Why brick by brick, some founding principles, and what paid members get
I’ve been off Substack with any consistency for about 10 months. Some of that was life circumstances (family stuff and I have 2 side-hustles which I manage and work alongside my day job), but when I get motivated to write, I write more consistently. And yesterday, reading Christy Lynne Wood’s Post on Sunday:
I once again got motivated to write. Hence two posts in 2 DAYS!!!!
Anyway,
’s post helped me see what I’ve been trying to do with this Substack ever since its inception, and the way she expressed the idea inspired me to change directions with that new knowledge in hand. The portion that really moved me was her illustration of ‘deconstruction’ of faith. The illustration is in her book (you should buy it: Religious Rebels. I’m not that far in yet and I can already tell this is going to become one of my go-to books). The ‘pull quote’ that really moved me is here:“Pretend with me that there was this incredible Lego set. Over the years people added pieces to it—most of them with the best intentions. They were trying to make it look defined, creative, and better designed. But after a while people couldn’t tell what the set originally looked like. It was just a pile of Lego blocks stuck together. This is what has happened with our modern Christianity.
I took the blocks apart and separated the pieces. Then I looked at the instructions—which were kind of crumpled and hard to read. I tried to choose the blocks that belonged to the original set and did my best to follow the directions even though they weren’t always easy to decipher. I put the Lego set back together again and threw the extra blocks in my tote. This is my faith deconstruction and reconstruction story.
Not everyone deconstructs this way, but because we use the same word to describe our journeys, it can be confusing. Some people separate the blocks and then use them to build something completely different. The end results can vary drastically. Other people take the blocks apart and throw them in the trash or leave them in a pile on the floor and walk away for a while or forever.
We all took the pieces apart, so we all call what we did with them deconstruction. But it’s what happened after we took them apart that makes our stories so different. It creates a complicated definition because deconstruction means different things to each of us. If we could just agree that deconstruction means taking something apart down to its individual components, then maybe we could stop condemning or making assumptions.”Christy Lynne Wood, Religious Rebels
This quote from her book resonated with me for a number of reasons.
First, I’ve been on my own deconstruction journey recently. This journey was predicated by some recent trauma that my family continues to endure, but frankly, it was always in the background of my faith journey, with my incessant questions and never-ending conspiracy theories. What Christy’s illustration confirmed for me is that I am coming to believe that the modern version of the church that we engage with has a massive amount of baggage it carries. Some of that baggage is probably healthy, but much of it is like the Lego blocks she describes, we’re not always sure as believers where the idea came from, whether it reflects the original tenets of the basic faith, or whether it’s been bastardized over thousands of years of human intervention.
Second, Christy’s thesis about the instructions being “kind of crumpled and hard to read” is correct and helped me to see what I’ve been struggling to do with my Substack. The ‘instructions’ ARE crumpled, they ARE difficult to read and understand. And I’m beginning to believe that it’s possible that Church leaders, though well-meaning, have introduced ideas over time that don’t reflect the initial ideas God imparted. And in the faith tradition I came from, questioning the ‘rightness’ of doctrinal belief is seen as more problematic than a host of other sins that Christ himself seemed to abhor. And so, those of us with questions have been left to our own devices, seeking truth quietly while keeping our mouths shut lest we find ourselves on the outside looking in. Our faith discussions lack context, our Christianity lacks a needed safe space for questions, and we wonder why our membership rates (particularly among certain groups) are low and declining.
Every time I hear about an innovative product, the CEO says ‘the thing I needed didn’t exist, so I built it’. I’m not so arrogant as to think that others haven’t built a place to expand our contextual understanding of faith, but I certainly hope to contribute to that understanding with brick by brick.
