After the Message: After Doubt

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Celebration Oracle.

Celebration Oracle.

What's up, everybody, and welcome back to After the Message.

Maybe you're stumbling along this podcast and uh you don't know where you are.

You are on the Celebration Church Orlando podcast, and this is a segment we like to call After the Message.

And it's just simply a conversation from the previous Sunday sermon.

I want to let you guys know that we're making history today.

We are making history today because typically uh we just have one of our pastors on here, which is amazing, or one of our staff members, but today we have our first outside guest on After the Message, Dr.

A.J.

Swoboda.

Dr.

A.J.

Swoboda, welcome to After the Message, man.

Nate, it is an honor to break history, to make history with you today.

That's so cool that you're here because we're uh like most of us know, we're in this this um series called Deconstructive.

And what many people may not know is uh this series was kind of birthed out of uh uh a reading of uh Dr.

AJ Swoboda's book After Doubt.

And uh we're we're excited to have him on today to kind of talk about a little bit about deconstruction, a little bit about the book, and maybe whatever else he wants to talk about.

I don't know.

I love it.

Let's do it, baby.

Um could you tell me a little bit or just at least tell the people a little bit about uh yourself, maybe about your family, kind of what what you uh what you got going on right now, AJ?

Yeah.

Well, I'm sitting uh here in my office at Bushnell University in Eugene, Oregon, where I'm uh uh the Bible, one of the Bible theology uh professors.

So I'm the associate professor of Bible and theology at Bushnell University.

Uh Bushnell is one of the oldest Christian uh universities on the West Coast, so it's one of the kind of old historic Christian liberal arts schools, and that's a great, great institution, and I love it.

Um I uh am a writer and author.

I I do a good deal of writing, and um After Doubt is my most recent book.

Um married to my wife, Quinn, of 19 years this summer, and my son Elliot, who's 10, and we have a foster daughter who is nine.

And so my world is um being a dad, a teacher, a writer, um, a Christian, and I also raise chickens.

We have 12, uh 12 emotionally unstable chickens.

I love that.

I love that.

Um I AJ, I know for me, you know, people may have not read the book, but I I just got through actually, it was my first audiobook.

I I will say it was my first audiobook that I've ever done.

You're making all sorts of history right now, Nate.

Where where have I been, right?

But it it was there was a lot of there was so much wisdom in it.

There was it was very profound.

I I think it was it it was timely, but but for me, uh I think the the adjective that to describe my experience was it was encouraging.

It was very encouraging to me.

And you would look at a at a book about deconstruction from the outside or a book about doubt in the faith and wonder how could it be encouraging?

But simply the title itself speaks to the fact that it's after it, right?

Like like how we walk through it in a godly manner.

So I I want to thank you for for even undertaking the the challenge of doing that.

And and I guess my first question would be what led you to take this on.

Well, first of all, thank you, Nate, for your um your uh effusive praise of of this book that I've written.

And I'm really grateful that you have read it.

And as I often say, as a writer, uh you're I'm always profoundly grateful that someone other than my mom has read my stuff.

So uh thank you for having read the thing.

Yeah, so uh after doubt, the the big idea here is that um I wrote this book.

Essentially, this this book took 20 years to write.

And the big idea here is that um for 10 years, I was a college pastor for 10 years, I was a church planter in Portland, Oregon, and for a number of years I've been an academic.

Uh and so my life has been working with predominantly college age and just post-college age students, and that has given me a very unique uh place to sit and watch from the front row what happens uh when people who are either raised as Christians or grow up in the church begin to encounter a whole new world of ideas that they didn't even know existed, and how uh essentially it's given me the opportunity to learn how young people walk through the experiences of doubt and deconstruction and what I've learned.

And and what I've learned may surprise some of your viewers or listeners, your church, uh, and that is that actually um doubt and deconstruction, when they are done in a godly way, can actually cause us to love God more.

Uh but we have we have to approach it uh with humility and a lot of commitment to Jesus.

