Out of the Embers - by Bradley Jersak (Paperback)

About the Book

"Deconstruction: Trendy brand name for falling away from belief in God? Or a process essential to authentic faith?Liberation or trauma? Prison break or exile?It's complicated. Just like you. Christian history records a Great Reformation and a Great Awakening. But today's "Great Deconstruction" will surely leave an equally profound impact. In Out of the Embers, Bradley Jersak explores the necessity, perils, and possibilities of the Great Deconstruction-how it has the potential to either sabotage our communion with God or infuse it with the breath of life, the light and life of Christ himself. In this collection of vulnerable memoirs, philosophical memos, and candid provocations, Jersak resists both the hand-wringing urge to corral stray sheep and the exultant desire to play the happy-clappy Ex-vangelical cheerleader. He employs the wisdom and expertise of the great deconstructionists-Christianity's ancient influences (Moses, Plato, Paul, and the Patristics), "beloved frenemies" (from Voltaire to Nietzsche), and the masters of deconstruction (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Weil)-to double down and deconstruct deconstruction itself. Where is faith after deconstruction? The author's heart is to engage and empathize with the bereft and disoriented, stoking the brittle ashes for live embers. In this quest for the resilient gospel of the martyrs, the marginal, and those outside the threshold...inexplicably, in this liminal space, life stirs. A Light shines through the ashes. We find, often for the first time, that living connection Jersak calls "presence in communion."There is a sea change occurring across the Western church and civilization. Whether we're watching a radical course correction or a complete collapse remains to be seen, and how it pans out will likely depend on how we see what's happening, who we are becoming, how we live in response-and, most important, where we find Christ situated in this storm"--

Book Synopsis

Deconstruction: Trendy brand name for falling away from belief in God? Or a process essential to authentic faith?

Liberation or trauma? Prison break or exile?

It's complicated. Just like you.

Christian history records a Great Reformation and a Great Awakening. But today's "Great Deconstruction" will surely leave an equally profound impact.

In Out of the Embers, Bradley Jersak explores the necessity, perils, and possibilities of the Great Deconstruction--how it has the potential to either sabotage our communion with God or infuse it with the breath of life, the light and life of Christ himself.

In this collection of vulnerable memoirs, philosophical memos, and candid provocations, Jersak resists both the hand-wringing urge to corral stray sheep and the exultant desire to play the happy-clappy Ex-vangelical cheerleader. He employs the wisdom and expertise of the great deconstructionists--Christianity's ancient influences (Moses, Plato, Paul, and the Patristics), "beloved frenemies" (from Voltaire to Nietzsche), and the masters of deconstruction (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Weil)--to double down and deconstruct deconstruction itself.

Where is faith after deconstruction? The author's heart is to engage and empathize with the bereft and disoriented, stoking the brittle ashes for live embers. In this quest for the resilient gospel of the martyrs, the marginal, and those outside the threshold...inexplicably, in this liminal space, life stirs. A Light shines through the ashes. We find, often for the first time, that living connection Jersak calls "presence in communion."

There is a sea change occurring across the Western church and civilization. Whether we're watching a radical course correction or a complete collapse remains to be seen, and how it pans out will likely depend on how we see what's happening, who we are becoming, how we live in response--and, most important, where we find Christ situated in this storm.

Review Quotes

Too much of what passes for contemporary Christianity deserves to be burned to the ground (then steamrolled). Amid the fiery embers, scorched treasures remain, ablaze with the authentic experience of the life of God in human flesh. In Out of the Embers, Bradley Jersak is our wise guide to the ever-salvageable way of Jesus. As the fire of deconstruction burned through Bradley, he found a company that had been through the fire in ages and centuries past (hint: deconstruction isn't new) and bonded with present-day companions who continue to walk through the flames with him. What they have seen and heard and what their hands have touched in the midst of the furnace of existence is the human God, whose co-suffering love never fails.
--Fr. Kenneth Tanner
Church of the Holy Redeemer, Rochester Hills, MI

With a theologian's keen insight and a pastor's heart of compassion, Dr. Bradley Jersak provides us with a pathway through the maze of deconstruction. Anyone in the midst of a painful deconstruction of their faith will appreciate Bradley's overflowing and merciful empathy. In Out of the Embers, he leads us through honest questions and genuine pain, taking us safely to the arms of Jesus on the other side. I love how Bradley gently and lovingly shows us that the ultimate answer isn't found in a move away from Christ or the Holy Scriptures or even the community of faith known as the church. Rather, he humbly asks us to consider a healthy deconstruction--the appropriate abandonment of counterfeits and obstacles, and a holy pursuit of the real thing. In that sense, he wonders if we shouldn't instead embark on more of a restoration project: the restoration of the masterpiece that is Jesus Christ and the good news of God's love in and through him.
--Joe Beach
Pastor, Amazing Grace Church, Denver, CO

