Distrust, Deconstruction, and Shallow Formation

Dan Hurst:

Welcome to Revitalize and Replant with Mark Clifton and Mark Hallock, where we equip pastors to take their churches from declining to thriving by pointing them to a new future and a new hope. Join us weekly for encouragement and practical advice in your pastoring journey.

So here we are with Revitalize and Replant with Mark Clifton-

Mark Clifton:

Thank you. Right here.

Dan Hurst:

… and Mark Hallock.

Mark Hallock:

Hey, what’s up guys?

Dan Hurst:

I’m Dan Hurst. We have Matt MacNaughton at the controls.

Mark Clifton:

Matt MacNaughton is at the controls because Kyle Bueermann is not here.

Dan Hurst:

Got on the wrong plane is-

Mark Clifton:

He got on the wrong plane.

Dan Hurst:

… the way I understood it.

Mark Clifton:

I know. He’s actually somewhere else. But, Matt, we’ll take a moment if you don’t mind. Matt had a famous encounter with Nate. But you don’t have a microphone.

Mark Hallock:

You don’t have a microphone. He can’t talk.

Mark Clifton:

Come here. You got to tell us because we’re going to get into some really serious stuff here right now.

Matt MacNaughton :

Yeah.

Mark Clifton:

But before we get some serious stuff, I just want Matt to tell this little story here because it-

Mark Hallock:

What is this? What are we doing? Nate? Okay, let’s hear this.

Matt MacNaughton :

So my wife and I are big fans of Nate Bargatze, the comedian. And we watched his podcast. I was on YouTube listening to it. And I told her one day, “Hey, I’m going to end up on his podcast,” just as a joke. She didn’t believe me, so I commented on his YouTube channel. Well, they read it on their show. And so he gets to my name, and he cannot pronounce my last name, MacNaughton, and so they stutter, him and Dusty Slay, if you know him-

Mark Hallock:

Oh, yeah, I love Dusty Slay.

Matt MacNaughton :

… have a fun time with it, and then they read my comment. And I made Nate Bargatze chuckle a little bit, so that’s my claim to fame right there.

Mark Hallock:

Dude, that’s great. That’s worth a clap.

Dan Hurst:

You entertained the man himself, huh?

Mark Hallock:

Amazing. He’s never been the same since.

Mark Clifton:

All right. And he actually tells that story every day. I’ve never been with Matt. And you haven’t told that story at least once, so let’s just get this out of the way and we’ll move on. All right.

Mark Hallock:

And if you’ve never heard Nate Bargatze, he’s hilarious.

Matt MacNaughton :

Oh, yeah.

Mark Clifton:

He is hilarious.

Mark Hallock:

And he’s a believer. He loves the Lord.

Mark Clifton:

All right, here we go.

Dan Hurst:

Yeah. You what’s amazing? He’s a believer and he went to a Christian school. That’s pretty amazing-

Mark Hallock:

That’s a big win.

Dan Hurst:

… if you think about it. All right, so we’re talking. This is something you put together, Hallock and, yeah, it just captured me because, I mean, there’s a lot of big words in here that we could really take off on. When you look at it, we’re looking at some negative things, but there really is kind of a foundation for building a solid, solid ministry.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think what we’re going to talk about here are just some realities that we’re facing in the church right now in our culture of what I would just call distrust and deconstruction. The reality is there’s a lot of distrust. I mean, we’re in a time in history where it’s very different than where we were even 40 years ago in the church where, pastors and churches, there was a lot of trust. And the truth is, now, there’s not a lot of trust. And I think part of the result of that is we’re also seeing the rise in what’s popularly called or referred to as deconstruction, deconstructing my faith. I grew up believing these things. I was taught these things, and I don’t believe these things anymore, and so my faith in a sense is deconstructing.

Mark Clifton:

My whole purpose now in being around is just to tell you how things used to be. That’s my spiritual gift.

Mark Hallock:

You’re really good at it, bud. You’re really good.

Mark Clifton:

Back in the day…

Dan Hurst:

Yeah, that’s-

Mark Hallock:

Back in the day.