So basically, the idea of the book is this uh there is a way to question your faith without losing it.

There is a way, yeah.

Yeah.

And that's kind of what we're even you discussing here in our own church, is what do we do when faith and doubt intersect?

What what happens when we get to that place in the road?

And so I think that uh again, the book does a great job at at helping us walk through that because a lot of times we get to these places in our faith and we don't even know where to turn, you know.

So I uh again, timely for sure.

It AJ, it is is deconstruction uh a new idea uh in in the Christian faith, um or if not, then what is it is there anything new about the modern deconstruction?

Well, it would it depends on how one de it depends on one how deconstructs the word deconstruct and how um how one you know in essence defines the term.

And I would say that in general, um it's the the the best place to figure out what deconstruction is is not on TikTok or Twitter.

I would encourage you to not use those environments as the place to define the term.

Um basically the idea of deconstruction is um, and uh to be clear, it's not a biblical category.

Uh, this word deconstruction, you're not gonna find it in the Bible anywhere.

Um uh the word deconstruction, generally speaking, uh, comes from a number of French philosophers from the sort of mid-19th set twentieth century, uh, who um basically uh these sort of set of postmodern thinkers uh undertook a posture of skepticism towards uh a hermeneutic of skepticism, a posture of skepticism towards received tradition uh in the both the Christian sense and the Western sense.

Essentially, deconstruction means this deconstruction means to undo something that has already been believed.

It's to undo beliefs.

So the opposite of that would be construction, right?

Believe constructing beliefs.

Deconstruction is undoing beliefs.

And so the question then becomes uh your question was, is this new?

And of course, the answer is not even close, it's not even close to new.

And I think that even a robust reading of the Bible would reveal that there is what one might call a godly deconstruction and a demonic deconstruction.

Uh demonic deconstruction would be in Genesis 3 when the serpent comes to the man and the woman and he questions what God has said.

And he says, Did God really say?

And then he says, God didn't say uh that you are to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Demonic deconstruction is when we question what God has said or question God's goodness.

Um but good deconstruction is Jesus coming to the Pharisees and saying, uh, you have heard it said, uh, but I say to you, basically undoing bad interpretations of the law to make it clear what God had intended in the first place.

And so when I'm asked, is there good deconstruction or is it good or bad?

My answer is a little Facebook.

It's complicated because some deconstruction is actually really dangerous and dark.

And some deconstruction is actually an attempt at coming back to truth and reality.

Yeah.

So it all depends on why we're doing it and what we're deconstructing.

I I think one of the I think one of the quotes that that stuck out to me um what was to struggle with one's faith is often the surest sign that we actually have one.

And so I think what you're saying is is pointing to scripture and saying that that there are moments of that.

Um but but where where it gets dangerous, I think, is what you described as what when it becomes a total uh a total breakdown of the house instead of a remodeling uh home.

Can you can you kind of speak to that a little bit, AJ?

Well, to your um to yeah, two things.

The the first thing that you said is that actually a a sign of loving God is that it's hard.

And I I I love to point out, just you know, on a on a broader kind of biblical perspective, the word Israel, Israel in the Old Testament, the word Israel, literally means to wrestle with God.

And and the idea is that to love God is to struggle with God.

Um you know the the the um the the privilege of getting to do I do premarriage counseling for a lot of couples.

I'm not a counselor, I'm not a you know, a trained counselor.

I am a theologian who dabbles in um trying to help people follow Jesus, but um I'm not a counselor, but when I'm meeting with a people You dabble in that I dabble, I dabble.

Did I say babble?

I dabble.

No, no, no, you dabble in it.

That's I dabble I dabble.

Um when when I'm meeting with a couple who's about to get married and I'm doing premarriage counseling, um, I can almost universally tell uh when a couple is probably not suitable for marriage.

Uh and that is that when I asked the question, when was the last time you guys got into an argument?

Uh and they don't have an answer if they've never been in an argument.