Bradley Jersak offers an encyclopedic tome that engages the mind and heart with timely urgency. He deftly interweaves spiritual theology, philosophy, and history with self-disclosure and ecclesial and cultural commentary. What emerges, Out of the Embers, is an unconventional guidebook to faith formation--what I term continuous Christian conversion--that shows us how to surrender our defective and toxic God constructs, attachments, and ecclesiologies to truly follow, obey, and trust the crucified and resurrected King Jesus. Bradley's goal is to help us navigate the unsettling pathway of deconstruction to experience God's living love and light--his presence in communion.
--Roger Helland, DMin
Pastor, Professor, and Prayer Leader
Author, Pursuing God's Presence (forthcoming), The Devout Life, Missional Spirituality, and Magnificent Surrender

This is a very deep, thought-provoking book, but, at the same time, it is not a difficult read. It asks profound questions about our walk with God. I felt as if I were in conversation with the prophets, helping me focus on Christ my Savior, my healer, and the forgiver of my sin. In fact, it almost felt like a Socratic learning opportunity with Christ himself. I am so blessed to have had the opportunity to read Out of the Embers. Praise be to God!
--Fr. Leonard Herrem
Therapist and Rector, Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, Saskatoon, SK

What I love about Brad Jersak's book Out of the Embers is not only its timely message of reconstruction, shaped so significantly by Brad's own personal crisis and journey, but also Brad's passion--his relentless desire for others to come to know this God who walks every step of the journey in and with us. Thank you, Brad.
--John MacMurray
Director, Open Table Conferences and Northwest School of Theology

With his uniquely engaging style--jarring honesty, wit, insight, and compassion--Brad Jersak has written a book that challenges the way we look outwardly at deconstruction in the church and society, and leads us into an inward journey of the heart. While the deconstruction debate seems so current, Brad shows that, from Moses to our day, it has always been with us. Both individually and corporately, like it or not, we are on a journey of death and resurrection because this is how God moves. Out of the Embers calls us to step beyond our fear and insecurity to embrace the cruciform life of the Jesus Way. An outstanding book of vital importance for our time.
--Steve Stewart
Founder and President, Impact Nations

The process of faith deconstruction (or renovation, the term I prefer) requires the guidance of someone with a pastoral sensitivity, empathetic ear, and breadth of experience and wisdom to ensure that we don't succumb to the extreme pendulum swings and idolatrous ideologies with which such a disillusioning process can tempt us. Bradley Jersak is, for my money, by far the most trusted voice on this subject, having lived through the traumas and then stepped into the hopeful vistas of a genuine renovation of faith, which can often feel as frightening and exhilarating as building an airplane when it's already in the sky. Scholarly without being stuffy, Out of the Embers should be on the bookshelves of anyone who feels despairingly lodged in the darkness and pressure of the birth canal of deconstruction, clambering toward the "bright darkness" of divinity. The book is especially for those who've eventually found themselves disillusioned with disillusionment and suspicious of social-media influencers who've repackaged deconstruction as another consumer product--who, instead, want to avoid the allure of new fundamentalisms, restricting isms, and the worship of their own unanchored egos.
--Dr. Andrew Klager
Founder and Director, Institute for Religion, Peace and Justice

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." So wrote Yeats, filled with dread and uncertainty after the First Great War and the devastating flu pandemic that had almost claimed his pregnant wife. In a similar liminal space today, Bradley Jersak invites us to dare to trust that this present time of greatest uncertainty can also be a threshold to wonderful opportunity. You cannot read these pages without your dread giving way to a settling hope!
--Gary Best
Author, Naturally Supernatural and Where Joy Is Found

According to Bradley Jersak, "The Great Deconstruction is not just a two-year lockdown or four-year election cycle." He sees it as "a great historic tradition." However, the author insists we are bereft of neither reliable guides nor real agency. From Moses to Jesus to modern prophets like Simone Weil, Out of the Embers mercifully recollects for us the sages and seers who have "charted the way...[and] left us memos of their work." Out of the Embers is a most wise, kind, and timely gift for those of us whose very faith has been traumatized by the tumult of our age.
--Steve Bell
Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter-musician


