When Faith Doesn’t Fix the Pain: The Wilderness Way with Dustin Kleinschmidt

What happens when the faith you thought would protect you leads straight into the wilderness? Dustin Kleinschmidt shares how ministry burnout, church conflict, resignation, and panic attacks shattered the expectations he had placed on God. This raw conversation explores the space between rescue and restoration—where beauty and brokenness coexist, honest lament becomes worship, and healing begins by asking, “Where are You, God?” before “How do I fix this?” Dustin offers a powerful invitation to stop chasing peace and learn to live from it, even when life remains fractured.

Dustin's contact info:

Email - dustin@thenormalpastor.com

Website - www.dustinkleinschmidt.com

Coaching with Dustin - www.dustinkleinschmidt.com/coaching

Dustin's book:

The Wilderness Way: Finding Freedom in Life's Fractures

Music:

Wilderness Worship Collective 

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Transcript

ReLight Sponsor And Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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Wild Days Hat And Big Themes

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Welcome to the Hope Unlocked podcast. I'm Kristen Kurtz, your host. I pray this episode is like a holy IV of hope for your soul. Please help me welcome Dustin Kleinschmidt to the show. I'm so excited to have him here today. I think I said his name right because I was like, I want to make sure we get this right. Did I do a good job?

SPEAKER_02 0:52

You did, you did, Kristen.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

You got it. You got it right. Okay, so catch this. You guys who've listened to me or know me well, you know that I love like wild ones, wild things, wilderness, because wild is the beginning part of wilderness. So he comes on Zoom and I see his hat right away. And if you can see, those of you who are listening in, you cannot see what his hat says. Well, can you tell us a little bit about the hat before we get into who you are and what you're doing?

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Totally. Yeah. The hat says wild days, and it's upside down because that's what all the cool kids are doing now. They flip their hats upside down, or the wording, I should say. And yeah, it was so the book I wrote was called The Wilderness Way, which we'll get into the kind of the heartbeat behind that. And then I've I've been a musician for a long time. And so I started actually kind of as a fun side project, started write writing and recording worship songs and pulling older songs that I had written years ago and re-kind of redoing them, reinventing them, and ended up calling that worship album that just came out in Wild Days, kind of as a derivative of the book. But yeah, because we live in wild days, like life is wild. And and I I just I love I love conversations around how do we navigate the complexity and craziness of the world and not feel the need to be so binary, like it's either good or bad, but it can be both good and bad at the same time. Like life live life is that way, and that's that's I think the journey. And so yeah, so in wild days is all about the idea that we live in wild days.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yes, and and can people get this hat from you as well?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Well, I will I'm gonna send you a link. I don't the funny thing is, all I did was go on Amazon and have them design it so I can I can facilitate that. Or the beauty you can get anything on Amazon, you can get you know, groceries and a new hat and tires for your car all at the same time delivered in by a drone in 48 hours.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yeah, the ideator in me is like, you know, and you're an ideator as well. As we've talked already, but I'm like, oh, he's got a merch store, he's got this, he's got that.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

I'm not, I'm I'm actually not that sophisticated when it came to that. I should have, maybe I should have. Well, hey, I'll give you a piece. You can run the merch store. We'll just we'll work out a program.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Figure out something. Awesome.

Beloved Identity And Growing Up

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Well, before we get into your story, just tell us a little bit about you. Who's the Lord created you to be?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Yeah, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

We th we talked about being prior to the being record, but who's the Lord called you to be?

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah, I think that that's a great question. Well, one, I'm I'm first and foremost, I am a follower of Jesus and I am his masterpiece created new in him, right? And and that like anchoring myself in that identity that I don't have to perform for him. My God loves me and is not impressed with me, right? Like I nothing I do impresses him. He's just like, man, I just love you because you're you, and and so, and not the future version of me that I wish I was, but he loves me as I am, right? And so that's been a that's a lifelong journey, and and that's something I probably constantly am working on, like believing and owning. I I spent a lot of time early in my faith, you know, believing that Jesus died for my sins and saved me, and that God loved me in the general sense, but that he kind of lived perpetually disappointed in me because I was a knucklehead and I made dumb decisions and all that kind of stuff. And it wasn't until early early college years where that really shifted, where the gospel really came to life in a new way, and those Ephesians, that Ephesians passage and Psalm 139 really kind of took root in my heart in a very new way. So, first and foremost, that's who I am is I am a beloved son and child. And then I'm a husband to my wife Stacy. We've been married for 27 years. Thank you. Yeah, and she's a nurse, and we met in college, excuse me, in our college ministry. She we were in the same high school ministry too, but me and my friends were shady to her, and so she didn't want anything to do with us. She was like, You guys are reckless, and it's not that we were commit we were committing misdemeanors, not felonies, like we were we were mischievous, we weren't bad kids, we were just yeah, we were good kids trying to be as bad as we could without getting in too much trouble.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Kind of walking the line a little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

Very much so. Like, how far can we put in church terms? How far can you push the line, right? In the youth group.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

So so what would that be? Like, I'm just kind of curious, like what that machine.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

Oh goodness. Well, there was a lot of teepeeing houses on weekends. Okay, a lot of teeping houses, a lot of goodness, yeah. Like we we took we went and found a group of his boys went and found a bunch of toilets somehow, like that were being thrown away and put them all in our senior port our senior pastor's front yard, like just kind of laid them out in his front yard. So when he came up in the morning, he says a bunch of toilets in his yard, which is super random. And I have no like there's no logic or thought process behind any of this. We went around after Christmas. You know how everyone puts their Christmas tree by their front in the front yard for the trash man to pick up. We collected about 70 of them. Now, this wasn't just guys, but this guys and girls, and we put them and we built a Christmas tree lot on our youth pastor's front yard. And so he came out in the morning, and there was like 75 Christmas trees standing up in his front yard. And the best part was he admitted later it took him months. He would have to basically take a tree to every neighbor's house for months for the trash to pick it up because he couldn't stack them all up in his front yard. So, yeah, so it was that kind of stuff. Like we had a lot of fun being goofballs, yeah, and like I said, you know, there were probably some boundaries pushed, and in today's culture, we would have been detained multiple times by police, but in our era it we were it was a little more feral and a little more free range, right? And so, yeah, we had a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

That is funny.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Toilets and trees, that could be we could do two podcasts just on all the stupid things that I did. It's absurd.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

I'm similar, but I I didn't do I didn't do that. There was other things that we did. So we won't go down that road because we're you today. Yeah, no, I get it. So yeah, so the husband. Okay, go ahead. I was just gonna say, you know, who who is the instigator in all of these ideas? Like who came up with the toilet and then the tree? Was there a specific person that was like, I've got this idea?

