Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen. Welcome to Bleeding Daylight. I'm so glad you're listening. You can follow Bleeding Daylight on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. All the links, contact details and hundreds of additional episodes are just a click away at bleedingdaylight.net.
What do you do when the way you've thought about God through the years isn't the way He shows up in your life? How do you deal with what you consider to be certainties just fading away? Today's guest faced a perfect storm of circumstances which could have derailed his faith. He'll tell us what kept him going through the darkest days. I'm really excited about today's guest.
Dustin Klonschmidt spent 25 years in pastoral ministry, including student ministry, worship, lead pastor and church planting, before burnout and his own wilderness season. He's now an author and companion for people who are spiritually exhausted, disillusioned or just tired of pretending they're fine. His book, The Wilderness Way, is an honest, grounded work which challenges the idea that the wilderness is something to escape. Dustin, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. You've said that you've seen church life from almost every seat in the room. Take me back to the beginning of that journey, to the time before church life. When did you first encounter faith? Yeah, I actually didn't grow up in or around the church. It wasn't until high school. My sophomore year of high school, I had a French class and a friend of mine sat behind me and he kept kind of nudging me and inviting me to his youth group.
Of everything I knew of church at the time, I was not interested in any way, shape or form. But he was relentless and then he started using what teenage boys would use to pitch youth group, which is, hey, I have a girlfriend and she has a friend and maybe you'd like to meet her. He figured out the right angles to get me to start going to youth group. I started going and within a couple of months, I had heard the gospel and gave my life to Jesus.
I had grown up in a really kind of messy, broken family situation. So that youth group and those leaders and the other students really became a family to me in a way that I had not experienced apart from them. For many of us who've grown up in Christian homes, we wouldn't know what it is like to first encounter faith at that age. So I guess that there was lots of things going on that you were still trying to work out. I'm not sure what's happening here.
I accept the truth of the gospel, but there's lots of stuff going on and you had to learn a culture as much as you did your faith. Absolutely. The night I gave my life to Jesus, I grew up in Los Angeles and we went to what was called the Los Angeles Mission, which was a homeless shelter in downtown LA. And our youth ministry would go there every couple months. In essence, our youth pastor would give a gospel message to the homeless people and we would feed them.
And I remember we were sitting in the deacon's chairs off to the side of the stage while he was teaching to the homeless people. And I don't remember what he said or how he said it. I do remember that I was sitting there and I remember having this thought of like, I think this is true. I didn't have any theology. I didn't understand the gospel. I didn't understand salvation. I didn't understand any of it. I just knew that something resonated in what he was saying.
And I remember we were walking out and my friend who had originally invited me from the French class said, Hey, what'd you think of tonight? And I said, I think we need to talk. And so that led to more conversations. It was a bigger church. So then getting into a youth group, you're right. There was this cultural shift. It was definitely teenagers being teenagers. There was an element of that, but there was a different ethos.
I always joked and said that, you know, my years in youth ministry as a student, there weren't a lot of felonies, but there were a fair amount of misdemeanors going on. And so it was, how can we push the lines in a Christian sense? And yet we were also as messy and quirky as we all were. We really did want to grow in our relationship with Jesus and had some great small group leaders that helped us with that.
So how far along your journey of faith was it that you thought, Hey, this is something I can give my life to. I want to be a part of ministry. Ironically, none of it. I kind of jokingly say I've backed into everything. I am a natural servant kind of guy. Like I like to just help. I don't want to just sit and observe things. I want to get my hands dirty. I want to be in the middle of it. I grew up in Los Angeles. My dad was in the movie business.
And so I kind of had a techie nerd background in many ways. I was taking a video class in high school. And so they're like, Hey, do you want to shoot video? And it's like, okay, I'll shoot video for things. And then it was like, Hey, do you want to help us mix sound for our youth band? Yeah, I'll help mix sound. So I kind of was always serving and helping out with things. And then as I transitioned into college age, it was kind of a natural thing to be like, Hey, I want to continue to help.
The church I grew up in had a really good culture of leadership development. So it was always like, Hey, how do you invest in the next generation behind you? And who's investing in you? At the time, I didn't realize it. But now I realized there was a lot of good discipleship going on. And so in the midst of all of that, I was helping out with tech stuff. And then they were like, Hey, we need a part time tech director. So it's like, okay, I'll learn how to do that.
And then I had been playing guitar and I had become roommates with our college pastor. Basically, I knew four chords and he knew three chords. So that made me the worship guy. So I started doing worship songs. That is a rabbit trail into pursuing a career in the music business for a bunch of years and trying to be an artist. But in the midst of that, I started leading worship. In time, it was like, Hey, we want to hire you as our worship guy for the youth department part time.
