Growing up evangelical, nobody ever explicitly handed us a list of people we weren’t allowed to talk to. They didn’t directly tell us to look down on the people who questioned the theology, believed differently, or eventually packed up and left the church. But you didn’t need a written rule to understand the assignment.
There was a heavy, constant underlying current that told us exactly how to categorize those people.
They were the “backsliders.” They were the ones who had “fallen away” into the world. Or, most devastatingly of all, they were the ones who had “never really believed to begin with” and were now comfortably cruising down the wide road destined for hell. Along with that came an unwritten, unspoken quarantine protocol: Don’t talk to them. Don’t get too close to their questions, because their doubt might be contagious. They might derail your own faith.
When you live inside that kind of system, you learn to see the boundaries of your church tradition as a survival line. You internalize the terrifying idea that if you step over that line—if you stop going to the services, stop agreeing with the theology, or start asking the “forbidden” questions—you are stepping into a pitch-black spiritual wasteland where God will completely abandon you to the wolves.
Ancient mapmakers used to draw massive, terrifying sea monsters on the unexplored edges of the globe and write a warning across the blank spaces: “Here be dragons.”
High-control religious systems do the exact same thing to the boundaries of faith. They populate your doubts with monsters. They use the threat of cosmic abandonment to keep you paralyzed in your seat.
But if we are going to survive the mess of deconstruction, we have to realize something vital: Fear is an institutional survival mechanism. It is not the character of God. The system needs you to be afraid so it can maintain control. But when we actually open the scriptures without the institutional baggage, we discover that the wild, unmanaged spaces are exactly where God’s presence breathes most deeply.
To break the back of this fear-based theology, we have to look at a song written by someone who knew exactly what it felt like to be a discarded outcast running for his life in the wild.
In Psalm 139, David is completely unmoored. He isn’t sitting in a pristine temple temple-worship service; he is hiding in dark, muddy caves, running from an institutional authority that wants him dead. And right there, in the middle of his isolation and terror, he writes lines that should completely shatter every fear-based boundary line we were ever handed:
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” (Psalm 139:7-10)
Look at the sheer scale of that landscape. David looks at the entire universe—the highest highs, the deepest dark, the unexplored edges of the sea where the mapmakers would have written “here be dragons”—and he realizes there is nowhere to hide. There is no geographical, mental, or theological space where God’s presence stops.
Then he drops the absolute hammer in verse 12:
“Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”
God Doesn’t Run a Border Patrol
Think about the massive contrast here. The institutional programming whispers that if you step outside the church system’s fence line, you are stepping into outer darkness where you will be lost forever.
But the text says that the darkness isn’t dark to God.
God does not run a celestial border patrol. God is not pacing back and forth inside the lobby of your old church building, checking ID badges, and refusing to step outside the parking lot. If you step away from the corporate machinery, you don’t step away from God; you step into a wider, wilder, unmanaged field where His presence is already waiting for you.
When you deconstruct, the “threats” lose their power the moment you realize they were never designed to protect you—they were designed to protect the machine. The system isolated the doubters because the system couldn’t handle the scrutiny of an honest question.
Stepping Into the Wild
If you are sitting over your coffee today feeling that familiar wave of panic—worrying that because you don’t fit into the evangelical box anymore, you must be “falling away”—I want you to reframe the map.
You aren’t falling away from God. You are just falling out of love with a high-control system.
You don’t need to fear the blank spaces on the map. The doubts you are carrying, the questions you are asking, and the anger you feel toward the religious clutter are not signs of a dark spiritual failure. They are the actual, honest growing pains of a soul that is suffocating under a ceiling that was built too low.
God is not panicking because you left the building. He is already out in the wild, walking through the ruts, entirely unbothered by your questions, and completely incapable of leaving you behind.
The Garden Notes
📚 On the Nightstand
To help dismantle the heavy, fear-driven caricatures of God that keep our nervous systems on edge, grab a copy of "Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God" by Brian Zahnd. He systematically takes apart the cruel, angry deity often preached from modern pulpits and points readers back to the beauty of a God who is revealed completely through the self-sacrificing, safe love of Jesus.
🌿 From the Shop
If you want to take this week’s reflection deeper into your own life, I designed the Cultivating the Word specifically for this
"Fear is an institutional survival mechanism; it is not the character of God. The system populates your doubts with monsters because it needs you to be terrified of what happens when you step outside the lines."
The Greenhouse Preview
This Friday in The Weed-Puller’s Lab, we are running an Internal Monologue Reset for Fear. I’m giving you a practical, vertical checklist to help your brain instantly distinguish between the Voice of the System (which uses scarcity, isolation, and threats) and the Voice of Presence (which offers expansiveness, safety, and rest). Plus, we have 5 brand-new, deep journaling prompts to help you unearth and disarm the specific spiritual phobias keeping you stuck. Upgrade your subscription to join us in the lab this Friday!
The Closing Question
What is the specific "theological monster" or threat your old programming whispers to you when you think about walking away from institutional expectations, and how does it change your posture to realize God isn't afraid of that space at all?
P.S. If you are in between churches, or just don’t feel comfortable attending a physical building, but you are looking for something more, join us at Streams of Grace. You are welcome here!
