S3E24 - Steven McAbee - Tragedy and Testimony: What I Learned about Faith when everything was lost"

S3E24 - Steven McAbee - Tragedy and Testimony: What I Learned about Faith when everything was lost"

I sat down with Steve McAbee, and we talked about what happens when tragedy hits hard and faith gets tested. Steve just got back from Kerrville, where on July 4, 2025, the Hill Country got hammered by historic flooding. The death toll was one hundred and thirty-seven. Many of them children. But what struck Steve wasn't just the tragedy — it was discovering that God was working in the middle of it. A couple stuck in their attic with water rising, praying, and a window that had never opened opens while they're praying. A couple floating down a river on a couch, rescued. These moments don't make the news. But they happened. We got into the deeper things. The problem of pain. How a pastor sits with suffering instead of trying to fix it with answers. We talked about Job — suffering without deserving it. And we talked about something I think we need to hear: American Christians are comfortable. We're affluent. And we don't understand what it means to actually lose everything for your faith the way believers in other parts of the world do. Steve also got real about the church. We've built this idea that we need to have it all together. We perform. We hide. And when people finally see who we actually are, they check out. He talked about seeing people not as image bearers of God, but as objects that get in our way. How we've built a culture that values accomplishments and what someone can do for us, instead of relationships. And he talked about something his dad taught him that I think applies to everything: control what you can control. Don't worry about changing the whole culture. Be faithful in your corner. Be present with the people in front of you.

S3E23 - Rodney Sprayberry - New Zion Bonham - Hairy Goat Beings and the Days of Noah- The Unseen Realm Gets Weirder

Part 2 with Pastor Rodney Sprayberry picks up in the deep end and stays there. Rodney and Chris work through the UFO and disclosure conversation — what to do when a congregant comes to you with an otherworldly encounter, why the church can't afford to be the last place people feel safe asking strange questions, and what it means that the Age of Disclosure is already underway whether the church is ready or not. From there the conversation moves through the four theories of how the Nephilim survived the flood, why the surgical destruction of the Canaanites makes a lot more sense when you factor in DNA, and what it tells you about God that some of David's mighty men came from the giant clans and switched sides. Rodney also weighs in on eschatology — not with a clean answer, but with the kind of honest wrestling that makes for good radio. He's fuzzy on the timing of the rapture, fuzzy on the millennium, and absolutely certain that American Christians have no business assuming they'll be the first generation in history to skip persecution. The speed round includes Tertius — Paul's scribe in Romans who inserted himself into the letter and whose name literally means "three" because his mother apparently ran out of ideas — the Red Clay Strays, Stranger Things, and the hairy goat beings of Isaiah. Also: Laodicea repented for 500 years, N.T. Wright doesn't believe in the rapture, and Psalm 22 is not what you think it is.

S3 E22 Rodney Sprayberry - part 1 The Enchanted World_ Bigfoot, Deuteronomy 32, and the Bible's Weird Passages

In Part 1 of this conversation, Chris sits down with Pastor Rodney Sprayberry of New Zion Baptist Church outside of Bonham, Texas — a pastor who has spent 32 years in ministry and the last decade realizing the Bible is a much stranger book than seminary led him to believe. It starts with Bigfoot. Not as a joke, but as a genuine gateway into a conversation about the supernatural world the Bible describes and the church mostly ignores. Rodney traces his fascination with the unexplained back to childhood library books and a road in South Carolina called Latta Lights — and then forward to Michael Heiser, the divine council, and Deuteronomy 32:8-9. From there, the conversation moves into the Tower of Babel, the sons of God, the Nephilim, and what it means that every major religious tradition in the world tells some version of the same story. Rodney makes the case that rationalism — not atheism — is the greatest threat to a biblical faith, because rationalism demands that the strange parts of Scripture fit into a neat category they were never meant to occupy. As a hospice chaplain, Rodney has also seen things he can't explain — a grandfather clock that had never worked suddenly chiming eight times at the exact moment a patient died, a veteran who sat straight up in bed to say no before taking his last breath, and an aura he saw on a dying Native American shaman that opened a door to the gospel. He doesn't have categories for all of it. He's made peace with that. Also in this episode: the divine council, Psalm 82, why Elohim is not a name, why angel is a job description and not a taxonomy, and why the under-40 crowd in his congregation is more ready for these conversations than anyone gives them credit for.

S3E21 Colton Dowdy Floyd Baptist - 99 Out of 100: Two Years in Japan and the Gospel That Doesn't Translate

In this episode, Chris sits down close to home — just north of Greenville, Texas — with Pastor Colton Dowdy of Floyd Baptist Church. At 31, Colton is one of the youngest pastors on the podcast, but he arrives with a story that covers more ground than most. Colton traces his call to ministry back to a seizure diagnosis at 16 — 17 seizures in 15 days — and the slow realization that his suffering had a purpose. He talks about reading missionary biographies as a teenager, laughing off his mother's prediction that he'd end up overseas, and then finding himself two years later standing outside a Buddhist temple in Tokyo feeling the weight of a spiritual darkness he couldn't quite put into words. The heart of this conversation is the missionary challenge Colton faced in Japan: how do you share the gospel with people who have no word for sin? The Japanese word sumi translates directly to crime — which means that telling someone "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" lands very differently on the streets of Tokyo than it does in a Texas church. Colton walks through how he learned to start with brokenness, work toward sin, and trust the gospel to do what the gospel does. He also talks about what two years in Japan did to his theology — how it stripped away presuppositions, softened his grip on dispensationalism, and taught him to come to Scripture asking what God says rather than confirming what he already believed. Also in this episode: the land of eight million gods, why 99 out of 100 Japanese people have never heard the gospel, climbing Mount Fuji, the Tokyo red light district as a witnessing opportunity, Chinese college students being more open to the gospel than Japanese ones, why Colton refuses to use self-checkout, and the Karate Kid song he listens to on every run.

S3E20 Justin Wideman Direct Baptist - p2 - The Moon and the Sun- Discipleship, Chaos, and Reflecting What You Follow

Part 2 with Pastor Justin Wideman picks up right where Part 1 left off — which is to say, deeper than either of them planned to go. Justin unpacks his four-level discipleship model using the most relatable illustration you'll hear all season: a kid with untied shoes. Level one, you don't even know your shoe is untied. Level four, you're tying it mid-sentence without breaking stride. The question Justin keeps pressing is why the church keeps putting level-two disciples in leadership positions — and then wonders why it's answering spiritual problems with worldly answers. From there, the conversation wanders — productively — into the image of God as a battle line, whether chaos was baked into creation, and what it means to be a receptacle for spirit. Justin's answer to an impossible theological question is one of the most grounding things you'll hear on this podcast: "When there is chaos, I've got somebody I can turn to." The speed round delivers on a dentist named Dr. Silver Tooth, Justin's carnivore diet, why he scored a one in mercy on his spiritual gifts analysis, and the revelation that he binged a documentary about a football team he doesn't even like. It closes the way the best conversations do — with Justin reminding us that we are the moon, and He is the sun.