Deconstruction or Destruction

Understanding the Spiritual Difference.

  There is a new term running around, Deconstruction. The popularity of this word is quickly rising, especially with all the church systems that are currently getting hit. This word in many places is now becoming like a “lightning rod” across the Body of Christ, drawing fire from all sides. If you do a simple search, especially on YouTube you will find many inflammatory opinions that range from a beautiful garden to the very spawn of the devil sitting in a manure lagoon.

  Now personally I went through my own version of this a few years ago when I left MorningStar Ministries, although at that time there was no terminology for what I experienced that I knew of.

   Did I lose my faith in Jesus? No, I did not, in fact, I would say the experience has made me stronger in my faith. This is because, at my very core, I fully understood that God is real. He has stepped into my life many, many times. I literally have physical proof that I can point at, so walking away from the faith would be stupid, I know better.

  My deconstruction was one of ripping away all that I knew until there was nothing left but God, just Jesus, just scripture. This took time, pain as well as other emotions. But in the end, I had to ask, ok what’s left, what do I REALLY KNOW?

  The word Deconstruction implies a total removal of a building, and to many, this is offensive as it assumes the destruction of the Church itself. Well, there are a few points I would like to make that I am not hearing other ministries talk about. If you have followed my writing for some time you know I have been talking about this corporate Babylonian religious system. If you understand that, then please know that what I am about to say builds off that understanding. If you don’t know what I am talking about then I would suggest buying my book, My Father’s House.

  God is exposing the system right now before the eyes of his people so that they may get free. In doing so the following scripture is now in play. “Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.” 1 Corinthians 3:12-13 If people are departing the system then two things are happening. First of all the quality of the system is getting exposed. All the churches that were built on inferior things like a pastor’s personality, entertainment, single gifting, social works, great youth groups, etc are getting burnt up in the hearts of the followers.

  Pastors and other leaders have no right to point the finger at the people who are walking out the door when the bigger issue is what are they walking away from. If you're running a grocery store and people are avoiding the produce section, you need to investigate why. Shame blaming your customers will only draw a couple back out of guilt while the rest of the people will now draw away from your store entirely.

  The Community of the Body of Christ’s main duty is to lift up Christ to the world with no reputation as to what we can do. If this is done properly, Jesus will draw all men to that body. Any other system will not work, this is because that work will only bring in people who will be built on lesser foundations. When people start deconstruction, they WILL walk completely away from the faith because (Mark 4:17) they have no root. Could this not be a testimony to the quality of the foundational building they received that they are actually walking away from the faith? 

   The second thing is if people are departing the faith in droves from a certain fellowship, denomination, or movement. Then I would say the issue may be what was taught to them was not actually the foundation of THE GOSPLE. And perhaps these people need to learn again, with better teachers. I’ve listened to a couple of YouTube testimonies from “ex-Christians” who have walked away. Yes, it’s sad, but in hearing them talk about what the key points were that drove them away, it was obvious to me that they were given a culture-friendly gospel, not the truth.

A Healthy Deconstruction.

    When my deconstruction started, I walked away from what I knew and my first question was, “What do I fall back to?” My first thought was Vineyard because it was at one point a major influence in my life. But an uneasy spiritual feeling soon entered and I realized the Holy Spirit was not pointing that way. The same happened with the American Baptist question, the spirit said no. This brought me to think about the core of it all, the foundation. 

  In time (a couple of months) what I was left with was, “God is Good.” God is Good became the basic floor of my new foundation. From that point, I slowly moved forward. That journey eventually got me looking at Christ's history with us in a new light, resulting in my book. Two veins of research soon started up, one was, “What was the culture of first-century believers like?” I mean, what was in their thoughts, minds, and actions? This pushed me down the road to a more Hebrew understanding or view of the Kingdom.

  The second was Celtic Christianity, I found online groups in the UK that have been struggling for decades to rebuild some of this. I say rebuild because as I researched it became obvious that Paganism and Catholicism had slowly filtered in, corrupting what was once built. This means the oldest was better than the newest. And in researching this culture I soon found there were no serious writings or teachings from this time period because the mindset was completely different than ours. Any writings of value were done in poetic form. This is because the Ancient Christian Celts viewed poetry in a special foundational way. And in some ways, I would agree because not only does the Poetic form deliver information but cultural thinking as well.

  So I bought several hard-to-find poetry books and learned. It’s not easy reading “modern” translations of 1600-year-old poems, they don’t flow well. We do not seem to have good wordage that connects the ancient Celt language to ours. But at least some of the thoughts and ideas are present. 

