Beyond the Ruins: Building Communities Without Rebuilding the Walls
Why the future of faith requires more than reconstruction—it requires practices of re-membering
One of the unexpected gifts of publishing my recent long-form essay, “After Deconstruction,” has been the conversations it has sparked. Several readers have reached out with thoughtful questions, but one in particular has stayed with me. In response to the essay, @husseinxfakih asked, “How can communities preserve that openness without quietly rebuilding the same authority structures people had to leave?”
I think this is a vitally important question facing those of us trying to imagine life beyond deconstruction.
It names the central tension. Once people have experienced the painful unraveling of inherited systems—religious, political, cultural, or personal—the temptation is understandable. We long for belonging. We long for stability. We long for communities where we can breathe again.
But there is a danger.
If reconstruction simply means replacing one certainty with another, then deconstruction has accomplished very little. We may tear down the old walls only to rebuild them with different materials. We may exchange one unquestioned authority for another, one rigid identity for another, one system of exclusion for another.
The challenge before us is not merely what we build, but how we become the kind of people capable of building together without recreating domination.
The alternative, I sense, is not communities without authority. Such communities are impossible. Every community develops leaders, traditions, practices, stories, and shared commitments. The question is not whether authority exists, but what kind of authority emerges.
The way of Jesus offers a profoundly different imagination of authority. Jesus does not reject authority; Jesus transforms it. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,” Jesus teaches (Mark 10:43). Authority in the kin-dom of G-d is not the capacity to control others but the willingness to serve their flourishing.[1]
Healthy communities therefore understand authority as something entrusted rather than possessed. Leadership functions a gift offered for the sake of the whole rather than a status protecting the power of a few. Authority becomes accountable to the community it serves.
This requires a different understanding of truth itself.
Closed systems often imagine truth as something possessed. Those inside the system have it; those outside lack it. Deconstruction exposes the ways such claims can become instruments of control. But the alternative is not a community without conviction. Rather, it is a community whose convictions remain held with humility.
Truth becomes something discovered together.
This resonates deeply with the work of theologians such as John Caputo, who argues that faith is not primarily possession of certainty but responsiveness to the call of the impossible—the summons of justice, hospitality, and love that always exceeds our grasp.[2] A community shaped by this kind of faith does not ask only, “Do we have the right answers?” It continually asks, “Are we becoming the kind of people who embody the love we proclaim?”
This is why practices matter.
Communities remain open not because they adopt the right vocabulary or embrace a particular ideological position. They remain open because they cultivate practices that continually expose their own tendencies toward self-protection and exclusion.
Practices such as confession, lament, shared meals, welcoming hospitality, friendship, forgiveness, neighborhood presence, mutual accountability, and listening across difference become forms of communal re-membering. They reconnect what has been fragmented: people to one another, communities to creation, and humanity to the Creator.
The question is not simply what a community believes, but what the community’s practices are forming it to become.
Here Jesus’ metaphor of fruitfulness becomes essential. “You will know them by their fruit,” Jesus says (Matthew 7:16). The measure of a community is not merely the purity of its doctrine nor the strength of its boundaries. The question is what kind of life emerges from its roots.
- Are people becoming more loving?
- More compassionate?
- More courageous?
- More hospitable?
- More attentive to those who have been pushed to the margins?
- Is creation flourishing because this community exists?
These questions move us toward what I have called a shalomic imagination: the recognition that flourishing is never merely individual. Shalom is not simply personal peace or private spirituality. It is the flourishing ecology of rightly ordered relationships—between people, communities, creation, and G-d.[3]
This also requires embracing what I have described elsewhere as orthoparadoxy: the practice of holding together tensions that our desire for certainty wants to separate. Conviction and humility. Tradition and transformation. Belonging and critique. Identity and openness.
The opposite of fundamentalism is not uncertainty. It is humility. A mature community does not imagine that it has arrived at the final expression of truth. It understands itself as a people continually being formed. It remains teachable because G-d is always greater than our capacity to contain the Divine.
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of moving beyond deconstruction. The goal is not simply preserving openness. Openness is not the destination. Love is. Communities shaped by the way of Jesus do not exist to protect an idea about G-d. They exist to participate in the ongoing work of G-d’s love in the world, seeking to embody the kind of love witnessed in life, teaching, and death of Jesus the Christ.
The work of re-membering is therefore not rebuilding the walls we once inhabited. It is learning to become a people whose lives create shelter, nourishment, and belonging for others. Not walls. A garden.
Endnotes
[1] See C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1978), 378–79; and John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 134–36.
[2] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 7–12; John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 23–29.
[3] Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 10–12; Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 21–34.
Peace, dwight