And the the point being, like, I think the sign that it's an authentic relationship is that you got you got some wounds, you got some struggles, you got some scars.

There have been some battles.

So man, if if we've never struggled to follow Jesus, I don't know if we're following Jesus.

Um, so that to to to the first question is I think that that's that's absolutely absolutely true.

Remind me the second question again.

The second question was you asked or you said you made a comment about it's hard, and then and then you Well, I I was just saying, you know, I I think you you brilliant brilliantly distinguish between the house down a remodel and burning the house down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Um there is this weird um there's this weird impulse in our in in American Western culture right now.

And and the and the impulse is this.

It's sort of this weird, let's burn it all down and start all over.

And what that assumes, on politics, on uh gender, on sexuality, on you name it.

I mean, this sort of let's burn it down and start all over.

Well, the the assumption behind that is that we are better than than the dead people who came before us.

And that is that we're gonna do something inherently better because we are right, we are here now.

Which right in in the words of C.S.

Lewis, the way he described this was he called that chronological snobbery, the arrogance that we think because we're now, we're right.

Um, that is an impulse in our cultural moment where a lot of people are just saying we should burn the whole thing down and start all over again.

We need a whole new system.

Well, man, that that is that there's a there's a line in the Old Testament that I I've always loved.

Uh and it's the line, don't move the ancient boundary stones.

And the idea is there are things that God has put into place that cannot be moved.

There are things that God has put into place that should not be annihilated.

I mean, the whole New Testament talks about building your house, building your faith on the words of Christ, on Jesus Himself.

And that when you don't, you know, your house is like gonna just get annihilated by storms that come.

Paul uses the language of uh the capstone, the the foundation of the house.

Like there's a sense as a Christian that I want everything to burn down except for the foundation of Jesus.

And the truth is, anything in my life that is not built on Jesus is going to come down at some point.

But there is a difference between burning the whole house down and destroying the foundation and um naming the parts of our house that aren't real and good that need to be taken down so that it can be built the right way.

Those are two totally different things.

One is wholesale destruction and one is called repentance.

And repentance is good, it's when we take the parts that are not reflective of God and scripture and we we undo those.

But to undo the whole thing, I think too often that's moving the ancient boundary stones and that's rebuilding the house on the sand.

Uh we've the the foundation has been laid.

Jesus has been laid.

Uh we we we don't need a new foundation.

Uh we need to build on the foundation.

Yeah, you said uh uh something along the lines of pagans convert but Christians repent, or something along those lines in the book.

And um so to me, I kind of thought, like, man, should I always be in a state of healthy deconstruction or some sort of, you know, and you mentioned it earlier, like if we're not hurting, we're probably not following Jesus in some sense, but should should there always be this qu this questioning or this this breaking down, or is that a seasonal thing?

How do I know that it's getting too far or it's becoming dangerous?

You know, uh Nate, um my my family right now, and I'm I'm gonna have to omit her name because we we're not allowed to publicly talk about anything of her identity, but we have a foster daughter right now.

And um she she is the sweetest, I mean, she's the sweetest girl in the world.

It's been really hard.

I mean, being a foster parent is really challenging work, and it is not her fault.

It has just been really hard.

But she, you know, when when when you've been um when you've been in a family system that has uh given you lie after lie after lie and you believe those lies, it takes a long time to undo those lies.

They don't just undo, like it takes you disinformation is very hard to undo.

Well, in in the Christian story, um we have a word for that.

You know, to in the New Testament, we have a we have the there's a a Greek word that we all use very often.

Uh it's a Greek word metanoia, meta noia, which in Greek um is is the combination of two words, meta meaning change, noia, mind, change your mind.

Um, and of course, um you and I know that word, metanoia, as the word repentance.

Uh the word repentance means to change your mind.

And so you tell me the kingdom of God has come clear, repent.

Um you you tell me if we're supposed to repent every day or not.

Right.

Yeah.

I I I know me really well, and I know this.

