08-14-25

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
August 14, 2025
I was reading a portion of the book, “Deconstructing Your Faith Without Losing Yourself,” by Angela J. Herrington. Deconstructing is the process by which a person of faith, shaped by a very damaging form of faith, begins to unravel the mess of emotional trauma that has been woven into the fabric of one’s life. Though I have not read the entire book, I appreciate her approach. She does not give the impression that this is going to be easy or that there is a single path to follow. In fact, she’s not expecting her entire audience to come to the end of the process and say, “I’m a Christian.” Her hope is healing in whatever form that looks like for each reader. In the book, she references the work of the late Phyllis Tickle, who wrote an incredible book entitled, “The Great Emergence,” in which she suggests that the church has a ‘rummage sale’ every 500 years to purge the stuff that is unhealthy and hindering its purpose. Herrington builds on Tickle’s work and writes…

“All the signs point to the current church being in the midst of another such shift. We—the church and anyone who has ever been part of it—are in a season I’m calling the Great Reckoning. Like during the Great Schism and the Reformation, present-day Christians are at a fork where the path diverges into two radically different directions. Following one path requires doubling down on the imbalance of power and protecting the current church structure at all costs. The other path leads to a radical correction of the power imbalance by recentering white, patriarchal Christianity.”

Jesus entered a world that was facing a similar decision in regard to what path should be taken. Religion, at the time, was a tool of those who were seeking power, yet when all you’ve ever known is the religion that seeks to control through manipulation, it is hard to imagine anything else. Change feels like unfaithfulness, even heretical. And Jesus felt the pushback from those who had the most to lose by making a change. Yet those who had only known suffering through religion were able to experience their first taste of liberation as they encountered, through Jesus, a God who was interested in more than mass-conformity created by fear. On the other side of their awakening was a God who wanted people to know the fullness of life and joy through the realization that they were loved unconditionally. 

The sad part is that institutional religion rediscovers every few decades that there is more power to be gained and more money to be made returning to the system control by guilt, shame, and fear. And like every generation, there are so many people who have once again experienced spiritual and emotional trauma. Cypress Creek Christian Church has a lot of people dancing around the edges of our congregation, in part, because they are not quite ready to trust the church again. And as I share often, we are not interested in getting new members for the sake of new members. We are only concerned about them as individuals, and whatever wellbeing and peace looks like for them—inside or outside the church—we are glad to help as much or as little as requested.

O Amazing God, who is born anew into every moment to meet the newness of the moment, we pray for fresh eyes and truly open minds at a time when much of religion seeks to control and not set free, to bring harm to the human soul and not an abundance of life. Forgive us and teach us to live faithfully as Jesus taught us to do so. Amen.