Dan Hurst:

… the eighth gift.

Mark Clifton:

That’s right, so that’s my spiritual gift. But when I was a kid in grade school and, the first day of school, they would ask, “What’s your dad do?” They don’t do that anymore, but, “What does your dad do?” And I’d say, “Well, my dad is a pastor at First Baptist Church or Calvary Baptist Church.” Immediately, that was just considered pretty, pretty, pretty important, pretty respected. It was really, “Oh, wow. Yeah.”

Mark Hallock:

That’s cool your dad’s a pastor.

Mark Clifton:

There was a real immediate respect that your dad’s a pastor.

Mark Hallock:

Yes.

Mark Clifton:

That’s not the case anymore.

Mark Hallock:

No.

Mark Clifton:

And then, back in the ’70s, early ’70s, we had bus ministry. And I was a 12, 14-year-old kid serving on the bus ministry. My dad’s church had a whole bunch of buses. And we’d go out on Saturdays, me and a couple other guys, men, and we’d knock on doors. We’d have a whole box of bubblegum and we would knock on doors, and we would say, “You have any kids that live here?” This is true. “Oh, yeah.”

Mark Hallock:

It wasn’t creepy at all?

Mark Clifton:

“Can we talk to him?” “Well, sure.” “We’d give them the gum.” And it probably had all kinds of food dye in it and everything else. We’d give them the gum and we’d say, “Hey, we’re going to bring this old, painted school bus by tomorrow morning. Would you let your six-year-old get on it?” And they’d go, “Sure. Why not?” So we did that every week, and we had a bus full of kids. We don’t live in a day where people trust us anymore.

Mark Hallock:

No. No.

Mark Clifton:

They look at us now as a church basically distrusting us.

Mark Hallock:

That’s right.

Mark Clifton:

Assuming we’re going to-

Mark Hallock:

That’s the starting point.

Mark Clifton:

That’s the starting point, the distrust. I’m not going to trust you with my kids. You think about that compared to now what we have to do. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t do this. But now, if you have any children’s ministry, you got to check kids in, you got to have all this other high-security stuff. That did not happen 40 years ago. And there was a high trust level. Maybe it was misplaced. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t, but we live in a world now where the default is “we don’t trust you”.

Mark Hallock:

That’s right. Exactly.

Mark Clifton:

That’s what we’re talking about.

Mark Hallock:

That’s right.

Mark Clifton:

Okay.

Mark Hallock:

And so what we want to do for the next few minutes is talk about how do we as pastors and leaders effectively shepherd people in a culture of distrust and deconstruction. Okay? And there’s five points we kind of want to just talk about. I hope they’re applicable. I know they’re applicable to each of our context. I think they’re applicable to any context.

And so here’s number one. The first one is this, and we’ve already kind of said this, many people do distrust pastors in churches. It’s just the reality. But here’s what we’ve got to remember. Sometimes, that comes from a place of real hurt, and so, a lot of people that you’re meeting, they’re not just angry because they’re angry. They don’t just distrust because they distrust. They’ve been hurt by pastors, by leaders, by the church. And yet I think that’s a huge opportunity. So you can see that as a negative, “Well, they just don’t,” whatever. “We’re not dealing with those people,” or we can, I would say, take the heart of Christ toward those who are wounded and hurt and bring the hope of the gospel to those very people. I mean, you’ve got people in your communities. I’m thinking about Independence where you are, Dan.

Dan Hurst:

Right.

Mark Hallock:

You are surrounded… One thing, we drove last night and saw your church. We went down one street, and it was clearly low-income housing. And I’m just thinking, man, those places, they are filled with hurt people, I promise you. Right? And yet what an opportunity to help them see that they can trust the one who died to save them.

Dan Hurst:

Right.

Mark Clifton:

And, also, being in Independence, Missouri, that’s the headquarters of what used to be called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And now it’s called something else, but it’s basically a split sort of from the Mormons. And, within that group, they’ve had a lot of splits, so Independence has a lot of really strange religious things going on. And a lot of those have not been good, and so there’s a lot of people who’ve been damaged by another-

Mark Hallock:

Exactly.

