World Remade: A Spiritual Companion for the Betrayed, Disillusioned, and Plain Old Fed Up

By Brice Larson

Being fed up with the church is not the same as walking away from God. World Remade bears witness with hearts wounded by the unfaithfulness of our churches. It comes alongside those dissatisfied with the dissonance between Jesus' teachings and the ways Christian leaders prioritize money, power, and politics. This is a book for the betrayed, the disillusioned, the worn out, and the fed up who can't shake the sense that God still calls them.

In World Remade, Larson offers a window into a faith challenged by a seminary education and fractured by the failures of a self-absorbed church. As frustration gives way to cynicism, he is met by a God who knows us in our darkness and who holds all creation together even when we ourselves are shattered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385200931

Brice Larson

Brice Larson still goes to Sunday services, but most days he feels more at home with folks who’ve walked away from the church. He lives in the beautiful state of Montana with his wife Breann and their two children—Adelise (5) and Beckett (2). When he’s not writing, he operates a small business focused on supporting families in the child welfare system. He has an MA in theological studies from Portland Seminary.

Book preview

Beginnings

Have you ever noticed

How ugly a seed splits open?

Tentative tendrils groping

Through dirt and muck.

Expect no different

From your beginnings.

Snapshots of a Navel Gazer

Between Truth and Reality

Today, something lingers in the air. It flits about the corners of my consciousness, playfully beckoning me to disregard my responsibilities, my hopes and dreams, even my very self. This Ethereal Butterfly invites me to abandon all to the wondrous freedom of the moment and simply breathe.

Some would call this meditation. They are mistaken. Meditation is a wonderful thing, but it emerges from the desire of the individual for peace or serenity or mental strength. The Playmate fluttering around my soul is not a part of me. Oh . . . the memory of it lingers inside of me like the voice of a friend from long ago. It undoubtedly belongs in the whirling scope of my experience. But it remains wholly, undeniably Alien. Inhuman. Other.

Yet traces of humanness dance around it, mixing and separating from a misty aurora that smells of earth, ocean, and tree sap. For a moment, it presses against me with the inviting warmth of human skin before it breaks over me like a warm wave, bathing me until I, too, dissolve.

Breathe in—the rustle of leaves. Breathe out—the caress of the breeze. Breathe in—the song of millions of insects hurrying along their sacred steps. Breathe out—the liberating emptiness of knowing that I am inessential. Breath in—the pleasant murmur of friends and strangers going about their lives. Breathe out—the embrace of my wife. Everything is music. Everything is life. And, if I let myself, in this moment I can ignore the horrors of reality and believe it. Creation, my friends, may be wounded to its foundations, but it remains inexplicably generous and beautiful.

The Flutterer has drawn me into this space where the edges of myself blend into the fabric of creation. Here, contentedness soaks into me, bringing with it a pleasant lethargy. I want to loiter here, listening to the soft tones of nature, the rhythms of creation, and the pleasure of Creator. A whisper escapes my soul. It is good. Here, in this liminal moment that eternally haunts the spaces between hard, unyielding truth and the struggle of our convoluted realities, I believe it with all I am.

Still, a part of me finds it difficult to rest. I find myself caught betwixt the compulsion to work and the invitation to simply breathe. Eventually, my compulsion for productivity draws me from my savoring and back to the concerns of today. The in-between-place that I was absorbing (and that was absorbing me) releases its hold on my mind without complaint. But my heart remains stretched over the chasm between the beauty and harmony of the Flutterer’s reality and the consumptive demands of mine.

Lingering in the Dark

Advent 2014:

In Him was life, and the life was the Light of mankind. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it. (John 1:4–5)

Christianity has caught a lot of flak over the years for putting Christmas on the winter solstice to convert a pagan holiday into a Christian one. I, for one, don’t think our forebears were thieves. I think they were poets.

Poets, you see, understand the meaning of the solstices. Ever since summer, all of creation has been journeying together into the deep, cold, dark of winter. Then, at the solstice, the journey is reversed and light begins to push back the darkness. In the same way, until Christ, darkness increased. Then, the light began to push back the darkness.

