We're Back
We're Back
[00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back to God's Whole Story. My name is Chelsea and I'm here with Ryan and Chris. What's up? We're back. And it's been a fun two years since we've last recorded God's Whole Story. Uh, what's been happening with you guys? Man, it is hard to believe it's been that long already, but wow, lots has happened.
The last time, last time we record an episode, I was Well, I was very pregnant and out of breath because the baby was pushing up on my lungs when I was reading like Revelation. And then you disappeared for a long period of time. And then I was gone. And then just like magic came back. And then people were wondering Where's Chelsea?
Why, why is it just Ryan and Chris all the time? What happened? Now, if I'm out of breath, it's just cause I'm out of shape.
If talking makes me out of breath, you guys need to just give me a hard time. So the last episode of revelation we would have [00:01:00] recorded and released when? That was like, well, we released it on December 31st, 2022, yet 2021, 2021. Yeah. Wow. We recorded it. We recorded it a couple of weeks before that because of Christmas.
And then we released some new stuff in 2022. We redid some episodes. We re released all of our episodes. And we did deep dives. Yes. In Galatians. Um, but all through 2022, we did very little recording really. It was mostly re releases. Yeah So yeah, as far as fresh content, we haven't had a ton in the last couple years, but we plan to we do Um, and we want to talk a little bit more about that today That's that is the main purpose of what we're doing today is just to tell you some of what we're thinking about Uh, but we do probably need to catch up a little bit just on what has happened when we last Recorded revelation.
We were all employed at the same church. Yeah, we did it on church hours. We were paid for doing it. Uh, that's changed a little bit for many of [00:02:00] us. So what's changed for you, Ryan? Uh, it's wild. So I don't work in a church right now. Uh, I work in a, I don't know what you would call that. Like a para church organization right now, right now I am a ministry setting.
Yeah, for sure. Uh, right now I'm the Director of curriculum and instruction at men of iron. So men of iron is, uh, headquartered in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, but we have a presence like across the country. Um, and so right now what I'm doing is writing a lot of curriculum for them, working on small group materials, working on video driven stuff.
Uh, we're writing some books. Um, so I'm doing a lot of that kind of stuff. Uh, what's amazing is I have way less nights out and, uh, it feels like I have kind of a normal job. I miss a lot of the. Church pastoring kinds of things, but it's a different rhythm to be in. It's been pretty cool. So, uh, I also think my family is maybe almost double the size of what it was.
Uh, [00:03:00] or at least well on that way, let's see if the last time we record was 2021. Uh, let's see. We had a little girl in 2022. Basically we have a baby every two years. That's kind of how this rhythm works. And we have another baby do in. September. Uh, so that'll put us at five, uh, and maybe we'll be done, be done at that point.
I don't know. We'll, we'll see TBD. Yeah, actually. Jenny has already determined that we are done. Shout out to Jenny.
Well, uh, I, as I mentioned, no longer work at a church and one of the things that, uh, is interesting is my wife and I actually switched some roles. I was in a pastoral job, uh, for over six years and then, uh, she was, uh, Not working not employed that way just kind of helping out here and there figuring out what her place was She had an opportunity to take a pastoral job.
So we've kind of switched So I do like to sometimes joke and say I'm a pastor's husband now [00:04:00] Just to tease people a little bit. I did have somebody think that meant something very very different one time, but that's another story Anyway, so you know you were at that kind of Uh, so she is working at a church and, uh, that enabled me to basically be self employed.
Um, I'm a full time freelance Bible teacher. Uh, that's wherever they will let me talk about the Bible. I try to go to. So sometimes that involves traveling. Other times it's doing things in the local church and that's my foremost passion. Uh, I do serve with a number of local nonprofits, uh, just trying to help out with some of the needs in the community, bringing some affordable housing to our area, uh, which is some of what I was involved in when I was on staff at the church, but I've continued that.
Uh, and then I just dabble in a little investing here and there and. Run around with my two teenage boys, uh, doing whatever they're, they're up to. So that's a [00:05:00] little bit about what's going on with me. I am still employed at a church and I finished up my master's in theological studies this past fall.
Congratulations. I was working on that during our 2021 broadcasting. It's been a long time. Do we need to address you differently now? Uh, master Chelsea, master Chelsea, uh, is my formal. Um, but no, we're busy too with all the kids. We had Felicity at the end of 2021 and she's full on two year old phase and things are busy, but it's fun.
