Deconstruct with Purpose

"Deconstruction in and of itself is not bad. It's only bad or harmful when you don't reconstruct with truth." - Pastor Matthew Johnson

Few words have reshaped the cultural conversation more in recent years than deconstruction. It shows up in social media threads, in podcast discussions, and in the quiet, painful stories of people who have walked away from the church. But before it became a cultural flashpoint, it was a philosophical concept with a very specific and constructive intent.

In a recent Sunday message at The Tree Church, Pastor Matthew Johnson opened a brand new series by tracing the word back to its origin. In 1967, French philosopher Jacques Derrida introduced deconstruction as a method for examining the complexity of words and communication. His core idea was that people naturally filter what they hear and read through their own biases, cultural influences, and personal experiences. Derrida's proposed solution was not to tear things down for the sake of tearing them down. His goal was to strip away what was incomplete or false so that what remained was stronger and more solid than what existed before.

That original intent, Pastor Matthew Johnson argued, is one the church should understand clearly - because what culture has done with the concept since then tells a very different story.

From its origins in literature and philosophy, deconstruction gradually expanded. By the 1980s and 1990s it was being applied to governments, businesses, and the structures of culture. By the 2000s it had moved into entertainment and media. Then, around 2010, something shifted. People began turning the lens inward - examining their own identities, their beliefs, and their faith.

That inward turn was not inherently the problem. The problem, Pastor Matthew Johnson explained, was that many people began doing the first part of deconstruction without the second. They identified what felt broken or incomplete, but instead of replacing it with something true and solid, they simply discarded it. Cancel culture, he noted, is perhaps the clearest expression of this pattern. If any part of a person, an institution, or a belief system can be shown to be flawed, the response is to throw everything out entirely.

Pastor Matthew Johnson was careful and compassionate in how he addressed this. He shared that a friend who has gone through his own deconstruction reached out to his community and gathered pages of responses from others who had walked away from the church. Reading through those accounts, Pastor Matthew Johnson said what unified nearly all of them was not intellectual argument but deep personal hurt. People had been damaged by religion. They had been manipulated, let down, and disillusioned. Their pain was real, and it deserved to be acknowledged honestly.

At the same time, Pastor Matthew Johnson made the case that the answer to that pain is not a deconstruction that leaves nothing standing. It is a deconstruction that leads somewhere.

One of the most grounding moments in the message came when Pastor Matthew Johnson turned to Scripture and made a straightforward observation: Jesus himself was a deconstructionist.

When Jesus stepped into first-century Jewish culture, he encountered a religious system that had taken something originally good - the law of God - and distorted it into a tool of control and manipulation. Religious leaders had added their own traditions and taught them as if they carried the same authority as God's commands. In Matthew 23, Jesus dismantled that system directly and without apology. His rebuke was not that the law of God was bad. It was that what the religious leaders had done to it was bad.

Jesus was not tearing down for the sake of it. He was stripping away what was false so that what could stand in its place was true.

Pastor Matthew Johnson pointed to the Bereans in Acts 17 as a further example. When the Apostle Paul came to them with the message that Jesus was the fulfillment of their scriptures, they did not simply accept it. They received it with eagerness and then examined the scriptures daily to see whether it was true. They were willing to test what they heard. And when they found it to be solid, they owned it fully.

The Apostle Paul gave the same charge in 2 Corinthians 13:5, calling believers to examine themselves and test whether they are truly in the faith. In Romans 12:2, he urged the church in Rome not to conform to the patterns of the world but to be transformed by the renewal of the mind - testing and discerning what is good, acceptable, and perfect. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul described the work plainly: "We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ."

Deconstruction, done this way, is not a departure from faith. It is an expression of it.

To bring the concept closer to home, Pastor Matthew Johnson introduced a hands-on object lesson. He held up a Jenga tower - or as he clarified with some humor, the off-brand version - and used it to picture the structure of a person's life. Every block represents something that has been learned, experienced, or believed. Some blocks were chosen. Many were not. But the way they were assembled is uniquely personal, shaped by personality, relationships, and individual experience.

As life progresses, certain blocks begin to feel less secure. A new idea challenges something long held. An experience calls a belief into question. A block gets pulled. At that point, Pastor Matthew Johnson said, there is a choice. The block can be examined, evaluated, and replaced with something stronger. Or it can simply be discarded - left on top of the tower, adding weight and pressure without ever being truly processed.

He invited the room to be honest about where they were in that process. Some people, he suggested, feel like they are midway through the game - not completely unstable, but noticeably less secure than they once were. Others feel like one more block could bring everything down. And some feel like the tower has already fallen - the blocks scattered, the structure gone.

His question to all three groups was the same: how does Jesus see that?

The answer, Pastor Matthew Johnson argued, is found in Matthew 7:24-27. Jesus closes the Sermon on the Mount with a picture of two builders - one who builds on rock and one who builds on sand. When the storms come, and Jesus is clear that they will come, only one house stands.

Pastor Matthew Johnson was careful to reframe what Jesus was actually offering in that moment. For many people, he acknowledged, the idea of obeying Jesus's teaching sounds like an exhausting list of rules enforced by a distant and demanding God. That misunderstanding has been reinforced by generations of teaching that reduced Christianity to moral compliance.

But the Sermon on the Mount, read in its entirety, is something else. It is a relational invitation. Jesus addressed anger, sexuality, marriage, integrity, retaliation, generosity, prayer, finances, and anxiety - not as a legislator handing down a code, but as the creator of the human heart explaining how that heart was designed to function. He was not giving people more rules. He was telling them the truth about themselves and about the life they were made for.

At the center of it all, Pastor Matthew Johnson brought the message back to John 3:16. God did not send Jesus because the world had gotten its act together. He sent Jesus because he loved the world while it was still broken. That love came first. The greatest commandment - to love God with all of one's heart, mind, soul, and strength - is not a demand issued by a distant authority. It is a response to a God who loved first.

Pastor Matthew Johnson closed the message with a direct and gentle challenge. Whatever has been unsettled - whatever blocks have been pulled, whatever things about God feel confusing, painful, or unresolved - the invitation is to bring all of it to Jesus rather than simply walking away from it.

He reminded the room that Scripture says God has already searched every heart. Coming to him honestly is not informing him of something he does not know. It is acknowledging what he already sees and inviting him to move in it.

The goal of this series, Pastor Matthew Johnson made clear, is not to protect faith from hard questions. It is to show that hard questions, handled rightly, can lead somewhere stronger than where they began. To deconstruct what is false. To reconstruct with what is true. To build, together, on something that will hold when the storms arrive.

If you are searching for a church in Lancaster, Ohio, or a church in Logan, Ohio, The Tree Church would love to have you join us. We gather every Sunday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM at both our Lancaster and Logan campuses.

Lancaster Campus: 721 N Memorial Dr, Lancaster, OH 43130, United States
Logan Campus: 36 Hocking Mall, Logan, OH 43138, United States

Learn more and watch messages online at thetreechurch.com.