And so it was kind of this falling backwards. And then ultimately, that part time worship position became a full time position. And in the midst of that, I get asked to teach a chapel at a school. And I'm like, I've never taught the Bible before, other than in like small group settings. And my roommate and the college youth pastor was like, Hey, I'll help you. And so we sat and he helped me figure out the message.
And I stole as many illustrations from Louie Giglio as I could possibly grab for the sake of this message I was doing. And I taught. My friend Dave, the youth pastor came and he stood in the back and he listened. And afterwards, he was like, Hey, you may have some gifts here. And so then it was like, okay, how do those develop?
So then teaching in high school ministry, teaching in college ministry, again, tripping and falling backwards to the point where all of a sudden I kind of found myself in vocational ministry at this church that I had grown up in for over 20 years. I was on staff there for almost 12 years before we transitioned to moving to Texas. In the lead up to this burnout experience that you had, what was going on for you? To make a really long story short, I was at that church in California until 2009.
The economy changed dramatically here in the US and my position was cut and they helped me kind of search for new roles. And I ended up going on staff at a church in the Dallas area as a discipleship slash worship guy. We handed off the worship thing pretty quickly because the church was growing really fast. It had been a church plant. It was about five years old at the time. And I did discipleship ministry there for seven years.
I hadn't realized how good the leadership culture was that I had come from until I got into an environment where there was some challenges, some leadership weaknesses that I wasn't used to and hadn't navigated before. Over the course of a couple of years, I realized that long-term I wasn't going to be in alignment with the way that leadership was done. Ultimately led to us planting a church about 30 to 40 minutes away from where we were. Did that for three and a half years.
Two of those years were COVID. We pushed really hard to build this thing and got a bunch of people and started it going. And then COVID kind of diffused it out and we were kind of scrambling to figure out what to do. And then realized on the backside of that, that to try and start over again was going to be too taxing on our people. By then I probably was feeling burned out more so than I realized just because it had been seven plus years of straight ministry in a fast growing church.
Then right into church planting, which is extremely challenging. I don't recommend it for the faint of heart. It's just a relentless wear and tear on your family and on your time and energies. And then COVID kind of shifted that and we were obviously spending a lot of time during COVID trying to figure out how to sustain the church.
As we as a leadership team decided to shut down the church plant, the church I had come from, their senior pastor, the one I'd had some run-ins with, had resigned over a moral failure. They ultimately asked me to come back and help lead kind of this new season. We prayed and my wife and I talked about it. We knew going in, it was going to be a hard, hard rebuild for that church, but felt like the Lord was saying, go. And so we went. It was by far the hardest two plus years of my life.
The joke I make, my key card hadn't even swiped the first time on the door before there was a crisis. And then it just felt like relentless challenge and you put out a fire and there's another fire. And I remember calling a pastor friend of mine a month in and saying, man, I feel like I'm staring at a mountain range. You see layers of ranges, like a mountain, then a mountain behind it, and then a mountain behind that. And I don't even know which one to start climbing, to be honest with you.
But we put our head down and I did what I'd always done is just kind of put my head down and try and be faithful and try and work hard and was like, well, the Lord has led us here. So this should work itself out. Ultimately it didn't. I got to the point where it was just unsustainable for me and for my family and for the church. Ultimately, I was never going to be what they needed. We were never going to figure out how to align in a healthy way that could move forward.
You knew that it was hard work, but what were the first signs for you that this was more than just, this is a hard slog, that this is something that is just not healthy? I think at the time I probably was saying, well, this is hard and these are challenging things, staffing changes. So the church had lost their senior pastor to moral failure all of their elders had resigned.
They had kind of created an interim leadership team, sort of, but those guys were struggling and burned out and frustrated and overwhelmed too because of everything that had gone on. And then I come in, this is right on the backside of COVID. And on top of that, they had just built their first building in the middle of all of this. So it was like the trifecta of things that kill churches. It was a global pandemic, a building project and a pastor that resigns all at the same time.
So at the time you were just kind of like, okay, I'm head down. You move one thing, you shuffle one thing and another thing changes. I was really trying to be careful to not create as dramatic of changes as possible for the church because they had been through so much change. So I was trying to slow the pace down a little bit, which creates its own set of challenges on the other side. Because some people are saying, why aren't we moving faster? Why aren't we taking more ground?
You know, why aren't we moving through this faster? That tug and pull. And at the time, I think I was just kind of head down in it. In hindsight, what I realized, and this is probably one of the key things I've learned is I didn't pay attention enough to whether there was real value alignment with who I was and what I thought that church could be and who they were able to be. Not just who they wanted to be, who they were able to be.