Mark Clifton:

… church or even something that we would not even consider Orthodox, but they still consider it the church.

Mark Hallock:

Totally.

Mark Clifton:

When I served in Independence, and we planted our church there, I had a lot of people who had been burned by that. Even they were raised RLDS, the RLDS split, the RLDS did something, and they just didn’t want anything to do with anybody’s church. Same thing when we served in Montreal, they call it the Quiet Revolution, where the Catholics in Montreal just walked away from the church. They call themselves nonpracticing Catholics. They have no trust in any religion whatsoever, so it’s not just maybe that they had-

Mark Hallock:

That’s a great insight.

Mark Clifton:

… bad experience with the Southern Baptist Church. They’ve had bad experience with church in general.

Mark Hallock:

That’s really good.

Mark Clifton:

And you got to be aware of that.

Mark Hallock:

And just being aware of that, that’s right. Here’s number two. This is huge. People have serious doubts. They just do. This isn’t a matter of, “Do people doubt?” Of course, people doubt. Lost people have all kinds of questions. What do they need from us? They need a safe place to process and be honest about their doubts. Here’s one of my fears is there’s a lot of churches that are not safe places for doubters.

Mark Clifton:

Whenever someone says, “What’s your life verse?” I don’t mean to be flippant about this. I’m flippant about most things, but I’m not flippant about this. It’s Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Mark Hallock:

Help my unbelief.

Dan Hurst:

Yeah.

Mark Hallock:

Yep.

Mark Clifton:

That’s my life verse. I love the fact that he was able to say that in the front of Jesus, “Lord, I believe, but, man, help my unbelief.”

Mark Hallock:

Help my unbelief.

Dan Hurst:

You know what I-

Mark Clifton:

We need to give people that freedom in the church-

Mark Hallock:

Amen.

Mark Clifton:

… to do that. Go ahead.

Dan Hurst:

And it’s a process.

Mark Clifton:

It’s a process.

Dan Hurst:

It’s so easy for my, I don’t know if it’s just my chemistry or what, but I want to prove something. If somebody disagrees with something or they doubt something, then I want to prove that they’re wrong or prove my position. And I’ve learned that that’s not the way I do it. My job is to help them process. That’s why I love that you use that word, that they need a place to biblically process. And then, again, it comes to something we talked about in, what, the last podcast or before that, that we have to teach them. One of the reasons they doubt is because they’ve never learned to apply the word.

Mark Clifton:

Right.

Mark Hallock:

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hurst:

They don’t know. “Does it work? Does prayer work? I doubt it works.” They have that attitude. Well, why? Why do they? Because they’ve never been taught.

Mark Hallock:

That’s true. I think about, again, if you’re going to reach lost people, man, in 2026, you better be prepared to go to some deep places with some people who have real doubts. I think of Adam in our church. He’s been at our church now for two years. His wife’s a believer. They’ve got three little kids. He’s not a believer. He’s been coming for two years faithfully. Okay?This guy’s smart. His parents were both atheists. And the Lord has been slowly softening his heart. He will bring the kiddos to church even if his wife is out of town. This guy is not a Christian, and yet I look at our church and I think of the hours that have been spent with Adam just listening to him, just talking, hearing, not trying to solve him in one conversation.

Sometimes, here’s the problem. We think, “Okay, let’s do a lunch, and we’ll figure it out.” Dude, this has been a hundred lunches. And we believe the Lord, I believe the Lord’s going to save him. It’s getting closer. But the point is this. Your church, can Adams come to your church? Is an Adam not just welcome, but is your church the kind of church that says, “We’re going to walk with a guy like that?” And I’m telling you, your community needs your church to be a church like that and needs you as a leader to be that kind of pastor. And it’s hard. And it takes time and it takes energy. It’s not easy.

Dan Hurst:

Your church needs to see that as part of their mission, their ministry.

Mark Hallock:

Yes. Exactly. That’s right.

Dan Hurst:

If a guy comes to your church like that, he shouldn’t be the outsider.

Mark Hallock:

No.