There's a lot of disinformation in my heart that God is undoing.

And I'm like an orphan child that needs a lot of work, but it is a daily process of undoing lies that I've believed.

Listen, to undo and deconstruct lies, that that's our word for repentance.

That's our word for repentance.

So when somebody says deconstruction is bad, I want to say, in what Bible are you getting any of these ideas?

To undo lies is the work of holiness.

Deconstruct things that are not true.

That's our everyday job.

Changing our mind in Jesus' name.

Amen and amen.

Amen to that.

I know for me, you know, I'm I'm paranoid, AJ, about about being wrong.

I'm paranoid about having bad theology.

And and on the one side, you could look at well, well, that's great, Nate.

Like you you want to seek after the truth, but but on the other side, it could be it could be crippling.

Um so what would you say selfishly to me who feels like they have to have perfect theology, some someone like me who sometimes I can look at God, AJ, and go, oh, he's gotta be disappointed in the fact that I believed that for so long.

You know what, Nate?

I'm doing something right now that's uh for a preacher, it's the scariest thing you can do.

I am taking all my old sermons and I'm putting them into an Evernote file.

I'm putting them into my Evernote files.

And what I'm doing is I'm reading my old sermons from like 20 years ago, and I'm going through them as I'm putting them on my Evernote files.

And there are moments when I'm looking, I'm looking at my old sermons, and I I have these moments where I'm like, that that's heresy.

Like that, that some somebody let me preach that.

Right?

Like, how did somebody give me a mic that day?

I mean, that that that that is like that is like the story of following Jesus is the it's the ongoing journey of realizing all the ways you've been wrong and how Jesus has been right the whole time.

And that God is profoundly patient with us and generous.

And for heaven's sake, I mean we have in the New Testament, it's interesting, isn't it?

You have two stories of two apostles, two two uh two early disciples of Jesus.

You have Judas Iscariot, and you have you have Peter.

One is gonna go on and become the head of the church in Jerusalem, um, or at least a really important figure in the early church, and one is going to take his own life immediately after turning his back on Jesus.

But when you look at Judas and you look at Peter, it's astounding.

Um what did they both do?

They both have the they both committed the same sin.

They both turned their back on Jesus.

They're the only thing that's different between the literally the only thing different between Judas and Peter is one was willing to be forgiven.

And when you look at our lives, Nate, what is distinctive about us is not that we're perfect, it's that we are open to the grace of God.

And the journey of following Jesus, it is a lifelong journey of realizing how absolutely foolish and silly we are, and how much listen, the same God that calls us to truthfulness is the same God that died on the cross for us.

And so we've got to, when we do theology, we're all right now, we are all wrong in some way, shape, or form.

That's humbling.

And then actually, in 10 years, I'm gonna come back and listen to this podcast and be like, I said some garbage there.

I mean, we are all on a journey.

Jesus is the goal.

Our rightness is not the goal.

Jesus is the goal.

Right.

Yeah, you you said uh you quoted someone, I I don't remember the name, but uh, at any given moment, I have to be okay with the fact that 80% of my theology is wrong.

Yeah.

That was, by the way, NT Wright, one of the most important New Testament scholars in the world, uh, who uttered that uh in a room I was in once.

Um, eight that he has to be okay with the fact that 80% of his theology at a given moment is wrong.

He just doesn't know what the 80% is.

That is my hero in the faith.

I mean, that NT Wright has probably had more of an impact on me than just about anybody else that I've ever, ever, ever followed.

Um, to hear a hero say that, uh, to hear a person that you love and respect say something that humble, it's life-changing.

Um, this, by the way, doesn't mean don't for one second take this as some sort of um backdoor way of entering some sort of like theological relativism where nothing matters.

No, like truth really matters.

And we're called to have sound doctrine and we're called to have truthful theology.

Um, it just so happens that until resurrection, we all see uh uh through glass dimly.

And Paul Paul tells us we will we do not see Jesus um exactly as he is um until we see him face to face, John tells us in the letters of John.