I also talk about the Bible whenever I can. But, um, mostly it's in settings that are more casual than you need in church. And people are like, why are we talking about this right now? I just asked you what you're having for dinner. That's it at the checkout line at the grocery store. And I get real nerdy about it, but that's what makes this podcast [00:06:00] fun.
All right. So it has been quite a while since we've released new content. Um, so the question is basically like, what are we planning to do? And I'm really excited. Like we have a pretty ambitious vision for the future. I would say, um, kind of what we're going to try to do over the course of the next couple of years is do whatever we can to make sure that you are equipped as well as possible to really authentically.
Live out your faith. And so the way we're going to try to do that is focus on three core areas. One, one area we've already done extensively. We, we are very used to releasing a daily Bible podcast. Um, you can go back and reference any one of those episodes to cover the entire Bible in a year. Fun fact, you don't have to wait until January 1st to do that.
You can refer to that anytime. And we know. That many of you did start listening, you know, at different parts of the year. Uh, many of you are still finishing out that kind of program. If you look at it that way, uh, what we want to do [00:07:00] for this upcoming year, starting, I mean, now essentially is give you, um, just solid like book overviews so that you can confidently understand, uh, any book of the Bible kind of in a, I guess, like a snapshot, would you say like a snapshot?
Yeah. Yeah, I think a snapshot will probably dive into some of the harder passages, um, really look at how it fits into the big picture story of scripture. Yeah. And of course there still is the daily podcast that if you want like bit by bit commentary on each chapter, we, that's still available out there, but this will be a little bit bigger picture, uh, for people that maybe can't make a commitment to a daily podcast, this Be a little more accessible, probably in a weekly format.
Fun fact. We are those people who can't make a commitment to a deal. This is true. Which we'll get to in a second. But, um, because. Because we no longer all work at the same place, because we no longer all get a paycheck for working on the podcast, uh, we are going to dial back a little bit and instead of doing, uh, having a daily rhythm, we're going [00:08:00] to have a weekly rhythm.
So at least one episode a week, we've had some conversation about maybe every once in a while, there'll be a bonus episode or two. Um, but once a week you can look for new content and we will basically go, uh, book by book. Now, some books. It would be like pulling teeth to try to talk for 20 minutes about Philemon, for example, or maybe actually we could talk about it for a while.
Chris could talk about Philemon, but some of those smaller books, you know, we might put together whatever. But, uh, the idea is that you could actually use year one of what we've already done in companion with. What we're going to do so that you can get kind of a good, solid overview of Genesis. And then you can look at every individual episode of Genesis.
And by the end of this year's program, we'll, we'll, we will have covered the whole book, the whole Bible. It is interesting because I mean, still under the umbrella name of God's whole story, we're taking a step back from looking at every individual verse and looking at it more from a book perspective and how does it all fit together.
And in a way, this is, [00:09:00] I mean, this is just as valuable to look at books, the Bible, how they fit together and. This really grand thing that God created to communicate with us. We're going to look at it and see the common themes and threads and why it's important to even study these books that maybe seem unimportant or.
Irrelevant. I'm super excited about how well it's gonna supplement what we've done in the past, because there were many times where we'd like, I, I don't know if you guys all know how we did this, but we would, we would like have like a Thursday afternoon where we would go into this little closet office, literally a little closet literally, which we haven't upgraded from really, um, and, and we would try to do essentially like seven episodes as quickly as possible.
Yeah. And it just felt insane. I don't know if that ever came across in the episodes, how insane it was. That we felt insane. Yeah. But basically we'd be like, okay, so like today we're going to do Genesis one through Genesis 37. All right. You ready to go? And be like, uh, yeah, sure. Um, so then on the odd time when we did the entire reading and forgot to push [00:10:00] record, There was a big dummy running the soundboard that had no business doing it.
And that was me. Um, also sometimes me. So watch your mouth. I don't think, I don't think you ever actually forgot to record actually. Um, anyway, mistakes were made. Um, I I'm also, we're not going to stop just at full book overviews. I'm really excited about what we have in store for the future. Um, because once we are done giving you full book overviews, we're going to dig into doctrine.
Uh, which sometimes can sound kind of like, wait, really? Like, what could you possibly do? That's interesting about doctrine. Um, it is really important to understand the entire Bible, but it's also really important to understand what the Bible is teaching you. And I think we're going to have some really compelling conversations about specific doctrinal points.
We're talking like, who is God? Um, why does Jesus matter? What, what is sin? Why do we need salvation? What is a church meant to do? Um, So we're going to have like full conversations about [00:11:00] those kinds of things in year two, um, go for it. Yeah. Which I think also, like what we also hope to do is to not just give you like dry statements on doctrine, but also like, why does this matter?