Dan Hurst:

He should be the person that you want in your church.

Mark Hallock:

And, sadly, we say we want them. That’s, I guess, my point. But do we really? And if not, man, pray that God would change your heart. Say, “Lord, give me a heart for the doubter, for the one who says, ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.'” I think, Clifton, the reality is that’s all of us.

Mark Clifton:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Hallock:

And so we need to be real about that. And that takes grace. That’s a culture of grace.

Mark Clifton:

It is a culture of grace.

Mark Hallock:

We’re in your church. It’s okay to not be okay. You know what I mean? Here’s number three. Let’s talk about deconstruction. The third thing is some people deconstruct their faith. And this isn’t anything new, by the way. This has always been there. I don’t want to make it sound novel, but it is a term that’s become popularized.

Mark Clifton:

Well, and one of the reasons it’s become popularized is because people who deconstruct their faith now have a group to belong to.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah. Exactly.

Mark Clifton:

So, now, they-

Mark Hallock:

There’s a label now.

Mark Clifton:

Let’s be careful, but it’s almost another group of people that can say, “I’ve been wounded. I’ve been hurt. I’m a victim.” Right? Yeah, we live in a victim-

Mark Hallock:

That’s true.

Mark Clifton:

We really highlight… Our culture celebrates victimhood. I got to be real careful about that. I didn’t mean the way it sounds, but you know what I’m saying.

Mark Hallock:

No. I know what you’re saying totally. Yep.

Mark Clifton:

So, in the past, if I’m going to deconstruct my faith, you might’ve been looked at like you’re sort of ostracized, but, now, if you deconstruct your faith, you got a whole group to belong to. And, in that group, you can have the higher moral ground. “I’m smarter. I’m wiser. I figured this out.”

Mark Hallock:

“I know more than you.”

Mark Clifton:

“I know more than you do.” That was not the case 40 years ago.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point.

Mark Clifton:

People have always deconstructed their faith. But, now, the adversary has created this environment where it seen as an affirming thing-

Mark Hallock:

Exactly.

Mark Clifton:

… that you’re a better person because you’ve done that. You’ve grown. You’ve matured. You’re smarter. And that’s very… I mean, that’s something… That’s what Satan did in the garden when he said, “Don’t you want to be like God?”

Mark Hallock:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Clifton:

He ate it as fruit. “You don’t have to live under His rules. You can have your own rules. You can be like Him.” And that’s what deconstruction is.

Mark Hallock:

Well, totally. And I would say, man, there’s kind of two when you’re talking about deconstruction. And Clifton just said it really well. I’m generalizing, but there’s two types of individuals who’ve deconstructed. There’s those who’ve deconstructed, and they’re proud of the label and their hearts are hard as can be.

Mark Clifton:

Yeah, and some of those are pastors.

Mark Hallock:

That’s true. And they’ve left and then, now, they have podcasts on why they deconstructed.

Mark Clifton:

Right? And they’ve got podcasts.

Mark Hallock:

I mean, it’s crazy.

Mark Clifton:

It’s crazy.

Mark Hallock:

But you also have folks who have deconstructed, but they want to rebuild. And those are the folks that, honestly, I’m thinking about most here, but they don’t know how to rebuild.

Dan Hurst:

Right.

Mark Hallock:

And so we need to be the kinds of churches that can help them deal with some of the reasons they deconstructed and then help put the pieces back together biblically, theologically so that their faith can actually be strengthened. We’ve all known folks who have deconstructed, but, now, their faith is stronger than ever because part of what they deconstructed, to be honest, needed to be. There’s some parts maybe of their faith that they grew up with. That’s a prime example.

Mark Clifton:

They deconstruct from legalism.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah.

Mark Clifton:

And we’ve got to help them understand that deconstructing from legalism is not the same thing as deconstructing from the gospel.

Mark Hallock:

Amen. That’s exactly right.

Mark Clifton:

And so, a lot of them, they think they’re deconstructing from the gospel, but they’re really just deconstructing from legalism.

Mark Hallock:

Yep, that’s right.

