It is imperative for the sake of the lost, for the sake of our children and church members, and for the glory of God that we understand the fact that faith cannot be deconstructed. Rather, when someone walks away, he is simply saying, whether he likes it or not, that he never truly believed.

Rhett and Link, former CRU missionaries who have become famous through YouTube, have recently joined the chorus of “former Christians” who feel the need to share their “faith deconstruction” stories for all to hear. They are now agnostic.

As part of their healing process, they are all told to declare to the world their reasons for why being a Christian is wrong. As a result, they are surprised and hurt by Christians who promptly said that they never truly were of us (1 John 2:19).

Their response has been very interesting; they have lamented this by retorting something like “if there ever was a Christian, I was”. Some describe the hurt that it has caused them and they then, in Philippians 3:4-6 style, describe, like a pre-converted pharisaical Paul, all the reasons why they were actually Christians. They described their Christian lives like, “I prayed, I shared the Gospel, I went to church, I read my Bible, I believed the Bible, but then as I met LGBT folks and as I studied evolution, I discovered that the Bible could not possibly be true and therefore Christianity is false.”

This grieves my heart. And perhaps the main reason for this is the fact that most of these “former Christians” love declaring that they were true Christians. This leads thousands of young people questioning their faith and wondering if their heroes could be right. Can I simply stop being a Christian?

It is important to remember that we are called to be gentle in how we talk to someone who now claims to be an unbeliever (2 Tim. 2:24), at the same time it is imperative that we care about their soul enough to gently walk them through why they were never truly a Christian (probably the best approach is by explaining to them what a Christian is, rather than just yelling at them, “You were never a Christian!”) This is not to make ourselves feel better (as they claim) but because we are saddened that they have walked away from Jesus whom they once said that they loved.

As we think through this, I want to offer you a couple of reasons why it is so important for Christians not to grant the fact that our friends who walked away were ever true Christians.

The first is that salvation doesn’t depend on what you do.

The fact that upon being told that they were never Christians, they respond with things that they did that proved they were Christians shows that they misunderstood what Christians believe about salvation. They were in a works-based relationship with Christ.

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