I'm not talking values in terms of love for the gospel and reaching people with the good news of Jesus. But more so, even stylistically, you were talking earlier about the culture of a church that you don't know is there until you step into it from the outside. A lot of those things that I definitely misunderstood how deeply rooted they were. In my mind, I was going, we'll get this figured out. It was almost like death by a thousand paper cuts, more so than anything else.
In hindsight, I realize now that that was what really pulling the fabric of the relationship. And then for me, a lot of burnout and overwhelmedness. You say that you went into your own wilderness season. What did that look like? Ironically, it really wasn't while I was going through the hard things at the church that felt like a wilderness. It was difficult, but there was kind of a goal out front.
Like, okay, but we're still climbing towards this inevitable thing where we'll get over the hump, we'll figure it out, the church will stabilize, we'll get healthy. It wasn't until after I resigned at the end of 2023 going into 2024. It was a couple months later, we went and visited a church that we were going to start attending. And I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do. What did I want to do when I grew up? And I still have a deep love for the church. I still did.
And so it was like, do I continue in ministry? Do I look at other things? But we're at this church and we're getting plugged in and we meet a couple. And it turns out that they were mutual friends with a couple we had known at this church that I was on staff at. And it wasn't like a negative experience. It was like, oh, wow, that's cool that you know them. But internally, I felt emotionally starting—I felt myself starting to spiral. I realized I'm in a much messier place than I thought.
I remember looking at my wife when we got in the car and said, I think I need to call someone. And I remember calling a counselor that a friend of suggested and started meeting with that counselor regularly. And that led to a dark season of untangling my identity from ministry and trying to learn how it was to exist as simply a follower of Jesus in the world and not vocationally or financially being tied to how I love Jesus and love others. It led to a really dark space.
I talk a lot about it in the book to the point where on my 50th birthday, I ended up telling my wife, you know, I would never take my own life. But if Jesus wanted to take me today, I'd be okay with that. It was a really dark season of trying to unpack.
And I think that was where the Lord needed to take me in order to me to see how tangled up this all was, as well as to help me to see what ended up becoming the main thesis of the book was that I had had a kind of quib pro quo with God that I wasn't even totally aware of. That it was like, hey, I'm going to go back because you told me to go back to this church, I think, and I'm going to help them out. And so because I did that and I obeyed you, it's going to succeed and I'm going to succeed.
And when that didn't happen, it threw my whole world upside down. So how do you start to walk through that season? You've been helping others. And as you said, even naturally as a teenager, you're a helping kind of person. And now all that helping seems to have driven you to a place where you desperately need help. Where did you find that help? My wife was amazing. She became a place where I could share these things that I was wrestling with. So that was a big part of it.
And I think for so much of our lives, I had worked really hard to protect her from some of the messiness of ministry and even some of my messiness and probably shortchanged her ability to walk with me through some of those things, the deeper things even. And so she was a big part of it. A counselor that I still see semi-regularly was a huge part of it. He had grown up as a missionary. So he understood ministry dynamics in a way that most counselors didn't. And that was really helpful.
And frankly, he didn't take my BS. And so he would call me on my stuff, which was huge. Like I needed someone that was willing to not let me get away with whatever it is I was trying to get away with and to really kind of press in. And so those things were huge. And then writing, honestly, I wasn't teaching publicly at the time. I was hanging out with friends, but I wasn't doing any discipleship per se in the same ways. We really hadn't found a church home.
I was helping out, kind of doing some freelance things with friends that needed help. The only thing the Lord was really clear about when I stepped out, I clearly sensed Him telling me, you serve and trust me to provide. In other words, don't chase a vocation. Whatever comes up, just be available to it. Whether that was a friend that called me and said, hey, my wife and I are struggling. Can we just have coffee?
Yeah. Or another friend that's like, hey, I've got this little church in this little town. The church is dying, but they need someone to teach this Sunday. Could you go do that? Slowly, but surely over the course of a year and a half or so, I learned to just be present and love and serve people where they're at for who they are, completely detached from my identity and my vocation.
Then in the midst of all that, began writing all these things from my own story that ended up becoming this book called The Wilderness Way. Many people, when going through these sorts of seasons, don't just walk away from a particular church or a particular ministry, but they walk away from God. What was it that held you close to God even during this dark time? That's a great question. He and I had some really, really honest conversations.
