Can I Interest You in a Game of Theological Jenga?

Have you ever played Jenga? During the holidays, our family used to love playing this game. Especially when they came out with the “life-sized” version. It was so fun to watch each of our faces contort with tension as we chose a Jenga piece to pull out of the stack and delicately tried to maneuver it out from underneath the block without dumping the whole stack!

Recently, I’ve been reading and listening to books and podcasts by Colby Martin. If you don’t know him, he has written two books that have solidified my understanding of what I feel is a compelling understanding of the Christian faith. These two books are the book “Unclobber: Rethinking our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality” in which he admirably takes on the 6 or 7 “Clobber Passages” in scripture that are used by many conservative Christians to literally “clobber” the LGBTQIA community and does an excellent of showing us that the more conservative and exclusive interpretation of these passages is wrong. It’s a must read if you are, like me, trying to be an ally to that community. The second book is called “The Switch”, a book that tries to help folks who have felt like they have lost their faith or have come to a point in their life where the current understanding of the Christian faith just doesn’t work for them in this current reality.  In the book he tries to convince folks not to quit being Christians, but learn, instead, to move away from that more conservative understanding to a more progressive understanding of the Christian faith.

This “shift” is one I have been making most of my life. And it’s not that I grew up in a conservative Christian family or faith (indeed I grew up in the United Methodist Church). But I did grow up in a culture where the conservative, evangelical understanding of the Christian faith permeated every breath I took. And I was never comfortable in that environment. That understanding of faith was “too” sure of themselves. That understanding of faith left no room for my creative side. That understanding of faith left too many of my friends and family out on the outside of my Christian community!

At the heart of my ministry is a total sense of compassion for folks who struggle like I did and do. I, like Colby Martin, want to help and urge these wonderful folk not to give up, but instead to switch the way they understand the Christian faith. I want to introduce them to an understanding of faith that is not exclusive, but inclusive. I want to introduce them to an understanding of the Christian faith that isn’t based on guilt and shame, but on original blessing and empowerment. I want to introduce them to an understanding of Jesus that isn’t centered on whether you are going to heaven or hell, but is, instead, contingent on how you can authentically be a “conduit” of the inclusive, empowering love of Jesus.

Sounds cool, right? Where do I sign up, Brook!

Well, as cool as it might sound, this journey is complicated and confusing and leaves many of us kind of feeling like we’re out on an island all by ourselves.

One of the processes that we need to go through, in order to get to that other side, is a process called “deconstruction.”  It’s a process where many of the classical tenants of our faith are intentionally torn down. Now, at first, that might sound empowering. “Pastor Brook, let’s just burn the whole building down!” But as you start working through the process of “deconstruction,” many people find themselves wondering if we even have a faith left to stand on anymore. As someone put it: “pretty soon it just kind of feels like we’re a club where no one believes anything!”  And at first glance, that might be what it feels like, but the truth is that deconstruction’s purpose is not to burn the house down, but instead to break it apart into pieces in order that we can build that Christian understanding of faith back up with language that speaks and works for us.  Deconstruction should, in the end, help us find authentic footings on which to base our Christian faith.

Colby Martin, in one of his interviews, uses the game of Jenga, as an analogy for this “deconstruction” process. In this process we are pulling pieces of the traditional or more conservative understanding of the Christian faith that we feel don’t speak to us anymore, or don’t fit with “inner truth’s” that we have now started holding due to our experience in this world, and we are taking them out so we can examine them.  We take them and try to understand why our community and tradition hold or held them so dear. We try to honor that, but we also try to honor the experiences that have brought us to a place where they no longer speak to us. Or where we just simply don’t agree. We taste that tension. We live in to that tension. And then, with prayer and study and wrestling, we do one of three things. (1) We realize that it is indeed vital to our faith understanding and we place it back in the Jenga block. Maybe in a different place on that block, but still there. Or (2) We see it as valuable but in a different sense. We take the words of the past and try to rewrite it so it has significance to our journey now. Or (3) we don’t see it as valuable. We may even see it as an obstacle to being our true self, or to the life and spirit of Jesus and so we set it aside.

In many senses I think Colby Martin’s idea of Theological Jenga is what we in the United Methodist Church have called that Wesleyan Quadrilateral. An understanding of the Christian faith where we use Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience as the criteria in which we wrestle with those Jenga pieces.

For me, being a thinking Christian, I believe Colby Martin’s idea of Theological Jenga is a wonderful expression of what it means to live as an authentic Christian in the 21^st Century. It allows us to live with the real tensions of this world and calls us to align our understanding of the Christian faith with the changing world we live in.

Shalom, your pastor, and friend hoping to join you in a game of Christian Jenga sometime soon, Brook