That brings me to the re-naming of my previous Substack, Divergent Dad, to “brick by brick”, where I will share research about the context of how the modern church got to where it is today by pulling the bricks of Christian history apart and examining them, brick by brick. Given that ‘deconstruction’ is a charged topic, I should explain my ‘first principles’ for this publication. These, of course, are subject to change as I adjust my thinking but right now:
I believe that God is real and that he has revealed himself to us through different times in human history. WHO he is (his nature) is something that we’re still working to really understand and may not until we see him face to face. My deconstruction of my Christianity is not an attempt to jettison it, nor do I believe that an honest search for the God who actually exists would ever lead me to such an attempt. I just am not sure that the God we hear about in many of our modern churches is the REAL God. And frankly, if my theory is even partially correct, I’m mad about that fact. I’m sure there will be others who strongly disagree with me here, but my honest thinking here is a strongly enough held belief that I’ll state it to anyone I know (hopefully without anger or frustration in my message) and hope that in doing so, I honor the REAL God I believe we all are seeking.
I believe the church, as we experience it in the modern ‘west’ is flawed and that those flaws are ‘baked in’ over thousands of years worth of decisions made by countless ‘good’ people, many of whom believed they were doing the right thing. We don’t know how we got ‘here’ and it’s not ok to ask in many churches today for fear of effectively being labeled a heretic.
I believe that there are answers to ‘what the hell happened’ in our history and that much of what we believe today that may sound ‘biblical’ or ‘from God’ is actually interpretation and our best guesses. Some church leaders want to portray these things as ‘settled’, but I think that they are things God always intended us to wrestle with and that there are many ways that the same ‘settled’ matter can (perhaps even was, in the past) be interpreted. Sometimes we have gotten it right, others wrong. I’m not sure I have the wisdom to know which is which, and though I certainly have opinions, I will try to state them as such rather than as historical facts.
I believe that history matters as well as context and that an historical understanding of Christianity’s history is an important component of getting to know the REAL God. When Jesus points out about the ‘worm that never dies’ and we later translate this idea to hell, I think it’s important to know that in Jesus day there was a dump on the outside of town called ‘Gehenna’ that trash burned in without ceasing and that worms burrowed in incessantly, seeming to never die. Whether this historical fact and this context of how a Jewish listener to Jesus would have taken his words is relevant to our modern understanding of hell or not is unsettled in my mind, but just knowing that history and context is something that ALL church leaders should be telling their parishioners, and despite a lifetime in churches I’ve rarely heard it. We’re not idiots, and we’re not going to ‘fall away’ from our faith if you give us the context the words were spoken in, but it’s just possible that your description of hell is mis-informed and your parishioners deserve to know that this is a part of understanding the concept. I know that some may see my questioning of the meaning of the Bible’s passages as antithetical to faith, that I should just trust in the providence of God to ensure the text and the history we have today are somehow sufficient for our needs. But I don’t think that’s how this story works. I believe we’ve been privileged with a real opportunity to engage with the God of the universe, even to partner with him, but doing so without context or historical insight is ignoring the pre-requisites for such an engagement.
I believe God, and Jesus, might agree with the Oracle from the Matrix: “I expect what I’ve always expected. For you to make up your own damn mind”. This is the hope of brick by brick. I certainly have an opinion and won’t be shy in telling you what it is, but in the end I hope that the Oracle’s words ring true for how I present the information in the blog. I give you my research, I’ll even tell you what I think, but at the end of the day, this is YOUR faith journey, it’s YOUR understanding of God that will impact your relationship with him, and my role will hopefully be tangential to whatever decisions and assessments you make about your ultimate thoughts about God (even if it’s just to make it a lower-case g). I hope my deconstruction is helpful in you making up your own damn mind.
You’ll also notice that I changed the Substack to a paid version. I don’t believe that abandoning the free space is a way to achieve paid growth, so I will generally publish a companion “free” post with every paid one that touches on some of the points I make in the paid post. It will be more free-flowy and less historically dense and definitely shorter, but some of the paid stuff will always make it’s way into the ‘free’ space. Paid subscribers will also get access to an interactive timeline (and hopefully other contextual aids) to help contextualize the history, reviews of books and articles I use in my research for the newsletter (my research is pretty extensive and will typically center around reputable historical sources), and interviews of experts I enlist to inform my writing.
I hope you are along for the journey, whether you decide to upgrade to a paid subscription or to engage with the continuing free content I will produce. Regardless, I am excited for this new direction that the Substack is taking, it’s been a long time sorting through ‘what I’m really trying to do’ and I wanted you to know how I came to this decision.