SPEAKER_02 7:14

No, well, probably. I mean, uh, that's a long time ago. There it there was a lot of groupthink, you know. It's like the you get enough teenage boys together and the lowest common denominator drops pretty dramatically.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Yeah, yeah. And so it wasn't you, we'll just say it wasn't you.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Not necessarily. I was happy to participate a hundred percent. I I was I was probably the kid. So if you had like two halves of our group of guys in this, so this is the youth group. I became a Christian in high school, and so one half of the group of guys, I mean, all of them were church. I didn't grow up in the church, I became a Christian in high school, so it was like I kind of entered into this world that existed, you know. One half of the group of guys became went into ministry, like planted churches, became pastors. The other half of the group of guys had some, you know, challenges with addiction and other things like that. And so it was really interesting. Me and a couple of my friends were kind of in that middle group where it's like we were really close with the guys on the like the edgier side, and we were really close with the guys who were on the more straight and narrow, for lack of a better term. Okay, and so we kind of played with both, and it was interesting as high school went on how they began to diverge, you know, like it the group shifted because as you know, these kids started stopped going to youth group, and and you just kind of develop a thing, but we were kind of the middle ground ones. I was the one, you know, this is all before phone internet stuff. So, you know, we would meet in a parking lot. There was a place called Penguin's Yogurt, and so we would meet in a parking lot on a Friday night, everyone would kind of get there, and then there would be an hour-long discussion about where we were gonna go or what we were gonna do, which drove me insane because I'm like a let's just make a decision and go. And so finally I'd be like about 45 minutes in, and I'd be like, Look, I'm going to a movie. Like, I don't care what you guys do. You and you can follow me, you can stay here, I don't care. I'm going to a movie. And so I and like three friends would leave, and inevitably everyone would follow and we would go to the movie. Yeah, so I I led more so out of my own impatience.

unknown 9:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Than I than than being kind of the outfront guy that was like, We're gonna go do this. Like, I wasn't rallying the troops, I was getting tired of the troops.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Okay, so that's kind of it, it's you've seen this throughout maybe your life a little bit as well.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Yes, very much so. Yeah, I we we talked offline a little bit about the I have a contrarian streak in me. Yes, very much can see, you know, and a lot of it is there's probably some hypervigilance in there and some protective stuff from childhood trauma type things, but I I have this ability to read things and go, like, I that's a great idea, but I could see the seven things that are gonna go wrong before we get there, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

It's I feel like it's such a gift, right? It is it's all it really can't when and how you exercise it, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:56

Right. Like I think the younger version of Dustin would be like, You're stupid, and like the the maturing, softer version of me is like, Hey, well, that's a really cool idea. Can we let's what are you seeing in that? What potentially could go wrong? Like learning curiosity and questions was a huge part of me learning how to navigate that world, even though I would have never made a great counselor, because in counseling you're primarily trying to help people discover for themselves, which you do in coaching too. But yeah, yeah, there is a part of me that just wants to say, Hey, I we could shorten this by 45 minutes if you just let me tell you what's wrong. Like I can give you three things, we can move on.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yeah, I call that ninja coaching.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Yes, like we've got to the chase.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

I love it. Well, yeah, so you you said you're your husband, you've been married seven years, and you have kids.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

We have three kids. We have two boys, 23 and 20, okay, and then one daughter who's 14. So she's gotten the experience of being both having siblings and functionally being an only child. Because her because our oldest has moved out, he lives about 20 minutes away with some roommates and works at a restaurant and is doing his thing. Our middle one lives at home still and is doing college for computer science. And our daughter is she's starting high school in the fall, so she's she's in full high school mode, getting ready, hanging out with her friends, playing volleyball, all the things.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

It's wild how quick they grow up, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 11:27

Oh my gosh. Yeah, it is. It's it's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

It's amazing. Wow.