However, Advent is not a time of celebration. It’s a time of struggle as the sun is driven below the horizon earlier each day. It’s a time for looking at the darkness around us, the darkness that cannot understand Christ. It’s a time for acknowledging that this darkness has found its way into our hearts, our minds, our lives, and our communities. Only then can we again answer the call to be the light of the world—a city on a hill.

Incidentally, we must keep in mind that Christ is much bigger than we are and that there may be many hills and many cities. Christ taught us that we are the children of God, the children of the light. He didn’t teach us that we are the only children and can lord over a world of slaves. It’s time to emerge from our toddler-ish insistence that God’s world revolve around us. Indeed, this self-centeredness paired with the political, economic, and military might of the West over the last several hundred years has deepened the darkness around us. And if the light within some children of the light is darkness, how deep is that darkness?! Perhaps so deep that only a new encounter with the Light of the World can rekindle it . . .

For all God’s nearness, the God of justice remains utterly apart from us small, limited creatures. The power that we want to swoop in and set things right remains maddeningly absent. So, at least, we must conclude if we listen openly to the cries of our fractured society and honestly bear witness to the ugly parts of our history. Who can believe in a just God and attend to those expended as human resources on altars with names like economic growth, class struggle, westward expansion, and national or racial exceptionalism? These spent souls haunt our homes and our histories from the Congo to Cambodia, from Auschwitz to the Americas, and from our deepest past to the present day.

But God is not so far off as we might conclude. Remember the sheep and the goats at the judgment. If we shut our eyes against the horror and plow through the dark, we will awake to find we have missed Jesus entirely. But if we offer sustenance, care, and honor to one another amidst the struggle for food, warmth, dignity, and freedom, we will find ourselves joining the community Christ calls home.

We discover Christ when we linger in the encroaching darkness and deepening cold of our shared brokenness. Here we join the faltering glow of winter in bearing witness to the suffering of this blessed, frostbitten world. My friends, if we reject the temptation to hide our hearts from the faltering of the December stars . . . If we follow this frozen path even though our soles recoil from the cold at each step, then we may just discover Bethlehem has moved into our neighborhood. Christmas has yet to miss its appointed time. We need not lose heart.

The Christ child met us precisely when darkness held sway. God meets us here still. Let us not run too quickly through the dark!

Lost

I have lost my way.

Now, before you jump to any conclusions, know I’m not complaining. Nor am I confessing some deep, dark secret. I’m merely stating the reality I’ve come to know. I have lost my way.

Once upon a time I knew all about God. I knew that God was good and just and that God loved me. I knew God would watch over me and nothing really, truly horrible would happen. I knew that I met God when I prayed and I knew what God was saying when he spoke. While we’re on the subject, I knew God was Male and that I was created in God’s image. I knew that women were not as strong as men and that, since I carried God’s image and God was a rescuing God, it was my place to rescue them. I knew that if I held to these beliefs and didn’t do anything incredibly evil or stupid, God would use me, would partner with me, in changing the world like he hadn’t used anyone since William Seymour? Martin Luther? Paul? Jesus? I suppose with God all things were possible . . . I had found my way.

Then, life happened. First, I discovered that, despite my best intentions, I had done things both evil and stupid. Then, I discovered that what I thought I heard from God sometimes told me more about what I already thought than about what God was saying. Eventually, I woke up and realized that in the very moments I was expressing my confidence that nothing really, truly horrible would happen, really, truly, unspeakably horrible things were happening all around me. I had just been blind to them. Looking these realities in the face, I could no longer say with absolute confidence that God was good or just, nor, when I realized how complicated the systems and convoluted the stories that lay behind those evils were, could I say what a good or just God would do. Finally, I came to see that the idea God was Male contributed to some of those systems and stories and that the way I had come to view myself and the world around me was, at least in part, both a product of a system designed to maintain masculine power and privilege and a contribution to the perpetuation of that system.

Somewhere in the midst of all that redemptive deconstruction, I lost my way. The best parts of me are deeply grateful. But, if I’m honest, parts of me miss the certitude. Sometimes I