Uh and at that moment, you know, we will see him face to face.

Um my friend Jerry Root, who teaches at Wheaton, he has this funny thing that he says where you know the first words we say when we get to heaven, when we enter the presence of God and we see God face to face for the first time, and we enter the throne room and we see heaven, the first words out of our mouth is we will look around.

And we will all with a collective sigh go like it will all at that moment make sense.

It will all that suffering, all those tears, all that loss, all that abuse, all those confusions, all those questions, they will all be clarified at that moment.

But until then, until then, we see through glass dimly.

Yeah, at towards the beginning of the book, you said uh even that that heaven will be eternal deconstruction.

We'll be we'll we'll be looking at, like you said, what what we thought or what we believed, and and and even you know, re as recently our pastor was talking about how the angels say holy, holy, holy, and and they're saying that constantly because there something new is being revealed about God.

Yes.

And they've been around for for much longer than we have, right?

Absolutely.

And in that same passage in Isaiah, Isaiah sees God in his glory, and the first words out of his mouth are in Hebrew, Oiveh, woe is me.

He literally he said, I mean, you can see his theology deconstructing in by the moment.

What I thought about God is very different than God himself.

Yeah, and that that you can have a theology and not an experience of God.

But the minute you have the experience of God, your theology, um, you need to be open to the fact that maybe you've had ideas about God that are not true.

Isaiah did, for heaven's sake.

Isaiah did.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that we bend all of our theology to experience.

Um, but I'm just struck that even in the Bible, um, people that encountered God, their theology of God was rearranged because they experienced something real and true about the living God.

I'm not saying we rearrange all of our theology around experience.

I'm just saying in the Bible, that is something that happens for people is that they have an experience with God.

That is ironically, that ironically, the people that got Jesus crucified were all the theologians.

It is it it's the people who knew the Bible the most who killed God when he comes.

That terrifies me.

Yeah.

It's that that uh the scripture, I believe it's in Matthew AJ, where you know, depart from me.

I I never knew you.

Talk about talk about terrifying.

And even called out, you know, with the right language, curios, curios, Lord, Lord, uh, using all the right words.

I mean, yeah, terrifying.

Now, James, um, you know, who, by the way, was Jesus' brother, um, uh, and Esau Macaulay, I is at uh Wheaton, he has this funny thing where he says, you know, one of the greatest arguments for uh Jesus being God was that his brothers worshiped him.

Um you know, because I I don't I have some step step, I have a stepbrother and some stepsisters, and I can tell you I don't I don't worship any of them at all.

Not even close, and they don't worship me.

Um but the fact that you've got you know two brothers who uh purportedly are Jesus' brothers in the New Testament worshiping him, that's a pretty good sign that something was up with Jesus.

Um but uh that you have James making this comment that um even the demons, even the demons have good theology.

They they they they confess Jesus is Lord.

And in the gospels, by the way, the first beings to name Jesus as the divine son of God are the demonic figures.

And uh James says, you know, they the demons know their theology and they and and shudder all the more.

Uh it is entirely possible to have a perfect Orthodox theology and be demonic.

I mean, that's terrifying.

Terrifying.

It is, it is, and it's equally terrifying to know that one could have a really broken theology and really know God with all their hearts and and experience the living God.

It's con this is complicated.

It's complicated.

Yeah.

I think one thing you do really well is is uh in in After Doubt is um is pointing to the fact that we not only need to know God, but we need to know ourselves.

Um so so what in this culture of uh self-awareness that we find ourselves in, why does it seem like we're missing the mark on it, AJ?

Like we've got we've got test out the wazoo to figure out who we are, and yet I feel like we we're we're further and further from from the market.

Can you speak to that at all?

Well, we we are obsessed with right now, rightfully so in our culture, right?

When you look at uh our obsession with things like Enneagram, 23andMe, um you know, um all every test in the world to figure out your personality, your story, your history, where you come from, genograms, whatnot, we are sort of obsessed with learning about ourselves.