Finding Faith Through Real Community

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Well, I would love for you to share more about, you know, we talked a little bit about your your youth. So you you went from youth, you know, now we we hear where you're at now, but tell us a little bit more of the the in-between.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Yeah, so like I said, I so I I did. I I came to Faith in High School. A friend of mine started inviting me to his youth group. I said no. He kept going, I kept saying no. He then invited me to go to an amusement amusement park called Six Flags, Six Flags Magic Mountain in the Los Angeles area. And and then he added on to that that he was dating a girl who had a friend, and so I was like, Hey, I'm in. I love I love Magic Mountain and I like girls, so we're we got it. Like, we're here and so I went and I really I had grown up in a with a stepdad who was abusive, and then my mom and I moved out, and it was just her and I through middle school. And then when I started high school, my freshman year high school is when this guy Tim and I connected. And I found in that youth group, like that first night I went and instantly found this community that I had lacked in my life. I had friends, but never had really experienced a community, and then had a small group leader, this guy, Steve, who was with those knuckle-headed boys that we talked about from freshman year through senior year. His wife discipled all the girls in that in that same age group. They stayed through us all four years with another couple that helped them. And he they they that they just discipled the heck out of us. They loved us well, they took us on trips, we would go camping, we would do small group. The guys would do small group at 6 30 a.m. on Monday mornings at his house. So think about a bunch of high school boys. Like with the worst time you could ever do small group would be 6:30 a.m. on a Monday morning. And Steve would always say, He'd say, Look, my door will be open and I'll be here with my Bible. And if you guys don't show up, I'll do my quiet times and I'll go to the office. And we would show up often, you know, there would be 15 or 20 of us to drag our butts in this front door, some of us wearing boxer shorts and not much else, and just it was a mess. We probably smelled, but we had real conversations and real investment. And like, what does it look like to love Jesus in the real life? And let's talk about real things. We're not gonna gloss over lust and we're not gonna gloss over girls, and we're gonna talk, we're not gonna gloss over honoring, and so we just did all those things, and so it became immediately normative for me. I didn't realize that that wasn't normative in most churches because I had no context, it's the only church I'd ever been to, right? So I had no idea that that level of discipleship had been so consistent. So immediately I was in, I you know, actually gave my life to Jesus within a couple months and then was all the way in, like part of the group, helping and serving where I could. As we kind of talked about a little offline, I'm not a good observer of things, like I want to be in it, I want to help, I want to participate. So it was like, hey, you want to help video? Sure, I can figure that out. You want to help mix sound, sure, you know, and then pick up a guitar. And so it was always just there and invested. So by the time I got into college, I was really integrated in, didn't know where I was gonna go with my life, didn't really have any plans, had started playing guitar and really kind of cultivating that. Moved in with our college pastor, he and I became roommates, which is where I ended up meeting my wife, really was in that college ministry. And I the joke is I knew four chords and he knew three chords, and so that made me the worship guy. And so I would, I would we I was clunking through worship songs, and we were we were trying to we were cultivating this community again, finding this really good community, really good mentorship and good discipleship. And yeah, we just all got to do amazing things through campus ministries and pouring ourselves into one another. And in the midst of that, I started actually I got pretty darn good at guitar and okay at singing, started writing songs kind of for fun, and that turned into a whole pursuit of a career in music. Started a band, started playing the Hollywood club scene, you know, had to invite invite all my friends, come play, come see us play on Tuesday night. Would you guys come play see us, you know, every every week? And ended up with a record deal out of that from a small record company in LA. And we never were able to get it over the hump. We we tried, but it just never was, you know, it was never gonna become the thing we wanted it to be. And I was actually on stage in a club in Hollywood. The club was called the Coconut Teaser, and it was like the Lord was like, Okay, you're done, like almost audible in the middle of a show. Like I'm on stage. I still can visualize the moment being on stage, you know, 30 years later almost. And it was like, Okay, you're done. And I was I remember in my head going, like, done with this song. I don't know what you mean. Like, I'm confused, like, I don't know what to do. And so we finished that show, and it wasn't bad, it was everything was going fine. Yeah, I was working as an intern at the church church at the time, like helping out with different things to kind of pay my bills while I was pursuing the music thing, living with my roommate, kind of like you know, that kind of thing. And so I went back to my roommate Dave, the who by then was no longer just a college pastor, but he was over overseeing all of student ministries, so really it's a relatively large church, definitely by Los Angeles standards. And I just told him, I said, Hey, I think I'm done trying to be a rock star. And he's like, Really? He's like, That's interesting. He's like, I've been thinking about a position at the church of a full-time student ministries worship pastor. And he's like, I thought of you. He's like, But uh, you were you've kind of been chasing this other thing, yeah. And so we talked about it and prayed about it and pitched it to the elders, and lo and behold, they signed off. We did not think they were gonna say yes because I hadn't really, I hadn't finished a college degree, I hadn't finished, I didn't even have a formal music degree, let alone a theology degree or even my associate arts in anything yet.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

Okay. Now, were the were they looking? Like, were the do you feel like they were looking for somebody who had kind of the titles behind their name in essence?

SPEAKER_02 17:58

No, I think what it was is the the idea was so no one had ever done it. Like we went, we talked to all these other churches that we knew, like, hey, you have anyone that has done this student ministries worship because the guy the goal was we wanted to start an academy to train students music, like because we have a bunch of kids who are taking music lessons, and it's like, well, instead of teaching a Mary Head a Little Lamb, what if we use the worship songs that they love so much and that they sing on in youth group? Yeah, and in addition, we can train them in a theology of worship, like what is worship? Romans, you talked about Romans 12, too, Romans 12, one and two, it's our core passages of what a life of worship looks like. And so, really develop that culture in middle school age students, and then in high school, we wanted to help them develop into student bands that could then lead worship in the different areas of the church from kids' ministry to main services, and so we basically built a farm league, and so partnered with with a couple other like kids that I knew who were music majors, okay and we did. We developed this program, and for seven years, that's what we did we did is we built this thing, and some of those kids that were in middle school then are still leading worship at that church today, and they have their own families and are doing their own careers, but they still play at that same church. In fact, the girl, she was a college student when we started it, who was probably my most my most close partner in it, like developing. She's an amazing vocalist, and she really did a lot of the go vocal training stuff. She's the worship pastor there, she's been the worship pastor there for probably 10 years now.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Amazing. So it was like this really you see, like you look back and it's like the yes, it's like from Tim to Steve to Dave, right? To like all these people that invited you into something and you said yes, and then like it's so cool to look at that, like the ripple of your yes, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:48

Yes, absolutely. And it was it was like, but it wasn't it was never like an aspiration, it wasn't like I'm gonna go into ministry and then I'm going to it was the Lord like literally getting me to trip and fall backwards into it, yeah. And then wake up one morning and go, Oh my gosh, uh am I a pastor? Like, is that really that sounds weird? Oh, absolutely. I hated it, I hated being calling a pastor.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

