Recovering Evangelicals #54 A global deconstruction network
Last week, we talked about believers starting out with a simple but passionate Christian belief (stage 1) which crumbles as doubts and questions erode the pillars of their faith (stage 3). This is such an unsettling experience for anyone going through that, but Brian McLaren showed that it is still possible to find Faith after Doubt (stage 4). But that transition can be a very long, and hard and lonely one, full of feelings of loss, confusion, disorientation, fear, rejection, anger …
… not a happy place.
I’ve been there myself.
And so has Phil Drysdale. We’ll hear his life story, which began in a very Evangelical setting, took him through Bible College and traveling world-wide to speak to large Evangelical audiences, before he found himself in a downward spiral of religious deconstruction. And also how he made his way through that and found a new passion in life: he started an on-line support network for others going through the same experience. A community (a word we’ve been hearing a lot about in the past several episodes).
He’ll also tell us about research he’s done on the deconstruction experience, beginning with what a typical deconstructor looks like. You might be quite surprised about what he found. Contrary to what many might assume … that people left faith because they were hurt or because they weren’t really all that invested or involved … his statistics quash both assumptions. In fact, the numbers show that they tend to be “much more likely to read the Bible regularly … to pray regularly … to attend church frequently… to be involved as volunteers or even staff (including being a pastor) … to have a theological degree … than those who stayed in church.”
He’s also researched some of the things that tend to derail people on their faith journey, and the things that help them through that rocky part of the path. In fact, his research shows that “one of the major ways you can mitigate how hard the deconstruction journey is, is to be surrounded by other people going on a similar journey.” Hence, his global, on-line Deconstruction Network.
We also teased apart the various definitions of “deconstruction,” and how it really looks more like a process of “growing up,” something we talked about last week with Brian McLaren.
As always, tell us what you think.
You can learn more about Phil Drysdale and his Deconstruction Network at www.phildrysdale.com.
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