And that's not a problem.

It's actually, I think, really important because I think for a long time we haven't taken time to actually get to know ourselves.

And so we do these things obsessively because we don't know who we are.

Um and so is it important for a Christian to know themselves?

Uh in the book, I lay out a theology um that in the history of the church has been called duplex cognitia, which is the idea of uh of knowing God and knowing yourself, and that knowing God and knowing self go hand in hand.

You that it's impossible to truly know God for who God is unless you know yourself.

And it's impossible to know yourself without knowing the God who made you, that you need uh both.

And so many people in church history, John, Calvin, Martin, Luther, uh, Saint Augustine in the in the church wrote about the importance of knowing yourself.

So here's the problem with not knowing yourself when you don't know you, is more often than not, when you don't know you, rather than knowing God for who God is, you start projecting.

And what I mean by that, in counseling, right, projecting is when we put on somebody else really something that is in us.

If I project onto my wife my insecurities, when I project onto my students my need for praise, when I project onto somebody else something in me, then I'm not really seeing the other for who they are.

So let me give you a let me give you a story.

Uh about 12 years ago, 13 years ago, I went through a struggle, a pretty real struggle with alcohol.

Um, a number of years ago, I wrote a book called A Glorious Dark, where I tell this story.

Um, and I um I was really struggling with with alcohol.

And it turns out a lot of pastors do.

Um, I was a church planter, and I'll tell you, when you're planting a church, it's hard work and you got to deal with your emotions somehow.

And I didn't have a counselor, so why not go to the bottle?

And so I didn't become an alcoholic, and I'm not an alcoholic, but I could tell there was a trajectory that was unhealthy.

So a friend of mine during that time came to me and and said something.

This rocked me, by the way.

This was a fair this was a very transformative moment in my life.

A friend of mine came to me and made a comment.

He said, AJ, I really love your preaching, but I've noticed you only preach grace, you never call us to the hard things of God.

And the point was, he was saying, like, mean you bring grace and you do a great job bringing grace, but you don't talk about discipleship, you don't talk about holiness.

And I couldn't at the moment have figured it out, and I didn't until years later, but I it is abundantly clear to me right now that what was happening was actually I was preaching not what the congregation needed, I was preaching what I needed.

And what was happening was I was I was actually projecting onto the church what I myself desperately needed, was I just needed a lot of grace.

And I was I was unwilling to go to the harder things of Jesus.

When we don't know ourselves, we tend to project onto God our own stuff.

And so, I mean, we we could talk about, for example, I just taught a class on Bible, sexuality, and gender.

Um, I'm very, I'm very committed to the historically Christian view on sexuality and marriage.

And I'm you you could say I'm a conservative on this particular topic.

Um, and I'm stuck in the first century.

You know, I th I think Jesus was right, I think the Bible is right, um, and and I'm not going anywhere on that.

And I have observed very, very, very common experience that when somebody walks through an experience like same-sex attraction, or they walk through a friend coming out of the closet or something like that, it is very common for people to change their theology based on what's really going on inside of them.

And and and I'm I'm being sensitive and caring, I'm not being belligerent here, but I do want to say something dangerous happens when we start changing who God is because of who we are.

Right.

And that's I think I call it theological projection.

And it's very dangerous because we're called to love God for who God is, not who we want God to be.

The minute we start worshiping the God we want, that's no longer God.

That's called an idol.

Um, God is God.

Um, my wants are not God.

Yeah, and I I think you I believe you put it in the book, and and our pastor has reiterated that it's much easier to change our beliefs than our behavior.

Um, and and and and doing so uh can be detrimental.

And more often than not, more often than not, we change the Bible to fit what we're doing, rather than changing what we're doing to fit the Bible.

And that's a dang that's just honestly, that's what the slave owners did to the Bible.

Is the slave owners um they wanted the slaves to have Bibles.

