From Deconstruction to Faith Lab: Why I’m Still Asking Questions, and Why I’ve Come Back

For eight years, this podcast has been called Almost Heretical.

What started as a small side project became something much bigger than I ever expected. Millions of downloads. Thousands of messages. People all over the world reaching out to say, “I thought I was the only one.”

Most of them were wrestling with Christianity. Some were questioning it. Some were dismantling it piece by piece. Some were trying desperately not to lose it altogether.

They still cared about Jesus. They still cared about God, the Bible, meaning, truth. But they no longer felt at home in the version of Christianity they had inherited.

That season mattered to me deeply. It mattered to a lot of people. And before I explain where the show is headed now, I want to be really clear about something.

What Deconstruction Actually Was for Me

Deconstruction gets portrayed badly, especially in Christian spaces.

It’s often framed as rebellion, bitterness, or a desire to tear everything down. That hasn’t been my story.

For me, deconstruction was an honest process driven by a desire to understand what I actually believed. It’s what happens when inherited answers stop working. When the explanations you were handed no longer match your experience of reality.

I’ve always been wired this way.

When I was a kid, if my family got a new appliance, I’d ask for the old one so I could take it apart in the garage. I didn’t want to break it. I wanted to understand how it worked. Why it worked. What was really going on inside.

Christianity was given to me early in life, and for a long time, it made sense. I devoted years to full-time ministry. But about ten years ago, while living in San Francisco and planting churches, I a wall.

I was exhausted. Burnt out. Disillusioned.

I had assumed that if I gave everything to God, I’d feel grounded, confident, close to him. Instead, I felt tired and unsure of what I even believed anymore. So I stepped back. I slowed down. And eventually, I needed a place to process all of it.

That’s where Almost Heretical came from.

Deconstructing in Public

The show wasn’t born out of rejection. It was born out of confusion.

In many ways, Almost Heretical was me deconstructing in public. And I think it helped a lot of people feel less alone. If you’ve been through deconstruction, you probably recognize the pattern.

You pull on one thread, and suddenly the whole system starts to wobble. Things that once felt solid begin to collapse. Often, what you’re actually losing aren’t the core claims of Christianity, but later interpretations. Confident explanations. Cultural add-ons. Assumptions you didn’t even realize were there.

But when those things fall, it can feel like everything is falling.

For me, that unraveling was slow, honest, and sometimes painful. Eventually, I reached a point where I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore — not just about Christianity, but about meaning itself.

I still admired Jesus. I still valued the ethics and the community. But I no longer believed the central claim that Jesus had actually risen from the dead. And at the time, I honestly thought that was the end of Christianity for me.

When Deconstruction Keeps Going

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

Continuing to deconstruct didn’t just dismantle my faith. It dismantled the alternatives too.

Over time, I started noticing that many of the conclusions I was being encouraged toward also required their own kind of blind faith. New assumptions about reality. New stories about meaning and purpose that weren’t actually grounded in much evidence at all.

I also noticed something else: in parts of the deconstruction space I had helped create, there was often a strong tilt toward explaining Christianity away. And whenever I notice strong motives driving conclusions, it makes me want to slow down and look more carefully.

So I kept digging.

Discovering Evidence I Was Never Shown

I started listening to historians, philosophers, scientists, and biblical scholars who weren’t asking me to turn my brain off. What surprised me wasn’t that this material existed, it was that I had barely engaged it before.

For most of my life, I had focused on living Christianity, not examining whether its foundational claims were actually true. I had assumed that people who needed evidence were somehow weaker in faith.

That assumption didn’t survive scrutiny.

As I dug into the New Testament historically, it didn’t read like polished mythology. It read like people trying to describe something they believed they had actually witnessed. Real places. Real names. Awkward, inconvenient details you wouldn’t invent if you were creating a legend.

At the same time, I revisited arguments for the existence of God that I had previously dismissed. The beginning of the universe. The fine-tuning of physical constants. The staggering amount of information encoded in DNA.

I had absorbed the idea that science made belief in God unnecessary. What surprised me was that studying the science more deeply pushed me toward God, not away.

I explored skeptical explanations too. I took them seriously. But over time, they stopped making the best sense of the data.

And slowly, unexpectedly, the scale began to tip.

Not to certainty but to confidence.

Christianity as a Claim About Reality

Here’s what finally clicked for me.

Christianity didn’t begin as a feeling-based belief system. It began as a claim about history. From the start, it presented itself as something that either happened in the real world or didn’t.

The earliest Christian writings name people you could check, cities you could visit, events that were public enough to be disputed. Paul goes so far as to say that if Jesus wasn’t raised, the entire thing collapses.

That’s not blind faith. That’s a claim that invites testing.

And that realization changed everything.

Why Faith Lab Exists

Almost Heretical served the season I was in. But I’m no longer deconstructing in the way people usually mean by that word.

What deconstruction was for me, at its core, was always about getting to what’s real. I thought that process was leading me away from Christianity. To my surprise, it led me back — but in a very different way.

That’s why this new chapter is called Faith Lab.

Faith Lab exists because I discovered there is far more historical, philosophical, and scientific evidence for the Christian story than I ever realized. Evidence many Christians haven’t been shown, or haven’t seen put together in a coherent way.

This show isn’t about pretending questions don’t matter. It’s not about asking people to believe against their better judgment. It’s about recovering a vision of faith as trust grounded in reality.

On Faith Lab, I’ll sit down with scholars and experts and ask them to explain their work clearly and accessibly. Not for academics. For normal people like me.

If things are still falling apart for you, you’re welcome here. If you’ve been quietly carrying doubts you don’t feel safe asking out loud, I see you. And if you’ve been in church your whole life but realize you don’t actually know why you believe what you believe, this show is for you too.

I don’t want to lose my curiosity. I don’t want to stop asking hard questions. And increasingly, I believe Christianity can handle them.

If it’s true, it should stand up to scrutiny.

That’s what Faith Lab is about. And I’m really glad you’re here.