I can say that was really never in my mind or in my heart on the table. Having been in church life for long enough and been in ministry long enough, I know that we as Christians are not a great image of God's heart and presence all the time. We're pretty messy. It's pretty phenomenal that Jesus' church has done what it's done as long as it has and made the impact it's had because we're kind of a mess. I never lost that piece of my faith. Did I lose faith in the church? Maybe a little bit.
I think the thing that anchored me closely was knowing that I could be brutally honest with him at all times. You read in Psalms, David almost looks bipolar in some of the Psalms because it's, where are you, O Lord? Smite my enemies and then, but I will trust you and I love you. Those began to really resonate in me because I'm like, that's how I feel. I'm angry and I'm hurt and I feel abandoned and yet there's something that makes me want to keep clinging to you.
I remember one thing specifically that always stuck out was when Jesus is with his disciples. He's teaching to the crowd. It's where he says, unless you drink my blood and eat my flesh, you have no part with me. Most of the crowd's like, all right, we're out. We're good. We don't we're out on this whole cannibalism thing. Jesus looks at the disciples and says, basically, what about you guys? Peter says, well, where else would we go? You have the words to life. I think that was really my thing.
It was like, where else would I go? Would I be any better off not believing in God? No. Again, that really led to the main thesis of the book because I had put a condition on God. I had an expectation of him that he never promised. He didn't say that if you obey me, I'm going to give you what you need, or I'm going to make it easier for you, or you're going to see some miraculous change in this church. He just said, go. It was me reorienting and reframing my own expectations.
That really was a shifting point for me. Now you're helping others to reshift their expectations of who God is, those people who are exhausted or disillusioned, or I think there's probably a lot of people who just are pretending everything's fine, but in the back of their mind, they know that something is not quite gelling. How do you start to walk alongside those people? Absolutely. I think it is a systemic issue in the Western church. There is a sociologist named Wellwood.
He had done research with Buddhist communities and coined a term called spiritual bypassing. I think that that's a great description of what I think happens in many church environments and with many Christians, which is I read my Bible. Going back to the Psalm example, I read David saying, oh, my heart is downcast. I'm so hurting, yet I will trust you. And that's maybe five verses apart. But that doesn't mean that David went from pain to resolution in five verses in his life.
We don't know how long it took him to write that. We don't know the conversations and the challenges and the wrestling that went on between that. For me, the best way I think that I can help people walk alongside them is allow them space to be brutally honest. I tell people all the time, look, God wears big boy pants. He is not afraid of you expressing your anger, your frustration, your fear. You see Job do it. Job was pretty direct with the Lord.
He never blamed God. And so it was counted to him as righteousness. But he did say, like, hey, this isn't cool. Giving people permission to feel like they can talk to God in their own words that way. It's not about respect or disrespect. God knows our hearts better than we do. But giving people that forum to express that to God and to others, being a safe place to go like, you can say a bad word. I'll be okay. If you're that mad, say the bad word and we'll work through it.
That I think becomes such a sacred space for people to be able to know that God's love is so big and so vast and so deep that he's not afraid of our temper tantrums. He knows better than we can even fathom how hurt we are. I mean, he knows how messed up our viewpoint is of him and everything else. And so none of it's a surprise. That ability to just say, nope, this is where I'm at.
And then even my heart now with the church, I'm not on staff there, but the church that we're a part of as a family, the coaching I'm doing and other things is just saying, like, let's create brutally honest environments where it's safe to just have it out and not feel like we have to put a nice neat bow on everything because that's not how the world works. And it does sound like we're scared of the in-between, that time of I've gone from faith to now I'm not so sure. How do I get back on track?
It's almost like we've taken the lie of the TV show where every problem is wrapped up in a half hour episode. And that's what we want rather than as you say with David, we don't know how long it took him to get from the start of the psalm where everything is bleak to the end of where I'm going to trust you with my life. How important is it for us as Christians to recognize that God's okay with the messiness? Absolutely. It's essential.
So the thesis of the book, this is that you're hitting exactly what it was, which was God opening my eyes to see. So when you think about Israel's journey in the wilderness, they are rescued from slavery and then they're told about a promised land and promised a promised land, but then they spend 40 years in a wilderness. I began to kind of parallel it to my own journey of that homeless shelter.
I was rescued from slavery and one day I will see a promised land and there will be no more tears and no more sorrow and God's home will be among his people and everything will be right and he will wipe every tear from my eye. But until then, I'm in what smart Bible people call the now, but not yet, or the already, but not yet. And there's this in-between world, which is really the wilderness. The crazy thing about living in the wilderness is that it's a weird mix of both beauty and brokenness.