This is a very common thing in in the in the sort of uh colonial and and post-colonial era before before the civil war, is that slave owners wanted slaves to have Bibles because the slaves gave the Bibles hope.

But the problem was the problem was that pesky book of Exodus about God freeing slaves.

So, what did the slave owners do?

Well, the slave owners uh took the Bible and they cut out the book of Exodus and they gave it to the slaves, and they were called they were called slave Bibles.

And um, what is happening there is somebody is cutting out the parts of the Bible that don't fit their privilege and power and the way they're living, and they're passing along a fragmented version of God's revelation.

And the minute I'm not a slave owner, you're not a slave owner, I'm not saying that that you're slave owners, but there's something in that that we all do on some level that we cut out the parts of the Bible we don't like because they don't fit our lives.

Yeah, and that's that a dangerous posture to have towards the word of God.

Yeah.

And it kind of segues into our our last few moments together here.

Uh, I I kind of want to spend these last couple minutes talking about the church in particular, and and one area that that you mentioned was was loving God and hating the church has no historical precedent.

And and I feel like that we are um we're seeing that attempted in this in this moment, right?

We're seeing people saying, you know, my living room is my church at this point in time, and and that's okay.

Like in your assessment, AJ, what happened?

How did we get to this point and and what's our hope for for getting out of it?

Well, with do do do uh just just to clarify one thing, um, you know, for two, yeah, well, at least where I'm at for two years, our living room had to be our sanctuary.

I mean, that was absolutely the only space that we could, and and there are you know, people, um, non-able-bodied people who are in a position where that is the place that they find themselves, and we've got to be utterly respectful and kind, kind and understanding.

That said, um, there's another I think what we're what you're talking about is more directly uh a posture and attitude that says, um, I can follow Jesus all on my own, and I don't need God's people, and I can do it on my own, and I'll put a Bethel album on and I'll just worship with some candles in my living room and we'll call it good to go.

And that's a fine way to worship Jesus, don't get me wrong.

Um, but I think what I was trying to um uh uh trying to articulate in the book is that we can survive a post-denominational age.

Christianity can survive a post-denominational age, meaning we can survive getting past our denominations.

What we can't survive is a post-church age.

The minute we're done with the church, um, then the gospel, I mean, the church is um the embodiment of Christ's work on the planet.

And and the minute we try to do discipleship with Jesus without doing it with a bunch of people, um, or about without other people, something is tragically lost.

Something is tragically lost.

How have we gotten here?

I think there's a lot of things at play.

I think, first of all, um, study after study after study are showing that most people in America are losing trust in the institutions.

And a lot of that mistrust is earned.

I mean, uh unfortunately, a lot of um uh uh our Christian institutions have been complicit in propping up evil and injustice.

Um, but I think wholesale across the board, people are losing trust in institutions.

Uh, I think secondly, uh, is that um the human soul is not meant to worship ideology, it's meant to worship God.

And when a church props up an ideology rather than Jesus, uh we have an innate distaste for it.

Uh, or at least we should have an innate distaste for it.

Um, I think that might be true.

Uh, and I think thirdly, uh, we're being told increasingly to not relate to people that are different than ourselves.

So if you're conservative, don't hang out with liberal.

If you're liberal, don't hang out with a conservative.

And we're told that if you hang out with the other side, that there's something wrong with you.

So I think there's a lot of forces at play.

Um to say nothing of COVID.

I mean, I'm again, I think that that has rearranged people's psychology on a on a detrimental scale that we will historians will be writing about for generations to come.

So, what do we need to do?

Um, I have had a number of friends who pastor churches say that when people came back from COVID, it's like they came back different.

Um, and and a number of my friends have said it's like they came back radicalized.

And one of my friends said on during pastor appreciation uh week a couple months ago, said, you know, church, if you want to appreciate me, do this.

This week, let me have more authority in your life than Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow.

Let me have a little bit more authority than CNN or Fox News.

And what he was saying was he was saying, like, you all listen more to fuck Tucker Carlson than you do to me.