  In these poems, I can now understand a bit of their view of the Trinity, Jesus, and God in Creation, as well as how the Holy Spirit interacts with all the world. To the Celts, the world was more vast than we understand. This was because the understanding of the Trinity was central to all things. Within the Trinity was a perfect, complete community, and we have been invited in through the Blood of Christ. As a result, our perfect community is within the Trinity. Because all of the creation was brought under the curse through us, then through our community with the Trinity, creation becomes blessed as we walk out the first command God gave to Adam.

  The first-century mindset was Hebrew in nature. Within this is the understanding that God came down and he became one of us. Jesus is our brother and our family serves each other. To serve Jesus is to serve the greater royal family unit. We are royalty, so the question is how does royalty conduct itself. Although Jesus never broke the Law, he himself was not under the Levitical priesthood. Therefore the old system is no longer a mandate. 

  Roughly putting this together, here is my current understanding. We are a royal family before creation. We need to act according to that reality as Jesus was our model. There is much, much more to this as a person walks out the implications of demonstrating the heart of the Trinity to all that is around us. And hopefully, the second book I am working on called, The Well will answer at least some of this when I get it done.

Terminology

  A Healthy Deconstruction is not a destruction but a restoration and should be thought of more like remodeling an older home. You go in and tear everything out to the studs so that all you have left is the empty space. Now you can stop, breathe, and plan a new layout. When you do this, it becomes a unique opportunity to toss out every preconceived concept and tradition. Looking around, like in my case with Hebrew and Celtic. I can see what elements I would like to bring in that I feel like the Holy Spirit is pointing towards. What I am seeing now is more of the Charismatic Christianity with common sense from an ancient moral grounding.

  I have heard many people online say people should just be calling this reformation instead of deconstruction. Although this would be technically accurate and I have used these terms in my writing before. I believe the general wordage is lost on the general Christian population and the world beyond. The term reformation implies a mindset of something formal, old, and the domain of the higher-educated elite.

  The term deconstruction is something far more that the average modern Christian can easily understand with little effort. And let’s face it, part of our Protestant history revolves around the issue of making the scriptures easy to understand for the common man. At that time of course was the issue of all scriptures being hidden behind the wall of the Latin language. Nowadays we hide it behind the wall of confusing Christian lingo that only those on the inside can understand. Perhaps this to should change, because by our actions we are implying to the world that you need to stop being stupid and come up to our level.

  My Deconstruction lasted for a period of time, but my reconstruction will forever be ongoing. The lingo and the mindset of the past now works as a deterrent to the advance of the Kingdom. And as shocking as it may sound to some people’s ears, the Lord himself is willing to tear down the church to build his Kingdom. It was the late John Wimber who said it best. “The Church is not the Kingdom, the church is a by-product of the Kingdom.”

  That means as the Kingdom advances in the earth, one of the Holy by-products is the desire to assemble. It is unfortunate that Man’s fallen, twisted understanding of the Kingdom manipulates the need to assemble into forms, systems, and eventually corporations that can be controlled. In a corporate form, everything distorts further as motivations turn toward budgets, influence, and “who you know.” This of course divides our loyalties between the God of our Hearts and the god of the system, as we become a market share for pastors to protect to maintain budgets.

  I am saying this here to demonstrate just how far my deconstruction went, it went to the raw core and my only desire is Christ alone. If God was not a respecter of men, then this is something we should be as well. Meaning I can respect a person’s position, but that position does not give automatic headship rights above the Body.

  Consider what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9:2, “Even though I may not be an apostle to others, surely I am to you! For you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.” This means not everyone automatically accepted Paul as their Apostle.

Each Man’s Work - Consumed by Fire

  The reality is everything shall be tested by fire. Some places of faith will be totally consumed and there will be nothing left. Some however will only lose parts of their ministry while other sections remain standing. After the fire, some will find a fine foundation that only needs to be cleaned off and rebuilt. 

  The fire is a good thing. But right now ministries in some places are panicking because the fire is affecting their livelihood. This means a few leaders in the end will either need to reevaluate and deconstruct their personal understanding of the Kingdom. Or go get a job in the marketplace for a while. 

  I was in a Baptist congregation once when an elder bravely got up and shared a prophetic word that God was coming to test the congregation and that we would either advance or be reduced depending on how we reacted to the test. Six months went by and everyone forgot the word when the test came, they all cursed the devil and tried to cast him out. Forgetting the word of warning the congregation failed and 250+ people soon became less than 80.

  Right now, too many ministries have built themselves on human ideas and programs. Christ is not a commodity, you can not sell Christ, nor can you sell his Bride. That would be prostitution.