They called you a pastor, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Even then, I mean, I think they started me as director because and then over time I did the theological education, like I backfilled a lot of the things that I hadn't done. Because as I matured, and as you know, then you're like, Okay, well, like you know, I'm gonna help teach a little bit and I'm gonna help with small groups a little bit. And so you just at some point you're like, I need I need a more firm foundation in all of this, and so um, so I did that, and then when the economy changed in 2009, my position was cut, and because of all the housing market stuff, and so you know, by then we have two boys, we own a house, my wife's a full-time nurse, we're settled, and all of a sudden it's like, Wait, what? Like, we're gonna uproot everything. You've only ever known California. And I told I remember telling Stacy, my wife, I just said, Look, I'll never force you to move anywhere. Like, if he's if God could tell me where we're supposed to go, He can tell you. Like, I don't, yeah, and it was a two-year, almost a two-year process of praying and interviewing, and ultimately, crazy story. I had reached out to a friend in Texas, in a suburb of Texas, about another role at another church in that area, and just called him and said, Hey, like, because he I knew they had planted a church in that area. And I said, Hey, do you know anything about this other church? I'm kind of trying to get a feel for it. And he's like, Let me check it out, I'll get back to you. And he literally walked from that phone call into a meeting with his then worship guy, and the guy's like, Hey, I'm gonna resign, I'm gonna

Relocation And Church Leadership Tension

SPEAKER_02 21:34

go be a Dallas firefighter. And so he calls me back and is like, Hey, what were they gonna offer you? And I'm like, Why are you asking? And so it was like kind of this crazy like we saw God suddenly kind of go, like, hey, my I I'm in this, and that was one of the things we like, we wanted practical things like a place where we felt like we could raise our family and a place we could call home and all those things, but it was also like we wanted a clear sense that God supernaturally was orchestrating something that we couldn't force because I can't make it up, right? Totally because I'm pretty good at finding at making things happen for myself, and I I just I didn't want to look back and go, Oh, maybe that was me, you know. And so that phone call led to flying out there, spending some time. I had known most of the team that had planted that church because it was from a church near ours in LA that planted in in this part of Texas, and so so yeah, we transitioned out. It was really hard for my wife. She really struggled moving away from family, moving away from mountains and beaches.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

All the things, all the things I grew up in California, too. Yeah, so you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:39

I was more excited because it was something new and different. I was going to be doing worship and discipleship for the whole church. So now I'm out of kind of the youth ministry thing and in more of like the whole story. And I was really excited about that. And so I did. I jumped into that and for seven years was really invested in that church. Started to have some challenges with the senior leader. Some of what I who I thought he was didn't kind of come to fruition. And there was some leadership quirks and concerns. And quickly realized that that we were gonna we were gonna butt heads a fair amount. You know, I would bring something to his attention, and at times he would basically say, Hey, if I want your opinion, I'll tell it to you. And I was like, okay, this isn't good. But really sensed the Lord was saying, and I remember going back to my wife and being like, I don't know if we're gonna be here forever. And she's like, Are you kidding me? Like we move across the country, and now you're saying this isn't the final landing spot.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

But this but this was after like seven years that this was starting to happen, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:34

Uh it actually started happening about two years in.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Oh, two years in.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Yeah, a year to a year and a half in, I started to really get unsettled. But as we prayed about it, the Lord was like, He's like, You stay faithful and you trust me with him. To which my response was, Well, that's a really dumb idea.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

I love I love that. We have to be honest with God, right? I mean, I do that all the time. I'm like, really?

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Yes, it is a regular conversation with me and God for him to say, I want you to this, and me to go, no, that's a dumb idea. I don't think I should do that at all. Yeah, and and we've just developed, and he thought it was cute. But he did, he gave me, he gave me kind of the picture of Moses and Aaron. He's like, Your job is to be Aaron, like you hold up his arm best you can. And so did that for another five, six years, really. And it was challenging, it was very difficult, but tried my best to stay in my lane, to support him best I could, and at the same time just cultivate. By then, we had handed off the worship stuff because the church was growing really fast, okay, and someone else was doing that. And I was really focused on small groups and discipleship. And how do we how do we grow up in Christ? How do we help our people get in community, grow up in Christ, those kinds of things? And so focused on that. And then ultimately it led to us planting a church about 30 minutes away. And it was a way for me, like I we did pray and really felt like I was saying, Hey, I want you to, this is where I want you to head. And at the same time, it was a way, like a way for me to for us to step away from that church and not have it be combative or any any dissension. And I think for him, it was an easy way to be like to kind of move me along and not have it be a problem. So, and in hindsight, which you'll hear about in a second, it it was a way of protecting me from what I had didn't know was coming in in a way. So we moved about 30 minutes away, 20, 20, 30 minutes away to a town with about 12 other couples. And we started a church in Murphy, Texas, where we live today, which is like a suburb of the Dallas area near Plano. And yeah, we were we just did all the things, like started in my living room. My daughter's room was the nursery, and our upstairs media room area was kids' ministry, and and we just started investing in our neighbors and loving people and trying to show them our our community, our area specifically is about 22% Muslim. So it was a high concentration of non-Christians, which is part of what we were like, hey, it'd be really cool to go someplace where people actually don't know Jesus. Because if you've ever been to the Bible Belt, you can't throw a rock and not hit a church, and you really don't even need a good arm.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