Mark Clifton:

And they grew up in an environment where there’s all things-

Mark Hallock:

And it’s helping them, like you said, see that though because they might think it’s so tied in to Jesus-

Mark Clifton:

Exactly.

Mark Hallock:

… that it’s, like, “Man, I guess I’m done with Jesus.”

Mark Clifton:

Exactly.

Mark Hallock:

No, no, no, you’re not done with Jesus.

Mark Clifton:

Exactly.

Mark Hallock:

And Jesus is not done with you.

Mark Clifton:

Right.

Dan Hurst:

Well, in my case, the deconstructing happened because I had never been saved. I went through all the motions and emotions of how to live the life. And I did live the life. I was the preacher’s kid.

Mark Hallock:

True.

Dan Hurst:

I was a missionary kid growing up in church. And I didn’t get saved ’til I was 19 because… and my faith had… We used that term, “faith”, deconstructed faith, but there was no faith to start with.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Dan Hurst:

There was just that feeling or that sense or that belief. But belief isn’t faith. It’s two different things.

Mark Hallock:

Interesting. Yeah.

Mark Clifton:

And truthfully, too, in our evangelistic, evangelical denomination, evangelical culture, oftentimes, you’ll have children that will be converted at the age of five, six, seven or eight like I was. And, at that age, many of them give as much as they know and understand about themself to as much as they’re able to know and understand about Christ and God and the Holy Spirit. But, at age 15, they know a lot more about themself and the world and God, and sometimes they get into some real questions. And I think-

Mark Hallock:

That’s exactly right.

Mark Clifton:

We’ve got to be very much aware of that happening. And this isn’t going to be a podcast on the age of accountability or whatever we call it, but I think, if a child does come to know Christ at a young age, we’re going to have to realize that most of the time, when they become a teenager or younger adult, they’re going to have to somehow know how to process that as an adult rather than they did when they were six.

Mark Hallock:

That’s right.

Mark Clifton:

And some of that is the deconstruction that takes place.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah. Well, that’s number four is we’ve got to help them. Many Christians, they have strong opinions, they have weak biblical foundations. And I think those teenage years are actually crucial for that. The teenage years are the years we need to lean in to these questions and help build a stronger foundation.

Mark Clifton:

Why we believe these things.

Mark Hallock:

This is why, man, kids don’t… I mean, listen, I love having fun as much as anybody, but if your youth group is basically about playing video games and just being goofy for middle school and high school years, you are not building a foundation for those kids to engage the world. And so we have to help them with that.

The fifth thing, the last thing we want to hit here is this, that culture… And this is huge. We talked about this before the podcast. Man, we live in a culture that rejects authority. We reject authority. Scripture actually teaches that authority is good, that godly authority serves and protects. What do we do guys in a culture like that where authority is seen as bad, especially like authority in the home? I mean, think about just parenting in this day and age. Disciplining your kids is looked at some like old school, ancient, the authority of the government, the authority of the church.

Mark Clifton:

I’m amazed as a pastor for all these 50 years. I shouldn’t say amazed, but it has happened on more occasions than I would’ve thought. I’ll do marital counseling with a couple who are Christians, been Christians for years, involved in the church, very active. And, oftentimes, the bride will say, “I don’t want you to use that passage about submission.”

Mark Hallock:

Submission. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Clifton:

Really? No, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to do that. That’s almost a default in many ways now. And that goes to what you’re saying, the idea that there’s an actual authority and God has a plan.

Mark Hallock:

I know. I know.

Mark Clifton:

But, again, it goes back to the garden, right?

Mark Hallock:

Yep.

Mark Clifton:

God had a plan, and Satan said, “No, it’s not the best plan. I got something better.” And it’s just a new interpretation of that. But we do live in a culture where, what’s ever right in your mind, “What’s true to you is true and what’s true to me is true. And both things can be true and be different at the same time. And if you don’t believe that, then you’re a bigot.”

Mark Hallock:

Totally.

Mark Clifton:

And you’re a hate speaker, and you’re the problem.

Mark Hallock:

That’s right.