Yeah.

And I think what that represents, Nate, is it represents a rearrangement where we have increasingly put our trust in disembodied news sources, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and we have neglected to find ourselves in a community of trust where we we are willing to.

It's funny, isn't it?

We're willing to change churches for politics, but we're not really willing to change politics for our church.

And and I I think that that's weird.

I think that's weird.

Yeah, we have put politics in the place of Jesus, and that's a dangerous trajectory.

This is my way of saying uh it's very powerful to be in a church of people that you don't like, where Jesus is exalted and you are not the center of the room, and we need a place where we're not the center of the room.

Because everything else in our life tells us that we are the center.

Our phone is constantly blowing up at us and telling us we're the center of everything.

We need one place where we're not the center, and and that is the church.

Last thing for you, brother.

How do we lovingly walk not only with someone else through this, but maybe even ourselves through this process and in a way that's that's glorifying to God?

I'll tell you this.

Number one, uh, and unfortunately we just keep having to learn this uh as a church, um, not our church, just the the general, the the big C church, is that um probably the least effective way uh to serve people in deconstruction is shame.

And if we utilize shame and guilt as a way to get people to come back, it doesn't work.

It pushes people further and further and further and further away.

So no shame and and no guilt trips and no like um you don't you know you don't you don't bring a sheep back by beating it up.

You you go to the sheep and you care for it, and you pick it up and you help it and you care for it and you love it and you serve it.

Um I would say this.

Um when you're walking with somebody else who's going through deconstruction, be really, really slow to assume that the the problem is that they need answers.

And what I mean by that is if somebody's asking big questions, they probably aren't asking you for a YouTube clip or a Christian author.

More often than not, what they're probably asking for, if they're being honest with you, is they're looking for you.

And what they want is a friend.

And they want somebody to be with them in the foxhole.

Um, I have a lot of students who who set up officer appointments who tell me that when they talk to their parents about their theological questions, their parents send them a YouTube clip.

Well, you should watch this video, that'll solve it all.

And what that ends up doing is it pushes them away because they're not looking for answers.

They're looking for a buddy.

So I would say embrace the ministry of the ear.

The ministry of the ear.

Be uh be an excellent friend who knows how to listen.

If we learned anything from the book of Job, the answer is don't be one of the three friends that just brings really bad theological answers.

Yeah.

Up sit with Joe.

They did the right thing, they sat with him in the dust.

Do that.

But keep your answers.

You don't, you don't deconstruction and doubt is an itch of the heart, not of the mind.

And the person walking through those things is looking for someone to be with them.

What does Jesus do with the one doubter we know in the New Testament?

The one person we know who's known by doubt.

Of course, we call him doubting Thomas, but that's not in the New Testament.

But what does Jesus do?

Does he bring an answer to him?

No.

He lets him touch his scars.

And I think the doubter, they need some scars to touch.

They need a relationship, they need a friend.

Amen.

AJ, uh personally, just thank you so much for not only this time together, but uh for for the book, for your contribution to the church, man.

I mean, I uh and when I say that the the global church, I I I truly um I'm just truly grateful, man, for for for the writing and and I'll and I want people to read the I'm not much of an advocate for other stuff, but I I know how it's affected me and impacted me.

So I I really want people to grab this book.

Nate, you bless me, but truth be told, uh you uh you're doing the work of pastoral ministry on the ground.

Thank you for walking with people through everything they're walking through.

You're doing a great job.

And at some point, you guys are gonna have to have me uh come out to the church and I'll get to be with you and sit in the back and see all the good things God's doing at celebration.

That's amazing.

Dr.

AJ Swoboda, author of After Doubt.

Thank you so much.

And uh uh next week, be sure to tune in for our next episode of After the Message in our Deconstructed series.

See you guys.

Thank you for joining us for After the Message to learn more about celebration church here number landemal.

You can follow us on the public medium and the handle celebration over him, or visit number some liberation overhead number.