Set Adrift: Deconstructing What You Believe Without Sinking Your Faith

The number of Christians leaving the church today is significant. Many feel there is no place for them within the faith—they no longer feel at home in their church community or tradition. For various reasons, they are unsettled by the version of Christianity they’ve inherited.

Stripping away the nonessential aspects of Christianity, Sean McDowell and John Marriott will help you navigate the jarring questions and cultural challenges that lead many to walk away from the faith. You’ll come to recognize that there are other ways Christians throughout history have understood what faithfulness to Jesus looks like.

Each chapter provides practical advice on how to disassemble, rethink, and reassemble beliefs that are truly Christian and culturally and personally relevant. You’ll learn how you can continue to seek an authentic faith by:

• Establishing Jesus and his teachings as the foundation.
• Utilizing the creeds as boundary markers of what is essential.
• Seeing the entire Bible as a truthful revelation from God.
• Seeing Christianity as a historic and global tradition that encompasses diverse communities and viewpoints.

The authors of this book can personally identify with the process of disillusionment that many young believers go through. They wrote Set Adrift as people who had to navigate their own way back through the fog of deconstruction. They wrote it to offer their own personal suggestions for what to do when you’re not sure what to believe anymore.

John Marriott (Ph.D. Biola) oversees the Biola University Center for Christian Thought and is a leading expert in the study of deconversion. Currently, he oversees the Center for Christian Thought's Sustainable Faith Project which seeks to discover ways to cultivate lifelong faith. John teaches in the philosophy department at Biola University and also at Talbot School of Theology. He and his wife Nancy have two children.

Dr. Sean McDowell is a gifted communicator with a passion for equipping the church, especially young people, to make the case for the Christian faith. He connects with audiences through humor and stories while imparting hard evidence and logical support of a biblical worldview. Sean is an associate professor in Talbot School of Theology’s Christian Apologetics program at Biola University. Sean is an internationally recognized speaker and the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books. He has a popular YouTube channel in which he discusses apologetics, culture, and worldview issues and regularly hosts conversations with non-Christians. He blogs regularly at seanmcdowell.org and engages a range of different social media platforms.