Mark Clifton:

That’s new. Again, prior to the Second World War, there was absolute truth in most of our culture, but that’s not the case right now.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah. Well, and you named it, man. I think this is discipleship stuff, but we have to lean into this issue of authority and help people see that God has designed this world to function in a particular way.

Mark Clifton:

The authority is in Christ, not in the pastor.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right.

Mark Clifton:

I mean, sometimes, we get that confused and we become sort of dictatorial as pastors. And then we abuse that authority. And we make it worse than it was before.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah. Yeah. You’re called to submit. Submission, the whole word submission, people get nervous. Submission is freedom. It really is. As a pastor, I’m here to submit to the authority of Jesus Christ. Period. You know what I mean? This isn’t my authority. But even in the home, children and marriage… And so again though, this involves discipleship. We’ve got to talk about what is authority, what’s healthy authority.

By the way, Jonathan Leeman just wrote a great book on authority, as a resource just to throw in the show notes-

Mark Clifton:

Throw that in there, Matt.

Mark Hallock:

… on understanding biblical authority and why it’s a good thing, and why it’s a flourishing thing for all of us.

Mark Clifton:

If you have elders and if your elders function biblically, then one of the best things about elder leadership in a congregation, not elder rule but elder leadership, is that the pastor is equally under authority to those elders. And that’s important. I think in a lot of our traditional Southern Baptist world, the pastor, who’s he under authority of? Maybe the congregation as a whole or the personnel committee or the deacons. But if you really are in that relationship like I was at Linwood and at Warnell, I mean, truly, those guys, we were a team, and I was under their authority.

Mark Hallock:

Yeah, that’s right.

Mark Clifton:

We submitted to the Lord.

Mark Hallock:

Submit to one another and the Lord. Yeah.

Mark Clifton:

Yeah. And then that models for the church-

Mark Hallock:

Amen.

Mark Clifton:

… that there’s not one man in charge.

Mark Hallock:

Totally.

Mark Clifton:

We’re under the Lord’s authority and what the Word says in His name.

Mark Hallock:

Yep.

Mark Clifton:

Yep. Okay.

Mark Hallock:

So good, man.

Dan Hurst:

Well, that whole concept of distrust and deconstruction and shallow formation as we introduced in the title, if you don’t understand it, your people aren’t going to understand it. And it’s something that you really have to work with. But I close with this one little incident. You were talking about how, 40 years ago, if somebody knew that you were a pastor, that was a position of respect. People respected that. That was a big deal. “Oh, you’re pastor.” Well, Lou Miller, my mentor and former mentor, he’s gone on to be with the Lord now, but Lou Miller used to… When we were down in Florida, we were serving down in Florida, and we’d be at some place and somebody would introduce somebody, “This is pastor so-and-so of such and such church.” And Lou would shake their hand and say, “Oh, so you’ll be moving soon.”

Mark Hallock:

It won’t be that there long.

Dan Hurst:

He was so cold. Oh, man, and the look was just like, “Oh, what have you heard?” So thank you to the North American Mission Board for making this possible. We are grateful. We’ve been doing this now for three years, something like that. And it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. It really doesn’t.

Mark Hallock:

No, it doesn’t.

Dan Hurst:

It doesn’t seem that way at all. And I love these guys. We really have a good time. But, boy, we’re talking about some things that are life-changing. We hope that you will take the time, go back and listen to some of the former podcasts. Some of them were good.

Mark Hallock:

A couple of them. Yeah.

Dan Hurst:

A couple of them. Good luck finding them.

Mark Clifton:

Yeah, really, that part of… It’s like Where’s Waldo, which one’s really a good one? You got to listen to about 20 and you’ll find a good one, but it’s worth it. It is.

Mark Hallock:

It’s worth it.

Dan Hurst:

See you next time. Thanks for joining us today on Revitalize and Replant with Mark Clifton and Mark Hallock. This podcast is brought to you by the North American Mission Board where we help dying or struggling churches regain health for the glory of God and the good of their communities. If you found this podcast helpful, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. To learn more about becoming a Replant pastor or to explore revitalization resources for your church, subscribe to our monthly newsletter at churchreplanters.com.