding inherited claims accountable to the evidence, refusing to pretend the evidence says something it doesn’t. Nadia Bolz-Weber spent years inside the purity-culture machinery and came out the other side still preaching grace, pastoring a church, and reading her Bible. She just stopped reading it as a weapon. That’s deconstruction. That’s also faithfulness.
Andrew Wilson, the theologian who trained me, models something I respect even when I disagree with his conclusions. He reads the scholarship. He engages the arguments. He doesn’t pretend the difficult texts aren’t there. His concern about doctrinal authority, that belief shouldn’t be adjudicated by individuals without some form of communal accountability, is worth taking seriously. And I do take it seriously. That’s part of why this blog exists. I don’t do this work alone. I do it “in conversation” with Bart Ehrman, Dan McClellan, Pete Enns, Sarah Coakley, and Thomas Oord, scholars who’ve done the primary work in languages and manuscripts I haven’t. I’m one step removed from the scholarship, not making it up as I go.
Which is, funnily enough, the same move Wilson himself makes when he engages Christian Smith’s critique of biblicism. He reads the scholarship. He engages the argument. He comes to a different conclusion. But he doesn’t pretend the argument isn’t there. That’s also deconstruction, he just doesn’t call it that.
What I’ve built instead of certainty is a faith that can hold mystery without needing to resolve it. A faith that reads the Bible as a library of competing voices. That post is the companion to this one. A faith that treats kindness as more fundamental than doctrinal precision, that expects to be wrong about some things and doesn’t experience that expectation as a threat. Is that a weaker faith than the one I was trained in? By the standards of that training, yes. It’s less certain, less defensible in a debate. By the standards of the life I’m actually living, it’s the faith that survived, and God willing, will thrive.
I pray. I attend two(!) churches, I read my bible. I’m still trying to love the person in front of me. The mental architecture is different: I think about the Bible differently, and the cross, and what’s at stake in believing wrongly. All of it has shifted, but the centre holds. The centre is Jesus. The centre was always Jesus. I just needed to stop defending him and start following him.
Deconstruction doesn’t guarantee a specific destination. The apologetic assumption that questioning leads to nowhere is exactly backward. What deconstruction guarantees is that whatever position you hold at the end, you hold it because it survived honest examination, not because you inherited it unexamined. That’s terrifying if you believe the faith can’t survive honest examination.
I don’t believe that. I believe the faith can survive quite a lot of honest examination, actually. What it can’t survive is being turned into a fortress that must be defended against evidence. That was never what it was meant to be.
The thing I want people who are worried about deconstruction to consider is this: maybe the problem isn’t that people are asking questions. Maybe the problem is that we built a version of Christianity where honest questions felt like threats.