I've heard, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

Yeah, no, you don't even need a good arm, you can just it's it's very different than LA. Okay, so we did. We just started investing our community, moved into a middle school near us after about it six months or so. Did the whole setup tear down, like exhausting, wearing out. You know, my one of my sons was the slide guy, the other son would mix sound. Like it was it was whole family, everyone's involved. Yeah, and we did that for almost three years, and then COVID hit, and that was like one, it was kind of a nice reset because we moved everything back into some homes. We split up in between multiple homes so that we could still gather, but not like have everyone in one space to try and honor that what was going on. And yeah, we did that for almost a geez, almost a year, and in that our leadership team started really wrestling with like this will be a full restart on the backside. And do we want to ask our people to do the same level of sacrifice that they just did, you know, to their family, to their relationships? Because it's a lot when you ask people be a good husband and dad or wife, you know, be a good parent, work your full-time job. Oh, and if you could also help me lead a small group, and if you could come on Sundays and set up and tear down. And we we want to love our neighbors well. So we're gonna serve at this event and this thing and this thing. It's a lot for a small group. And we just decided ultimately it wasn't worth what it would cost. And we would rather have people walking with Jesus than have this thing called Cornerstone Church Murphy, and prayed about it and decided to let it go. And in the midst of all that, the church I had come from, that senior pastor had resigned due to burnout, was the original statement. Turned out he had been having an affair, and that church really imploded. And it was interesting, parallel timing-wise, about six months before, right as COVID was hitting, was when all that happened. And so I had heard about it, but I had and had been contacting friends and praying for him and just saying, I'm really sorry you're walking through this. And a lot of the things I had been struggling with suddenly made a lot of sense. And so you're in this weird space.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Yeah, like that tension of yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't tell what. And it wasn't that he was having the affair back when I was there, but the unhealthy patterns that led to it were already in place. Okay, and you know, they the the affair in many ways was just a symptom of much deeper issues. And so, as we were shutting down the church plant and in communication with them, their leadership that was left, because they're a bunch of their elders resigned, said, Hey, would you be willing to come back and help us kind of rebuild? And we knew it was going to be messy because by then the churches, you know, upwards of a thousand people, they'd just built a building, it's the backside of COVID. People are hurt, people are scared, very untrusting, right? Of anyone who had been in and around that ecosystem. There's a lot of clamoring for power vacuums going on, so all the things that you could expect are happening. And originally I went back just to kind of consult a little bit and help them kind of think through how they could reorient. And that led to them saying, Hey, would you come back and be one of our lead guys? And we prayed and ultimately decided to say yes, though we knew it was going to be hard. And that I I was I lasted three years, is the way I can describe it. So I my key card hadn't even swiped the door once before just chaos ensued, in terms of a bunch of things. You've got a disgruntled elder who wanted that job that was the other leaders were like, No, we don't think you're the right fit. So he throws his hissy fit and takes 50 people and goes and plants a church. And you know, budget, you know, we we all have this brand new building, which is costing 20 grand a month or whatever the mortgage was, and people are leaving the church because of all that's going on. And I'm coming in, they're like, Well, can is he just here to take over? Is he just like the old like so it's it just shows you the you know, it shows you the impact of sin in situations, it's never just the person, like the ripple effects are dramatic. And so I came in and was really like, okay, how do we how do we start to build health in this? Because it was a very unhealthy leadership environment, ministry environment. And so we needed to kind of re reorient it completely, and so I really we did that. We put our best faithful uh effort in. We stayed in Murphy, we didn't move back, so we were commuting in and out.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

Okay, how far of a drive was that for you?

SPEAKER_02 30:34

About 30 minutes or so, and ultimately the plan would have been to move back because I had a conviction that if we were long-term going to be there, I wanted to live in the community where I was pastoring, and that would make sense. But right, luckily the Lord kept us from doing that. Okay, and I I write about it in the book, but basically, yeah, it was just conflict after conflict, having to let go of staff because of budget cuts and having to move people out of roles because they just didn't fit the roles and confronting unhealth and you know, trying to move slow enough to where you're not jerking the wheel for this church. And when you're doing that, so if you move too fast, people complain that you're moving too fast and then it's abrupt. When you move too slow, you have people that are like, Why aren't you moving faster?

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Right. And so, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

And so I was literally out. This is in chapter one of the of the book. I'm literally in an elders' meeting, and we have to I have two young leaders sitting there that kind of crash the meeting. Okay, and they're so we have like three elders plus me, and then a couple elders in training that we because we'd been working to develop a new elder group and we need need a better leadership. And and these two two guys are sitting there basically going around the room telling us why they think that we're all horrible leaders and they don't want to follow us anymore. I'm like, what what's going on? And and I remember and and I watched a couple of the elders start to kind of fold because they were fatigued too. They had one through the same thing, like they had the snot beat out of them as well. And well, you know, one of them was like, Well, what do you think we should do? And I'm like, Wait, what? And ultimately I left that meeting and I'm going, okay, so these two guys who were beloved and did a great job as their role in their roles on staff, but I'm like, if they say they can't follow our leadership, then either we go or they go, right? Right? Like, so now you now might I'm faced with a decision, do I fire these guys?

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Right.

SPEAKER_02 32:19

And then if I fire them, I know enough about the culture to know we're not gonna get up front and go, let me tell you what happened at this meeting. We're gonna be gracious and we're gonna say, Hey, we've decided to move them on. And but when you're unclear, then that just creates more, well, what really happened? And oh, he was a threat, you know. And so I just saw it. Like I looked forward and said, Oh, this is gonna this is gonna stink to high heaven. This is not gonna go well. Oh my god. And I remember calling my wife and just saying, I just don't see a way forward. I I don't think I can do this anymore. And we prayed about it for a couple weeks, and I gave my resignation at the end of 2023 and was like, Okay, I I can't. I I'm I'm done. I told him in my resignation, I said, Look, I've I've spent three years fighting for you, or I've been I've spent three years fighting with you, and so I can no longer fight for you. Wow, and I just yeah, after 25 years in vocational ministry, I was like, I was so worn out and beat up. I was done.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

So it I can see obviously the the name of your book came out of this. Could you share the name of your book? Yes you wrote, and I would love to hear, you know, you you wrote songs and prior to writing a book, had you thought you'd ever write a book? Did you ever think you'd have a book that would be launching? And then like first share the name of the book and then tell us a little bit more, even that book process

Resignation After Years Of Conflict

SPEAKER_00 33:39

too.

