Deconstructing a Counterfeit Jesus

I’ve been living in a state of deconstruction for four years. It’s not the first time I’ve described my life in this way, though, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

The first deconstruction began nine years ago and focused on my heart. God was dismantling the lies I believed about myself and the way those lies led me to treat other people. It was a long and painful process. I learned patience as God kept me from immediately trying to fix every issue that came to light.

By the end, I understood it was necessary to fully deconstruct first so I could sort through all the pieces and keep only what was true. If I focused on fixing only one issue, I might miss the other issues behind it. Reconstruction can start only once deconstruction is complete.

This time we’re deconstructing my faith.

In the church world of my youth, we were taught to fear this idea. We were taught not to question because questioning could lead to “losing your faith.” Instead, we were to accept the word of our teachers and preachers at face value, to believe with the simple faith of a child.

I certainly understand that fear. What if we ask questions we can’t get answers to? As Christians, we believe things we’ve never seen or experienced personally. But while the deconstruction process hasn’t been comfortable or easy, I’m convinced at the end of it I will have found my faith rather than lost it.

Why am I so convinced? Because this process has mostly been about deconstructing my understanding of Jesus.

As I stepped away from church a couple of years ago, I realized I could say with Sarah Bessey in her book Out of Sorts, “I lost Jesus in there. It seemed one could be a Christian without being a disciple of Jesus.”

It’s impossible to be a disciple of Jesus when you don’t truly know who Jesus is. For thirty years of my life, I listened to other people tell me who Jesus is. Everything I knew about Jesus was filtered through the perspectives and experiences of pastors, authors, Bible study leaders, and college professors. Even my own Bible reading was informed by these outside voices.

In a scene from a movie, a guy is trying to remember exactly what a woman he saw only once looks like. He keeps ripping images of women out of magazines. Using the chin from one, the nose from another, he tries to put together a face that correctly reflects the one he saw in real life.

Sometimes I feel like this is what my version of Jesus looks like. I’ve been given many different pieces from church and pastors and Bible study and books. Over time, I’ve put those pieces together like a puzzle, trying to understand who Jesus is.

What I wound up with was a counterfeit version of Jesus. In fact, I have no idea who I’ve been following all these years. He looks a little bit like the Jesus I find in the Bible, but he has some glaring differences too.

My counterfeit Jesus is white like me.

I grew up in churches where Jesus was always depicted as having fair skin, light brown hair, and blue eyes. One church had a huge painting of this European-looking Jesus in the lobby. Stained glass windows almost always show a white Jesus. I acted in plays depicting the life and death of Jesus; the actor playing Jesus was always fair-skinned.

But Jesus wasn’t white. Born in what we now call the Middle East, he would have had brown skin. Most likely his hair and eyes would have been dark. He would have looked like many of the people we Americans tend to identify as “the enemy” today.

My counterfeit Jesus can be found only with the righteous.

Despite teaching that we are saved by faith and not by deeds, the church has often had this undercurrent of needing to have it all together. Rules upon rules were established to keep us from getting anywhere close to sin. We used phrases like “if you’re asking if your behavior is crossing the line, that probably means it is.” We were intent on acting right all the time.

We judged and rejected those who didn’t follow the rules, because we were right with God and they weren’t. We truly believed we were closer to Jesus.

The real Jesus spent time with the people who had been rejected by those who called themselves righteous. Yes, he taught in synagogues and the temple, but he also taught on hillsides and beside lakes. His followers had been cast aside by the religious leaders, and he intentionally spent time with tax collectors and sinners. He did this so much that the religious leaders became angry with him for eating with sinners (Mark 2:15–16).

These are just two of the lies that have been part of my counterfeit Jesus. In the process of deconstruction, we’ve been taking him apart piece by piece. Once everything is dismantled, we’ll sort through the pile of debris and determine what’s true and what isn’t. Because amid the lies, I have found some truths. These go in the “Keep” pile. Everything else gets thrown away.

In the reconstruction phase, we’ll take all the truths and begin to put Jesus back together in his true form. Once I know who he really is, we can work on the rest of my faith.

Katie Mumper is a daughter, sister, friend, writer, and singer. She loves Jesus, music, books, and great TV shows. Because she’s far from perfect, she is grateful for God’s grace in her life. She writes with the hope that others might be encouraged to let God make them new as well. You can read more of her work at beautyrestored.me.

Photograph © Andrey Grinkevich, used with permission