When Deconstruction Becomes Conversion

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. One of the biggest myths many of us carry about faith is this: that if your beliefs change, your faith must be failing. For a lot of people—especially those of us who grew up in evangelical environments—faith was often presented as a kind of finished product. The right doctrines. The right interpretations. The right answers. Once you “arrived,” the expectation was that you would simply defend those answers for the rest of your life. But life and the Holy Spirit have a way of complicating tidy answers. You encounter new ideas. You meet people whose experiences challenge what you were taught. You discover parts of scripture you had never really wrestled with before. The Holy Spirit moves in your heart, asking you to reconsider something you’ve always believed. And suddenly the faith that once felt certain begins to shift. For many people, that moment can be terrifying. Because if faith is supposed to be a fixed set of beliefs, then questioning those beliefs can feel like the beginning of the end. But the deeper Christian tradition offers a very different picture of faith. In the Rule of St. Benedict—the sixth-century guide for monastic life—monks take three vows: stability, obedience, and something called conversatio morum. That Latin phrase is famously hard to translate, but it’s often rendered as “conversion of life.” Not conversion as a one-time event. Conversion as a lifelong process. Conversatio morum assumes something many modern Christians forget: following Christ means continually being changed. Your understanding deepens. Your assumptions are challenged. Your life slowly reshapes itself around the way of Jesus. In other words, change is not a failure of faith… change is faith. That idea was enormously important for me personally. I grew up in an evangelical world where certainty was often treated as the highest virtue. But as I encountered the wider Christian tradition—scripture, history, theology, and the sacramental life of the church—I found myself asking questions that my earlier faith didn’t always know how to answer. For a while, that felt like everything was unraveling. But discovering this older Christian wisdom from St. Benedict reframed the entire experience. What I thought was “deconstruction” w something far older: conversion of life. Conversatio morum. It reminded me that the goal of Christianity is not intellectual rigidity. The goal is transformation after the mind of Christ. And in many ways, that realization is what eventually drew me into the Anglican tradition. Anglicanism holds deeply to the ancient faith of the church—its creeds, its scriptures, its sacramental life—but it also carries a humility about our understanding. It recognizes that the Holy Spirit is still at work reforming the church ever closer to God’s intent. That means we hold tradition seriously, but we also remain open to asking whether some of the church’s long-held assumptions were shaped more by culture than by the heart of God. Questions about the roles of women in the church, or about LGBTQ people and their place in the life of faith, have forced Christians to wrestle deeply with scripture, tradition, and lived experience. And in many parts of the Anglican world, including my own, that wrestling has led to the recognition that what once seemed like the “traditional” position may actually have been culturally conditioned by forces of patriarchy, discrimination, or marginalization… that the Spirit may be leading the church toward a fuller understanding of God’s love and justice than we previously held. That too is conversatio morum. The apostle Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Notice that word: renewing. Not once but again and again and again. A Benedictine writer once captured the spirit of this beautifully with a simple phrase: “always we begin again.” That’s what the Christian life looks like. We learn. We grow. We repent. We reconsider. And through it all, the Spirit keeps shaping us more and more into the likeness of Christ. Always we begin again—a truth of discipleship that sometimes might feel scary but that is actually a profound gift. The myth is that faith means never changing. The truth is that following Jesus means being willing to be changed—again and again—as we grow ever closer to God’s intent for us to be a people of love, justice, humility, grace, and mercy—particularly for ourselves. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.