SPEAKER_02 33:39

Yeah. So the book is called The Wilderness Way Finding Freedoms and Life's Fractures. And no, it I I again, the Lord leading me backwards into things. I didn't set out to write a book. And I I had written, obviously, I'd written messages and I'd written booklets and stuff over the years. And right, so I love the exercise of writing, but never with like, hey, I'm gonna write this thing and publish it. And in fact, the book itself started as just me journaling and wrestling through everything I was going through. Because when I left the church, when I resigned, I thought, like, okay, I'm gonna get a big deep breath. And uh I didn't get that. I actually, for the first time in my life, started having panic attacks, had never had them before.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Right after you left in 2023?

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Three months after resigning, I had my first panic attack.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

While visiting another church.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Can I just ask you, like, if somebody's listening in and maybe they have never experienced what that is, and what what what is that what is that experience like? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_02 34:35

It was so for me, and it's different for everyone experiences things differently. So, but for me, there was a trigger moment that was very innocuous, like it should not have triggered the what it did. But instantly, like my stomach was in tight, tight knots, like I stitch in my side, lay like shallow breathing, couldn't get a full breath. Okay,

Panic Attacks And Trauma Uncovered

SPEAKER_02 34:57

and like it almost feels like it, like the West Way I can describe it is it feels like someone's squeezing your heart. Like if someone was grabbing your heart and pushing on it, they weren't killing it, but they were just making it really hard for it to compression. And so that was this sensation. And again, like I've never had this in my life, and so all of a sudden I'm like, What in the heck? And so we get in the car to drive home from this church where this is starting, like I feel my brain, my mind spiraling, and you know, shame triggers and all these things are going on. And I look at my wife and I'm like, I think I need to call somebody. And a friend of mine, coincidentally, had recently suggested to me a counselor that he had started seeing who had been in ministry, had been a missionary, and I had seen counselors in the past, but I had always struggled finding a counselor that was direct enough and strong enough to handle my personality. Because I'm not a pushover and I like I like direct challenge. And and they also, most counselors didn't understand the dynamics of ministry, they just hadn't been in vocational ministry. And so uh while we're driving home, as I'm kind of trying to reset myself, I messaged this guy. He was on vacation and he called me and he's like, Let's talk. And uh kind of told him what I was going through. He's like, Okay, I'll be back in the office next week. Let's start meeting. And so I did, I started meeting with him, and that began this journey of like, oh, there's more going on here than just my resignation. That that there was deep childhood trauma, stories that I believed about myself, stories that I believed about God, which I talk about in the book, which I'll explain in a second. All these things that were going on that kind of all collided in one moment, and then became kind of like it's imagine like if something explodes and then it starts to ripple out. So it was like that was the explosion. Now I've got to start navigating all the shrapnel, and that's really what the next two years was, and really the process of the book. So, in the midst of all this, I had been reading through the Exodus narrative. And what you have in Exodus is you know, Israel is rescued from slavery to Egypt, and they're told about a promised land, and then they spend 40 years in the wilderness. Now, you can say, yes, that that 40 years is a direct result of their disobedience, absolutely, but it also is the place where God did all of this formative work, right? And so then I'm thinking about it in light of a follower of Jesus. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. As a follower of Jesus, I've been rescued from slavery to sin and death. And one day Revelation teaches us God's home will be among his people and he will wipe away every tear from their eye, and there will be no more sorrow, and a new Jerusalem will come down, and

Wilderness As The Christian Life

SPEAKER_02 37:36

there will be new heavens and new earth, right? But until that day we live in the wilderness. And so I used to think of wilderness as I'm going through a wilderness season versus going, no, I actually think this whole already but not yet life is the wilderness. And it's always gonna be a mix of beauty and brokenness.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

That's so good. And that again, I feel like somebody needs to hear that again.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

Yes. So life is always gonna be a mix of beauty and brokenness. And and and we all experience this in different ways. It's not even the hub, the big bigs and the low lows, but or the but it's it's just a reality. Like this last week in my life, a really good friend of ours that we or her their daughter, mid-20s, was sexually assaulted, like like by a by uh an ex-husband, like just horrific, horrific situation. You know, and and then but we went out to dinner with them on Saturday after it happened because she's working through it and stuff, and we actually had fun. And I watched her smile in the midst of so like this again, she's yeah, there's a tension in life, right? Like you can you can sit on your patio on a beautiful sunny day, and then as soon as you start scrolling through what's going on in the news, you're like, ugh, right? Right, yeah, the the world is wild, it is messy, completely, and and I think that what what I realized about myself is that I had had this subtle quib pro quo with God that I was really largely unaware of. It's one thing when you do something disobedient and you get a consequence for it, right? Like, okay, so I did this thing and I got in trouble, and uh yeah, that's on me. His grace is sufficient, his power is made perfect in weakness, cool, move on. It was a very destabilizing thing for me to go. Wait a minute, I did what you told me to. Yeah, I went back to that church. I I tried my best to honor him the best I could. I really cared, I really wasn't trying to control things, I really was trying to honor and serve people, I really was sacrificing and giving. My family was sacrificing and giving. I was all those things, and and it didn't work out. What the heck? So this is a very job conversation, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:54

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

And and I remember like praying and wrestling and having really honest conversations with God about this. And and in essence, what I sensed him saying was, You are doing an awesome job articulating your disappointments to me, but you're not talking about your expectations, and every disappointment is built on an unmet expectation. And he was like, What are your expectations? And as I started to do the math, I'm like, Oh, yeah, he he never promised that if you're faithful, things work out. If if that's true, then Jesus got a really raw deal because he was the most faithful, and it didn't work out, right? Right. He and Paul was a faithful guy, and yet he was in prison multiple times and beaten within an inch of his life. And so it was this realization that I had allowed this creep in my life of like, oh, I've started to believe that if I'm a good boy and do the right things, God will bless me. And although that is true at times, it is not exclusively true. And life is messy, and and I need to become more comfortable in the mess. And what it ultimately led to was a freedom in me. It wasn't, it didn't become fatalistic, like you know, life stinks and then you die. For me, what it became was oh, yeah, like wilderness happens. Like, so when I'm driving to work and I get a flat tire and I'm frustrated on the side of the road, it's like wilderness, right? Like the wilderness means there's nails on a road. Yeah, and sometimes your computer doesn't work, and right, like all of these things.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

It's like consider it pure joy. Yes, consider it, just consider it. That's pure joy. You know, it's oh, how can I find joy in this, right? Yes, it's back, it's backwards, it feels upside down, but there's that attention, you know, pay attention to the tension, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:42

Yes, uh exactly. And what it was like the the biggest thing in it for me was when I was in a hard season, not just this one, but any hard season, my functional thought was, what do I have to do to get out of the hard season? How do I fix it? What do I get out? So all of my effort and energy is going into resolving whatever the problem is.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

Problem solver, yes.

