Episodes

Which feelings were you allowed to show growing up? Not which ones you felt. Which ones got you comfort, and which ones got you "stop that"? Week two of Be Quiet. Last week was how the church built the old story. This week is the other half: how do we raise great human beings without handing them that baggage? It starts in the car, with a four-year-old's question about where babies come from, and the very Christian answer Chad had loaded and ready. The questions it leans into: babies cry, laug...

How does a 19-year-old learn to see a woman as less than him? Nobody is born with that. Somebody hands it to him. This is week one of Be Quiet, a two-week conversation on patriarchy, the manosphere, and the part the church has played. It starts with Chad's 12-year-old son, and with research showing how fast a brand-new phone starts feeding boys the manosphere. Then it asks this year's question of the oldest story there is: who told us this was just the way things are? The questions it leans in...

What if the thing your faith trained you to pay attention to is the thing that quietly made you who you are? Chad closes the Unforced series with two weeks in Costa Rica — a trauma retreat with 50 veterans, an ant hauling a pink flower petal across a path, and six tattooed men standing in a row staring up into a tree at a macaw. None of that is the point. What happened in his body while he watched is. The questions he's chasing: attention is love's raw material — you start to love what you loo...

What if confession was never about getting back into God's good graces — and was never supposed to cost you your dignity? Chad's back from two weeks away, and the distance made something obvious: every practice in this series has been the same practice wearing different clothes. Noticing. Lament. The table. Rest. All of them are coming out of hiding. This is the week that says it out loud. The questions underneath it: NASA scheduled the course-correction burns before the rocket ever left the g...

You don't have to believe what I believe to belong in this space. Eric Villalpando tells his story, and it starts in two rooms on the same morning — a Catholic church and this one. He grew up fully Catholic: Catholic school, every sacrament, a theology degree from St. Mary's. He's careful about what happened next. He didn't deconstruct, exactly. He demystified. The hinge is a summer at Deer Creek Camp — forty counselors from wildly different backgrounds in one room with an open Bible, led by a...

Rest isn't the reward at the end of the design. Rest is the design. Britney Carrasco teaches on Sabbath — and opens by admitting she might be the last person who should. She's a nurse and an Enneagram two, wired to earn love by doing things for people. Hand her a to-do list for rest and she'd dominate it. Two things she won't let you skip. Humans arrive on day six, which makes the first full day of human existence a day off — we rested before we worked, before anyone had done anything to deser...

A third of the Psalms are lament. Church gave grief one sentence. Week three of Unforced opens with a confession: Chad is not good with grief. Not his, not yours. He traces where that comes from — personality, a nervous system trained over deployments in Iraq, and mostly how he was raised, including and maybe especially in church. Nobody taught him to grieve. He was taught to get past it. They're in a better place. God needed another angel. Everything happens for a reason. Sentences you reach f...

What if God isn't showing up — and you're just finally waking up? Week two of Unforced starts with a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral, who came home from a walk with his dog covered in burrs and, instead of grumbling and brushing them off like every human before him, put one under a microscope. That's where Velcro came from. The burr was always sticky. Nature was never hiding anything. Somebody finally looked. From there Chad runs the invisible-gorilla experiment as the frame — you don't ...

What if the life you're trying to earn is one you've already been given? Chad opens Unforced — an eight-week series on the rhythms of grace — by going back to where the summer left off. Four people stood on this stage and told their stories, and across four very different lives one word kept surfacing. It wasn't a churchy one. It was safe. From there he opens Matthew 11 in Eugene Peterson's translation: "Come to me… get away with me and you'll recover your life… learn the unforced rhythms of g...

What if the faith that formed you also handed you the things you'd spend years unlearning? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop knowing people as a category and actually hear what they've lived. Taryn Tipton shares her faith journey: growing up in a small town where church, school, and family were so intertwined that "every part of my life was connected and colored by church." It was mostly good. And the same people who taught her about Jesus also taught her that a woman couldn'...

What happens when you finally learn the history of the church that raised you? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop filing people away as "the guy in the back row" and actually hear what they've lived. Chad opens by introducing Nate: one of the kindest and smartest people you'll meet, and someone who has been in church a long time. Then Nate Kindig tells his story. He grew up Southern Baptist in Georgia, in Christian school, headed for vocational ministry — and by his own accou...

What if the hardest thing to admit at church is that you're not okay? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop saying a quick "hi" and actually hear what people survived to walk through the door. Chad opens on why the #1 source of awe across cultures isn't a canyon or the sky but *other people*, and how moral beauty — watching one human being love another — is the thing that undoes us. Then Alexis Uribes tells her story. She grew up as the baby of the family, the "good kid" who wan...

