Christianity After Deconstruction: Cabernet and Pray

You probably expect a certain type of person to talk to you about deconstruction and doubt. Perhaps someone young and with a lot of life yet to experience. But Jack Reese is 75, a former senior pastor and a professor for 28 years, and he just wrote Grace Sideways, a book about a lifetime of doubting. He has never fully understood certainty, and he argues that a hidden God is the God the Psalms and the prophets handed us. We get into summer Christians and winter Christians, why the church sings praise so quickly and lament so rarely, and what Jesus was doing when He quoted Psalm 22 from the cross. Jack also tells the story of walking away from a comfortable career to lead a nonprofit in the poorest zip code in Texas, where a Black congregation gave him the nickname "1%" and meant it as love. Along the way, he explains why the person who insists you must never doubt may be the most arrogant one in the room, and I admit that I want to sound like him when I'm 75.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/3y4NmmKFPMU

-----------------

Listen to my new short story audiobook called Loving God More. It's about a 15yo boy who tells his Christians parents he's gay. Neither of them knows how to handle it when an anonymous letter arrives with only one word. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/blog/loving-god-more

You can get a signed copy of my latest book, The Edge of the Inside, or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Links:

I've been on the ash heap with the Book of Job for eight weeks, and this week the author of Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees, Dr. David Gushee, joins me to close it out. Gushee was once America's leading evangelical ethicist, and after he wrote Changing Our Minds, the community he helped build pushed him out. He reads Job as a story that works like a parable. We take on Job 42:6, the verse where the Hebrew is so tangled that scholars disagree on whether Job repents at all, and Gushee explains why he doesn't buy the version most translations give us. If you've ever been told your questions were the problem, Job may have been on your side all along.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/HFFSJQhR6bc

-----------------

Listen to my new short story audiobook called Loving God More. It's about a 15yo boy who tells his Christians parents he's gay. Neither of them knows how to handle it when an anonymous letter arrives with only one word. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/blog/loving-god-more

You can get a signed copy of my latest book, The Edge of the Inside, or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Links:

For seven weeks, Job has been waiting for God to answer him. In part seven of the Job in Exile series, God finally shows up in the whirlwind and then wants to talk about lions, ravens, mountain goats, and two creatures that sound like they wandered off a monster movie set (yes, we get into whether Behemoth is a dinosaur, complete with a disturbingly catchy children's song). God never answers a single one of Job's questions about his suffering. If God actually blesses Job's questioning and protest at the end rather than his surrender, that reshapes how we bring our own hard questions to God. Pour a glass and sit with one of the strangest, most beautiful endings in the Bible. 

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/lPIXQHMSGjk 

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Just when you'd expect the Book of Job to reach its climax, a new character barges in. Elihu is young, angry, and completely certain he has the explanation everyone else somehow missed. In part six of the Job in Exile series, we see Elihu do the one thing the story keeps refusing to do: he shows up with a confident answer. The uncomfortable part is how familiar he sounds in many churches today. This episode argues that your posture around your faith matters more than the beliefs you hold within it, drawing on the apostle Paul, Brian McLaren, and decades of research suggesting it's fundamentalism, not orthodoxy, that tracks with prejudice. 

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/hVxsZ69QFwo 

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Joshua Colburn spent twenty years inside a megachurch, and now he's known as the "Original Sinfluencer." In this conversation, he and Jeremy dig into why humor and satire might be the most honest tools survivors of church trauma have, how fear gets used to keep people in line, and the day Joshua grew his hair out as an act of rebellion the moment he walked away. The heart of it is his story of being diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia only after leaving, and realizing the church had spent years reading his neurodivergence as a gift of the Holy Spirit and leaning on it to keep him from seeing the harm. If you love the church, parts of this will be hard to hear. If the church left a mark on you, this might be the episode that helps you heal from it.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/zWrTv6TlI4k 

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

-----------------

Find Joshua online on all platforms at:

Job had a way out. All he had to do was apologize for something he never did, agree that God was punishing him, and his whole world would snap back into place. His community, his reputation, his peace, all of it one lie away. Yet he wouldn't say the lie. In part five of our walk through the Biblical book of Job, we sit in the moment Job tells his friends he will defend his integrity until he dies, even while standing utterly alone. If you have ever been pressured to repent for your questions, to admit you were wrong just to get back in the room, you already know this story from the inside. We get into Job 19 and 27, Dr. David Gushee's Job in Exile, and what it actually costs to speak as you think instead of saying what you are supposed to say.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/rzmZNc-LQhg

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Job's three friends showed up while his life was in ruins, and by the end they had turned into accusers, convinced that a man suffering this much must have earned it. In part four of Job in Exile, I stay in the long, ugly middle of the book, the stretch most people skip, where everyone closest to Job decides the problem has to be him. If Job's collapse was undeserved, the same could befall any of them, and blaming the man in the ashes is easier than living with it. This is an episode about what a community does when defending the system starts to matter more than defending the person in front of it. We sit in the tension together. Pour a glass and come find out where it leaves us.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/4IUChiNnzik 

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

In part three of our Job in Exile series, we sit with something in the book of Job that most of us were trained to read right past. By chapter three, the patient, pious Job we love to quote is gone. He breaks a week of silence, curses the day of his birth, and starts to notice the suffering of a world he had been too comfortable to see. His own eviction gave him new eyes. And yet the most righteous man in the East owned people the entire time, and even after admitting to God that his slaves were his equals in creation, he kept them enslaved. Leaning on Dr. David Gushee's forthcoming book and a letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote at Christmas 1942, I keep circling a question I can't leave safely in the ancient world. What am I still normalizing on behalf of the people who suffer, and where does my empathy quietly hit its ceiling?

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/AdDm9VSK94Q

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

My guest John Doyle has spent forty years paying attention to the moments most of us file away and never mention out loud. The vision. The voice. The thing that grabbed him when no one was there. He holds these stories loosely, with more humility than certainty, which is what makes them worth sitting with. And it opens up the question I keep circling with people who've had a moment like this: how do you tell a real encounter with God from your own brain handing you exactly what you wanted to hear? We leave the door open to mystery rather than trying to land this cleanly. Pour a glass and sit with this one.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/kethXyx5d-E 

-----------------

One spot left for the Wine and Whiskey guys' trip. Find out more here: https://communionwineco.com/events/wine-and-whiskey/ 

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

-----------------

Links:

Job's friends showed up, tore their robes, and then said nothing for seven days straight. It's easy to rush past that on the way to the arguments that come later, where these three men get almost everything wrong. But for one week, before any of that, they get one thing exactly right. They sit down in the dung heap next to their ruined friend, and they stay. In part two of the Job in Exile series, Jeremy sits with the two kinds of silence we hand each other when life comes apart. There's the silence of presence, the friend who gets on a plane and shows up at your door with no answers and no agenda, just himself. And there's the silence of absence, the community that goes quiet the moment your questions get too big for the room, the people who used to reach out every week and now say nothing at all. If you've ever stepped back from a church and waited for someone, anyone, to notice, you already know how loud that second silence can get. So pour a glass, let it slow you down, and sit with us in Job 2. You'll leave with a question: which silence have you been handed, and which one will you hand to the people still sitting in their own pain?

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/6-zXx_-fazI

-----------------

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in