SPEAKER_02 42:04

Instead of going, okay, God, where are you in the midst of this? So imagine, like for me, it was like, imagine what would look different in my life if rather than trying to fix myself or fix the problem or get out of the tension or stop the pain. My energy first went to, okay, guy, where are you? What are you doing? It says that he weeps with the, you know, he's close to the brokenhearted, he's with us in the desert. He walked like in Israel situation, he was always with them in the wilderness. He guided them, like he provided food for them. And so that reorientation was a freeing thing. One, it allowed me to stop being surprised when life happens, big and small, right? And two, it was like, okay, so where are you in this? Like, how how are you trying to grow me? I I recently heard about Johnny Erickson Tata. I don't know if you know her.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:55

So she has a rule in her prayer life, which I is I've tried to adopt it. I think it's brilliant. It's an 80-20 rule. So she only allows herself to spend 20% of her time praying for the things that she wants or needs. 80% of her prayer life needs to be around what is it you're wanting to teach me or show me? Which I thought is brilliant. Yeah. And it's it was like, oh my gosh, that's so good. Because my compulsion is to come to God with my list of like, okay, if you could fix this and help me with this and provide a little more income here and do this thing here and do that here and help me with that. And if you're there, all right, cool, have a good day. I'll see you later.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Right.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

And he's like, But I okay, like talk to you later. But to say, like, okay, what like I want to sit in this, and it's okay to sit in it, and it's okay, God wears big boy pants. I can be frustrated and not have answers and not feel the need to resolve that, right? Like, I don't need to what we talk, I talk about in the book called Spiritual Bypassing, which a guy named John Wellwood coined the term, and it's the idea of like when we just paint a verse on something, and like you know, someone's in real pain, and we're like, Well, God works all things to the good, and we we almost try to skip. Yeah, rather than saying I that I'm that hurts too, and I'm sorry you're hurting, and I don't have an answer for you, and I wish I did, but I don't. But you know what I can do? I can sit here with you, yeah, and I can be uncomfortable with your discomfort, and that's okay. And it's everything Job's friends first did well, until they started trying to figure it all out.

SPEAKER_00 44:24

They got really shifty. I'm back in Job right now, actually.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

Are you?

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Yeah, I'm like those guys were great when they were quiet. They were, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:31

And then as soon as they started trying to resolve why Job is suffering, it all goes sideways.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Right. The problem solvers, right? And but we can be like that too. Like I I've naturally even myself, like I'm I'm a problem solver. So when these things happen, you know, I came out of corporate 20 years in accounting. One plus one equals two, right? But in in this wild life that we live, it it's not like that.

SPEAKER_02 44:58

Yeah. And there's and again, it isn't that solving problems is a good thing, right? But it's it's more so do I believe that by solving the problems somehow I'm gonna feel more safe, more secure, more at peace. And the reality is no, like that's not the goal. So I should be trying to solve problems from a place of safety, security, and peace, not for safety, security, and peace.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

That is a key right there.

SPEAKER_02 45:22

Yes. And so learning to live from instead of for, and this goes back to our offline conversation about our identity and early on, right? Like identity in Christ, who am I? Okay, like I believe that God is fully loving and fully in control. And if you ask me why bad things happens, bad things happen, I have no idea. Yeah, anyone that tells you they know is faking it, they don't know. But we do know that God is fully loving, fully in control, and we live in a broken world, and so it's gonna be messy. And he's in the middle of the mess. And so for me, it has totally freed my heart in so many ways. Not that I don't fight it sometimes, but in many ways, he's freed my heart to just go, okay, God, like what is it you want to teach me? And how can I be faithful and present to this moment, whatever this moment is, whether that's sitting at a volleyball practice with my daughter or you know, having lunch with a friend or whatever. It doesn't matter what I'm doing. I just want to be faithful to those moments. And that's been it's so it's been a huge journey, and that's really the heart of the book and the music and all of that is helping people to not reconcile, but to to wander life effectively and to be present where they're at.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

Yeah, to be a a wanderer. I think there's a uh on Jeeps, I've seen it a lot where it says, not all who wander are lost.

SPEAKER_02 46:42

Exactly. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 46:43

I love it. It's a favorite. Tell us, tell us, I want to make sure that we capture. So you have a new album if or like I want to make sure we capture this. Tell us a little bit about that album. Now, yeah, I I I like being surprised, so I didn't dig in, but have you had albums prior to this that have been no well?