What happens when the house you built your whole faith inside of suddenly stops feeling safe? We're kicking off a new series — Arsenal Stories — on a simple conviction: you've been saying hi to people for years without ever knowing what they survived to walk through the door. Chad opens by tracing why the number one source of awe across cultures isn't the sky or a canyon — it's other people — and why every face is a "Thou," never an "it." Then Mark Bryand tells his story. He grew up in a beaut...

To close our "Who Told You That?" series, Chad opened the floor to your questions — submitted live via Slido — with Britney Carrasco moderating. It's an honest, unscripted conversation about everything the series stirred up. Chad lays the groundwork in Genesis 3 — the garden, and how the real story of the Fall is distrust that makes us hide, not just rule-breaking — then works through your hardest questions: Is sin a crime, or a disease? How do you reconcile a loving God with the Bible's pictur...

What if "the fear of the Lord" was never meant to be terror? In the final message of our Who Told You That? series, Pastor Chad Belew traces the difference between fear and awe — from a blackout patrol base in Baghdad to a garden where God came walking in the cool of the day, asking not "gotcha," but "Where are you?" If you've spent your life bracing for a God who's disappointed in you, this one reframes the whole relationship: the voice in the garden isn't hunting you down — it's calling you ho...

The most famous verse in Christianity may be the most misread. Chad takes John 3:16 back to the late-night conversation it actually came from — Jesus and Nicodemus — and shows how a verse we memorized as a gospel-tract about heaven, hell, and a transaction at the cross was, in the original Greek, never about any of that. "Born again" is better read "born from above." "Perish" means lost, not damned. "Eternal life" is a quality of life that starts now, not a reward after you die. And the word for...

We trained our dogs to stay off the couch — and they’re perfect angels, right up until no one’s watching. Chad opens there because it’s how a lot of us learned to follow God: behave when you feel watched, fall apart when you don’t. This message names the fear underneath that kind of obedience — the quiet question, "if I’m not afraid of getting caught, what’s to stop me?" — and gently turns it over. Fear can change your behavior, but it can never change what you actually want. Only love can do th...

Chad opens with his own prescription bottle and the chair he sits in once a week to talk with his VA therapist — and asks a question most pastors won't: what is fear-based theology actually doing to the bodies of the people in the pews? Pulling Edwards, chick tracts, and modern wrath-preachers next to trauma research, neuroscience, and his own EMDR work, he makes the case that a God installed in the amygdala can never produce the people Jesus called blessed. The gospel Jesus actually preached is...

For weeks we've been tracing where our picture of God actually came from — and last week we named the framework most of us inherited: penal substitutionary atonement, where sin is a legal problem, God is a judge, and Jesus absorbs the punishment we owe. This week Chad asks the question that was left hanging: if that's not it, what does Jesus actually say the human problem is? The answer reframes not just how you think about sin, but how you think about yourself. Sin, at its root, isn't a law bro...

Most of us were handed one answer to "Why did Jesus die?" — God required a payment, Jesus took the punishment we deserved, the debt is settled. We were told this is simply the gospel, the plain meaning of the Bible. But that framework has a name (penal substitutionary atonement), a birthplace (an 11th-century feudal court), and a history — and it isn't the one the church held for its first thousand years. Chad opens with a story about discovering what socks actually cost: once you see it, you ca...

Picture God looking at you on your worst day, right after you've done the thing you swore you'd never do again. What expression is on His face? For a lot of us, the honest answer isn't "love" — and that gap between the God we'd describe and the God we actually brace for runs deeper than we realize. Chad names the difference between our God concept (what we say we believe) and our God image (what we emotionally expect), traces how a distorted picture of God doesn't stay private but bleeds into ho...

What if the deepest question isn't "what do I believe?" but "who told me to see it this way?" Opening with the "overview effect" — what astronauts describe when they see Earth from space and watch borders, tribes, and arguments shrink while our shared belonging grows — Chad launches a new series asking where our maps of God, ourselves, and our neighbors actually came from. Walking back through Genesis 3, he reframes the fall: not first an act of disobedience but a rupture of trust, a lie that ma...

If Christianity is a relationship and not just a religion, then what happens when we actually look at it like one? On Resurrection Sunday, Chad reads the whole story — garden to cross to empty tomb — through a relational and psychological lens, and lands somewhere most Easter sermons don't. The problem in Eden wasn't bad behavior; it was broken trust. The serpent didn't make Eve defiant first, he made God suspect — "Did God really say?" — and once perception bends, shame and fear follow. We star...

We've been taught to read the cleansing of the temple as a flash of righteous anger — Jesus losing his temper over noisy commerce in church. But the night he arrived, Jesus walked in, looked around at everything, and left. The table-flipping came the next day, on purpose. This is the story of what he actually saw: not a worship service gone sloppy, but a "city-temple-state system" where religion, money, and empire had married each other and the bill was being paid by the poor, the outsider, and ...