Editor’s Note: The following appeared in the March/April 2024 issue of Nurturing Faith Journal (NFJ). In 2025, NFJ will become Good Faith Magazine and will be available for free to all Good Faith Advocates.

When I was younger, I despised telling an older person about a new idea I was mulling over, only to hear some version of the response, “That’s not new.” How dare they use their experience and wisdom to disavow me of the notion that I have thought thoughts that have never been thought by the brightest thinkers who have ever thought thoughts?

This annoyance was especially acute in the early 2000s when I was a young adult, knee-deep in what had become known as the “Emerging Church” movement.

After reading the works of postmodern philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty—but mostly of authors who interpreted such philosophers for mass audiences—some Christians concluded that the story of our faith was at an inflection point. They suggested that the ground was about to shift under our feet, and we needed to be prepared.

Some of us prepared for the coming earthquake by questioning and picking apart all we once thought was essential for our faith, discarding what wasn’t, and repurposing what was. We called this “deconstruction” and were quite proud of ourselves for inventing such an edgy concept.

The church I belonged to (and still do) was at the epicenter of this movement. We sought to reimagine our approach to God and the Bible and how we should live our faith in the broader culture– a culture we once considered an adversary but now believed could be an ally. We leaned into a belief that the dividing line separating “sacred” from “secular” was a false division, one the powers of Christendom created to exercise control over its followers.

This freed us to relax and take a posture of curiosity and exploration. God could be found anywhere, so we would look for God anywhere.

During this time, I ran into an acquaintance who asked how things were going with my church. (This is a very Texas thing to ask about when encountering an acquaintance.) I enthusiastically described to her everything about the Emerging Church movement and deconstruction and how we, as a church, were doing things “differently.” She graciously nodded her head and asked thoughtful questions. I thought to myself how impressed she must have been with my uncommon wisdom.

As the conversation began to wind down, she reflected on all I had been pontificating about and commented, “That sounds like church to me.”

I couldn’t tell if she intended to convey that this is how Christianity was always meant to be and that my church in Waco, Texas, had finally cracked the code, or that believers worldwide had been living this way forever and we were just now catching up. Either way, her words communicated the same dreaded message: nothing I had spoken to her was original or even very exciting.

She was kind and gentle and, I am confident, had no intention of bursting my idealistic bubble. But I received what she said poorly and vowed never to be like that. And, of course, you know what’s coming next in this story: I got old.

In recent years, a new generation of Christians has begun to reconsider the essentials of their faith. For many of them, like many in my Generation X cohort, their evolving faith is the result of disillusionment with an evangelical church culture that sought to retain power and prominence through shame.

Some experienced how pastors and theologians could masterfully weave around and dismiss the numerous bible verses that speak against wealth and privilege, but couldn’t use the same interpretation skills when it came to the small handful of scriptures about ancient gender and sexuality norms.

For many of these young people, this dissonance was felt most acutely during two election cycles and a national reckoning over race. These events created a crisis of faith within them.

So, they also began to pick apart their faith, keeping what was valuable and discarding what wasn’t. And you know what they called this project? “Deconstruction.” Even worse, they acted like they came up with the word. They made TikTok and Instagram videos about it. They discussed it on X (formerly Twitter) and created memes about it.

Recently, I have found myself resentful of this new generation of deconstructors. I have not been as gracious toward them as my older acquaintance was to me when I educated her on the contours of the Emerging Church. I’ve tried to reflect on why this is the case, and this is what I have come up with – My resentment is due to the fact that millennials and Generation Z are much better at deconstruction than we were.

They do it with a tenderness many of us didn’t have. They are light and humorous about deconstruction, less angry, more, well, constructive.

They are so good at it that Christian institutions called to nurture faith, justice and mercy in the world are on high alert. These institutions are scrambling to adapt, and the ones who survive will be those who enact more than just a cosmetic makeover. The new deconstructors have less institutional memory and even less institutional loyalty than we did. They aren’t playing around.

They have one basic requirement for Christian institutions: they must take the person and teachings of Jesus seriously.

What a novel idea.