SPEAKER_02 47:04

I mean, if you were if like if you went digging back, you might find some YouTube videos, but I wouldn't recommend it.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

So this is new, this is new.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

Yeah, so you know, back uh when I was uh when we was

New Album And Worship Collective

SPEAKER_02 47:18

doing the pop music thing, I had a bunch of stuff and we tried to push it and go and it didn't take off. And this is pre-streaming era and stuff, and so I have copies of those CDs still, but they're not on any digital mediums, nor will they ever be. Those are the early 2000s for a reason, and we're no longer in the early 2000s. But I also, while I was doing that, was writing worship songs, and we would perform them in that youth ministry and and and we would sing them. And my rule back then was I didn't want anyone to know I wrote the song, so we would just introduce new songs and we would they would just become part of the eco ecosystem. And about uh it was it was about eight months ago, you know, it was the book was was almost done. I was writing the final stages, and I was kind of on a nostalgic hit, and so I was listening to old worship songs because I have them all in my iTunes library. Okay, I have live versions that we did and whatever else. And I was like, I started realizing, oh, a handful of these have this wilderness theme in them. That tension between beauty and brokenness. I had been writing and singing about 25 years ago, but didn't realize it. And so it was this really interesting thing where I was like, one, lyrically, these songs aren't as bad as they are musically. Maybe they could get a little refresher course and we could modernize them. And two, some of these themes really parallel what we've I've talked about in the book. And so it was kind of this funny, like, oh wow. And with the way that digital recording has adapted and you know, relationships I have, I'm like, okay, I think we could, I think I could start doing this. And it was literally just for fun. So I was originally gonna do two or three songs and just release them, just kind of to do it. And so I did the three songs, and then while I was doing the three songs, I started having ideas of new songs, and so then all of a sudden a new song pops up, and I'm like, Oh, okay, that's that's pretty cool. Yeah, and it just kind of again, me tripping and falling backwards into things. And so I I don't like marketing, and so I didn't call it, you know, Dustin Kleinschemidt's worship project. What I developed is a thing called the Wilderness Worship Collective, which the hope is that it becomes a collective of artists who all want to create honest worship that holds intention God's deep love and sovereignty and honesty about how hard life is. Because I sometimes I feel like Christian music can go either way, like it can it can almost be a little Pollyanna-ish and or it can be like really dark and no hope. And so I was like, what if it what if we tried to kind of massage those two together? And so, yeah, so I spent uh some time and and had some friends and we just kind of all pieced it together. I actually ironically, I didn't sing on the album. I sang some of the backing parts and some of the scratch stuff, but I don't I don't like listening to my voice, and so I wanted to be able to listen to this album at the end of it, and so I'm like, I'm just not gonna sing any of it, I'll let other people sing it. They have better voices than me.

SPEAKER_00 50:11

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 50:12

So we did, we just crafted it around that, and I may release some versions with my vocals on them at some point. I'm still kind of wrestling with that because I haven't sung in a long time. It's on the radar.

SPEAKER_00 50:24

Release your sound, it'll give permission to other people.

SPEAKER_02 50:29

True, and I mean it's not bad, but yeah, I think if I'm gonna do it, someone else has to produce it because I I will obsess about it versus letting it like someone else would look at me and go, Hey, this is more than good enough. And I'm like, No, it's not.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

So it just gets recorded and then put out there, and then it's like ooh, 100%, 100%.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

Yeah, so so it's been fun, and it's again, it's a creative outlet for me. You know, my wife loves the playing guitar at the house again because I went a long time, 10, 12 years not playing guitar. And so, yeah, so she's it's been fun, and it's another creative outlet, and it's spurring on it's funny, like the writing spurs like the book writing or kind of the article writing spurs on the music, and the music spurs on. So there's a lot of like cross-pollination and thought process, yeah. And so, yeah, it's so it's called Wilderness Worship Collective. The song is called or the album is called In Wild Days. I think it's 11 tracks. It's out on all the major streaming platforms, or you can go to my website, it's the easiest way to find it. Because if you search it, if you just search In Wild Days, there's probably 70 other artists that are higher in the algorithm than me. So it's it's a pretty specific link, you know. But but yeah, it's been cool. And people have given me great feedback, the ones who've listened to it, and it's been fun.

SPEAKER_00 51:48

Okay. And what's what's your website?

SPEAKER_02 51:50

Uh it's just my name, Dustin Kleinschmidt.com. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 51:54

Will you spell your last name out loud?

SPEAKER_02 51:56

Yeah, it's K-L-E-I-N-S-C-H M-I-D-T. Okay. Sounds good.

SPEAKER_00 52:03

So and if you put it in the show notes, yeah, that'd be great. We'll have everything in the show notes. I'll have linked to, you know, maybe what's your favorite streaming platform we could put in there.

SPEAKER_02 52:13

Oh goodness. Either Spotify or Apple Music are the two best.

SPEAKER_00 52:16

We'll do we'll do one of those.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to divide the room by declaring which of the two are my favorites.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

We don't exactly that's like Mac and PC.

SPEAKER_02 52:25

You don't want to have that argument.

SPEAKER_00 52:27

Right. We don't want to have any division here. Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on today. Before I before we end, I always love to ask one more question. So if you were just to imagine like the one who's listening in today, because that's why I do this, it's for the one. What would you what other like encouragement, any wisdom that you'd want to speak over this person?

SPEAKER_02 52:51

Yes. And it's because I speak it over me all the time. Psalm 37, verses three and four. Trust in the Lord and do good. Dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. That idea, trust the Lord. So He's God, I'm not God, right? First and foremost. Do good, meaning be moral and

Befriend Faithfulness And Final Blessing

SPEAKER_02 53:14

like follow the rules and don't steal and don't lie and don't cheat and don't do all those things. Don't put it on the dwell in the land. Yeah, yeah, totally. Dwell in the land, meaning be where you're at. You know, if you're few, don't be past focused or fixated or future fixated. It's okay to look back, it's okay to look forward, but don't fixate. So dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness, which is one of my favorite phrases, phrases, and it it's the Hebrew term is this idea of making faithfulness your your greatest companion. And so just that idea of like, I want, you know, I want to hear well done, good and faithful servant. Because I, in each moment of each day, I said, My goal is faithfulness, my desire is to be faithful to the Lord in all things. And so my that's my encouragement. Wherever anyone's at in their spiritual journey or in their life, like your next first step is trust the Lord, do good, dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

So good. Thank you so much. This has been so amazing. I'm gonna close with Hope Unlocked anchoring verse. It's may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. And that's Romans 15, 13. So thank you for being a brave voice who's setting so many free. I'll be back with another episode next week. Thanks, listeners.