Finally, someone has written what I think will be the textbook on the deconstruction of belief--and it's Brad Jersak. I appreciate Jersak's thorough and caring contribution to this important discussion and urgent reality.
--David Hayward
aka "NakedPastor"
Author, Questions Are the Answer and Til Doubt Do Us Part


If there is a way forward into faith and mystery, then there have been many who have passed through tumultuous cultural moments like our own and have lived to tell the tale. Linking arms with Voltaire, Weil, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and John of the Cross, Brad Jersak opens a way to faith after having passed through the purifying fires of modernity. There can indeed be a second naivete, a return to childlike wonder after disillusionment. Deconstruction does not have to be an end; it can be a gracious iconoclasm that returns us to God, ourselves, and even God's scandalous GPS on earth: the church.
--Dr. Julie Canlis
Author, A Theology of the Ordinary


In a day when the answer to personal doubts and societal ills seems to be "Burn it all down," Bradley Jersak calls to us from the ashes of ruin with the attentiveness and compassion of the Good Samaritan tending to and providing for a stranger in need. Out of the Embers reassures us that deconstruction is not merely for the purpose of destruction, but, unlike many Christian texts of old, it does not attempt to fill in all the blanks or flood us with certitude. In this seminal work, Brad comes to us as a fellow wayfarer, a sojourner who is questioning and seeking but anchored. And from that deeply rooted place, which includes the voices of sages from eras past, he has written Out of the Embers as a companion for his fellow seekers and as a guide for the questioners. He calls us once again to the One who loves, the One who leads, the One who makes all things new. What will we be after the coal of the Refiner's fire has touched our lips? Out of the Embers leaves us hopeful.
--Felicia Murrell
Author, Truth Encounters


Revelation is Deconstruction, not the revelation of that which lacks but that which is True. Like the burning bush, the deadwood is being destroyed, allowing for the emergence of that which has always been present but hidden, now visible and attractive by its nature. This is the journey that Brad Jersak escorts us through, where the intent of love is never wanton havoc but the tender Doula's work, the Holy Spirit overseeing the birthing of true life. After all, only the ashes make it through the flames, and from the ashes, beauty.
--Wm. Paul Young
Author, The Shack and Lies We Believe About God


This is a wise and creative book. And despite the fact that Brad Jersak's wisdom was clearly hard-won, he has not been hardened by the gaining of it. Tender and personal, he is nonetheless also often fierce, never shying away into shibboleths or truisms or abstractions. His is a faith of fever and tears, a faith in a God with wounds. So, he writes with a consummate "touch" about the pains of believing and doubting, finding and losing the way. Just so, he fulfills his calling and helps us to answer our own callings, renewing our confidence in old wisdom, proven true over time, and reminding us that the Spirit is creating a fresh wisdom in and for us here and now--a wisdom, believe it or not, formed in our wrestlings with God.
--Dr. Chris Green
Professor of Public Theology, Southeastern University, Lakeland, FL
Director, St. Anthony Institute for Theology, Philosophy, & Liturgics


When we experience the inevitable widening of our understanding of and identity in God, of the Scriptures, and of our way of being in God's beloved, broken world, sometimes it feels more like an exploding grenade than an expansive invitation. Yet we need love's widening, especially when we religious folks think we don't. (Note who disliked Jesus and his message enough to make sure he died instead of their old beliefs.) We also need wise, pastoral, knowledgeable, hope-oriented guides who can help clear the smoke, remove the rubble, bind the wounds, and redirect our gaze on Jesus, who hides our lives with his own in God amid the shakeup. With his insights and the historical companions he has chosen to help us, Bradley Jersak--who also brings experience in compassionate triage--is that transparent, trustworthy guide who can help us examine the unexamined "knowledge" to which we cling so that it might be released and surpassed by God's love.
--Dr. Cherith Fee Nordling
Faculty, Masters in Leadership, Theology and Society, Regent College, Vancouver, BC

About the Author

Bradley Jersak is the Dean of Theology & Culture, a graduate studies program at St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick, Canada. He also serves as an editor at CWRmagazine and Clarion-Journal.com. Bradley and his wife, Eden, have lived in the Abbotsford area of British Columbia since 1988, where they served as pastors and church planters for twenty years. Bradley is the author of a number of nonfiction and fiction books, including A More Christlike Word, A More Christlike God, A More Christlike Way, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, Can You Hear Me?: Tuning in to the God Who Speaks, and The Pastor: A Crisis. He has an MA in biblical studies from Briercrest Bible College and Seminary, an MDiv in biblical studies from Trinity Western University/ACTS Seminary, and a PhD in theology from Bangor University, Wales. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, for postdoctoral research in patristic Christology.