They're always right in hand with one another. I can have an amazing date afternoon with my daughter and we can laugh and have fun. And then I can go to a meeting with a friend an hour later who's going through cancer. The realities of our world being so messy and it's so conflated, that is the wilderness.
And yet what you see in Israel's example, and I think I absolutely believe what I've seen in my life and what we see in our lives today following Jesus is that God is right there in the middle of the wilderness. He's leading us and sometimes he's not putting a cloud and a pillar, but he's just quietly there sitting next to us whispering in our ear.
And sometimes he's really quiet and he's just silent and he's just letting us sit in the discomfort in order to help us to trust him more and to surrender more fully to him. I agree with you. I think that that is the core thing about what it is to walk in those tensions is the brutal honesty, but also realizing it's always going to be a mix of beauty and brokenness this side of eternity.
As you look forward to that promised land, to what God has promised for us, it's almost as if we're dealing with the two different terms of hope. The world uses hope as a wish. I hope that things are going to get better. And it's really a wish we don't know yet. Biblical hope points to something we know is true. We know he's real, but it's not yet arrived. Is that the sort of hope that people will experience by reading the wilderness way? I hope so. Yes. I think that it's a mix of both.
And it's the hope that yes, one day all will be made right. That is ultimately our hope. But I think that there's also another layer of hope that moves back a little further into that idea that even in the darkest days, God is present. And maybe in the darkest days, God's more present. Maybe in that winter of your life where things just feel cold and dark, he might be more present and doing more in you than you could even fathom. There is this tangible hope.
Jesus tells his disciples in the book of John, it's going to be better for you that I go and that the spirit comes because the spirit's going to be the one who is your advocate, who's the one who's going to nurture and care for you and help you to understand me and to grow in me and to know that I'm with you interceding at all times. And so I really think that what people will get from the book is let's call it what it is. Life can be really, really hard.
And that's not necessarily because we're bad and we do bad things. It contributes, but life is just hard. A tornado happens and it wasn't because I didn't read my Bible that morning. Like it's just a reality of life because this is the wilderness. And yet in the midst of those moments, and I talk about, I give some examples in the book with some good friends of mine who went through loss of spouses with cancer and how God used that. Would they prefer that their spouse was still here?
A hundred percent. But to see how God has used the depth of brokenness to shape into mold and to bring beauty through it is profound. And I think that's the hope even as much as the fact that one day Jesus will restore all things.
And it sounds to me that The Wilderness Way is not just a book for those who have been through ministry burnout as you have, but it's rather for everyday Christians who have felt that disconnect between what they have built up their understanding of faith to be and where it actually can be. That honesty that you're talking about with God can be attained. Is that the sort of audience that you're trying to reach with The Wilderness Way?
Obviously it's written from a perspective of a follower of Jesus. I try to address those age old questions of if God's so good, why is there so much suffering and those kinds of things from the lens of what scripture would teach. I do think it is primarily the people who are going to resonate with it are probably frustrated or tired Christians. That's where I was in many ways where it's like, this isn't working out the way I'd written it up. And I'm a little annoyed by that.
I don't know that I can say that in mixed company. And I don't know what to do with that. And then to start to find so many other people who are like, yeah, I feel the same way. I'm struggling with the incongruence between the faith that I think, not that I was promised, but that I believed was going to happen. And then the reality of my life. I do think that is the primary audience, but I do think people who don't follow Jesus or don't know Jesus would be able to see what we believe about God.
I think that a non-Christian could read this book and see at least from a Christian perspective, how we have a hope that isn't just a pie in the sky, rainbows and butterflies hope, but it can be grounded and it can be rooted and it can be gritty and messy in the midst of real life. It doesn't have to feel detached and kind above the emotional reality of it. It doesn't have to be bypassed. It can be real and embodied.
I'm sure that the things that you've been talking about have really resonated with some people. If they would like to connect with you or to find your book, where is the easiest place for them to find you? Easiest places to go to my website, which is DustinKleinschmidt.com. Yes, I know the last name is really long, but it is phonetic and hopefully Rodney will put it in the show notes, but you can search Dustin Kleinschmidt on any search engine, but DustinKleinschmidt.com is the easiest way.
The book's there. There's some other resources. Like I said, I'm doing some coaching now. It's all around this idea of how do we navigate complexity in life as followers of Jesus and how do we help one another to navigate those complexities as followers of Jesus?
I will definitely have links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, but Dustin, I want to say thank you for sharing your personal story, what you've been through and the hope you've found and thank you for spending time with us today on Bleeding Daylight. Rodney, thank you. Thank you for all the work you're doing and the way you are helping shine light in darkness. It's awesome. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
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