Reframing the Deconstructor’s Narrative
A Feature Review of
Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ
Scot McKnight and Tommy Preson Phillips
Paperback: Zondervan, 2024
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Reviewed by Michelle Van Loon
Evangelical church leaders told me I needed to become a member of their congregations because I needed their spiritual covering to be safe. They warned me against church hopping. If a member moved away, they received a blessing from church leaders. But woe to the member who left the church for any other reason. Leaders often disparaged, slandered, or shunned those people – all in the name of doctrinal purity or institutional sanctity.
The decline in numbers of those attending evangelical churches isn’t as steep as it has been for decades in mainline congregations, but more and more evangelicals are heading for the exit doors and not looking back. The reasons enfold the now-familiar lineup of issues including abuse of power by clergy, church alignment with a single political party, and obsession in the congregation with culture war themes. Some of those who’ve left have also walked away from their faith in Jesus. But as professor Scot McKnight and pastor Tommy Preson Phillips remind us in Invisible Jesus, many who are deconstructing their experience within a corrupted and decaying evangelicalism are doing so in order to reclaim their faith.
They write, “Keep in mind that the deconstruction movement is not always an exodus from the faith. For many, deconstruction is not apostasy but a pilgrimage, not a departure from following Jesus but another step in the journey toward a Jesus-shaped way of life.” Many of those who’ve left the proverbial building to become a part of the exvangelical/deconstructor camp are not deconverting but are responding to Jesus’s call to follow him. This reality stands as an indictment of what the institutional church has become in the lives of many leavers.
Invisible Jesus opens with an accounting by each author of their respective faith journeys. McKnight comes from the fundamentalism of the 1960’s-70’s (which is basically the same as the fundamentalism of 2025), Preson Phillips grew up a generation later, in the world of fundamentalism’s kissin’ cousin, conservative evangelicalism. Both writers detail the movement away from those beginnings as each matured spiritually through a combination of time, experience, and education. That process meant that they outgrew the cloistered hothouse of the faith traditions of their youth. Neither lost their faith. Instead, each man’s faith deepened. It is from this point of view that they explore some of the dominant themes emerging among those who love Jesus but have been depleted, battered, or lied to by their church communities.
These themes include things like doubt, politics, and religious performance. They write,
“Deconstructors today have more to disagree with than I did when I was in that place. Yet the process is much the same. It involves leaving one’s faith community, one in which many of us were nurtured and in which we have many close friends, an experience that undercuts the social and relational pillars of life. It takes courage to do this, and that courage pushes me to admiration at times.
Yet what I admire even more is the courage to reconstruct one’s faith on the basis of Jesus alone.
Both are frank about the high relational cost many deconstructors pay as they walk away from their faith communities. Invisible Jesus is packed with quotes and anecdotes from those who’ve left, but the book’s primary focus isn’t on stories, but on reframing the dated narrative that leavers have lost their faith in Jesus.
American evangelicalism, which has long been characterized by a focus on the individual’s experience, has had a popular ecclesiology made up of two basic ideas. The first was celebrated often by Bill Hybels, the now disgraced and deposed founder and pastor of the Willow Creek megachurch empire, who used to tell people that the local church was the hope of the world. That language, along with the Hebrews 10:24-25 passage often used as a goad to get people to go to church so they wouldn’t be guilty of forsaking the instruction to meet together, formed the often-transactional (in other words, still primarily focused on the individual) relationship many had with their local congregations.
At first, it might seem that the message about deconstruction found in Invisible Jesus would be to center the individual’s experience even further and suggest readers skip the faith-suffocating middleman of commitment to an institutional church. But the book is about the longing among deconstructors (and many edging ever-nearer to the exit doors) not for a perfect church, but one that is actively and prophetically moving toward what the church is meant to be.
The final five chapters of the book aim squarely at where that longing is pointing: Jesus himself, the head of the Church. Unhealthy church cultures have usurped the place that Jesus alone deserves as the Truth, the Door, the Shepherd, the Resurrection, and the Redeemer. McKnight and Preson Phillips write, “Those who have become deconstructors for Christ’s sake have heard the Jesus call to disrupt the religious and political powers of our world by holding hands with those on the margins…(In response) Church elders have plotted against them and schemed, through conversations in church parking lots and in late-night elder meetings, how to get rid of them.”
Those who are deconstructing in order to find Jesus may be pioneering the way out of the desert that much of modern-day evangelicalism has become, seeking Living Water. To find its source is to find the Head of the Church. McKnight and Preson Phillips remind us that Jesus is not invisible outside the four walls of a dehydrated congregation after all – and neither are the beloved people who are a part of his re-forming, renewed church.
Michelle Van Loon
Michelle Van Loon is the author of seven published books about spiritual formation. Her
newest book, Downsizing: Letting Go of Evangelicalism’s Nonessentials, releases this fall from
Eerdmans. To learn more about her work, visit MichelleVanLoon.com
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