Yeah. And what are some of the conversations that are happening in the world today that, that these different things matter? And one of the, the really cool things is the way that we're doing this is since we're building with Bible content first. Uh huh. That gives us the foundation to then look at doctrine, to look at how that applies to our life, where that is actually not the way that a lot of people do it.
Like many times, if you go to a seminary, you go to things you, or even if you're a part of a denomination, you're going to learn their doctrine with a couple piecemeal scriptures tagged on here and there, but seeing the arc of scripture, it allows scripture to inform our doctrine rather than a denomination, a tradition, a, a background, or even one person's opinion.
We're kind of building that way. And we're just inviting you along for the journey. Yeah, [00:12:00] I, I love the Bible so much, but what's made me love the Bible even more and cling to it even more tightly is the doctrine and theology that I know that helps my faith stand on two legs and secures my hope in Christ.
It's, it's super important to have a theological foundation. I would say my whole faith journey started out thinking that doctrine and theology were like super bad words that were just annoying. Uh, and probably many of you feel similarly, like, it's not odd to feel that way. Um, but it is amazing what starts to happen when you know what God's word says, but And you understand the concepts that are being taught, because one of the things I like to point out for people all the time, there are many, many people who are very smart about what the Bible says, but they don't believe any of it.
So like, it's one thing to know what the word says, and you can be really sharp about what the word says, chapter, verse, you can memorize whole books and you can still be completely lost. So that's one of the reasons we want to, we already have [00:13:00] covered what the full Bible says. Then we want to dive into these topics about like, okay, what do we, what do we believe because of what the Bible says?
Um, and as we do that, I think it's going to help you firm up your faith like crazy. It impacts your everyday life. Well, yeah, because I know who God is. It impacts. Okay, so you can already see the broad scope of what we're, uh, seeking to accomplish, but wait, there's more, uh, in year three, hopefully, uh, we're going to be diving into, um, what you can do personally, uh, and corporately, we're calling that discipleship, like how you actually live out these things.
Now, obviously we're not going to wait. Three years to talk about how you live this out. We want you to know how to live this out right now. Um, but we are kind of building like this framework of how we're going to have our conversations, what we're going to be talking about, um, because we want to do everything we can to equip you, uh, to walk out your faith in a, in a really Tangible, um, faithful way.
And so, uh, as we dive into those discipleship [00:14:00] conversations, I can imagine us having conversations about like, how do you pray? How often do you pray? Why do you pray? What are the things that you pray for? Um, how do we handle fasting? Does anybody care about fasting? Why do we give, like, should we give, how much should we give?
When should we give? Um, those kinds of things that are like, because I know what God's word says, because I know who God is, what should I do because of it? How often should I go to church? Should I go to church? Can I just watch it online? Um, we'll jump into that stuff. Yeah. So it's super exciting. We're all very excited.
We have had offline conversations for the last two years now about getting the gang back together. And we've been looking forward to this. So we're super excited to invite you back on this journey with us. And, uh, excited that you've. You've already found some value in what we've offered before, but hope that you'll find some, some great value in what's coming.
And we're definitely, uh, we're looking forward to this. So one of the things that does need to happen with a podcast like this, uh, I've been [00:15:00] tasked with talking about the, the money part, uh, because it does, we are no longer employed at the church. That's paying us to do this. So, I mean, currently we're sitting here on a Saturday morning.
Um, you know, uh, Ryan has taken his army of kids and sent them off to an undisclosed location. Uh, we're doing this in our free time. We're kind of doing this on the side. And the expenses associated with the podcast are something that we do need to cover, especially, uh, as this begins to grow. Uh, and so we, we would love to invite you that have Already journeyed with us to invest in the future journey, invest in what's coming.
Uh, and in the show notes, there'll be a link to become a supporter of ours. Uh, any dollar amount that you want, uh, that I think you have to give at least 3, but it doesn't have to be a lot. Uh, but we just want to start building a network that helps us do this. And the more that we can do that, the more content we can offer.
We have dreams of offering some additional [00:16:00] bonus content, maybe having some subscriber exclusive things. Uh, but that's all takes a little bit of time and some money to do it. So we want to invite you on this journey with us. You've already journeyed with God Soul Stories so far. Come to the next generation of God's whole story with us.
Yeah. So we just want to thank you guys for joining us. And the next time you hear from us, we will be talking about Genesis and why it's important for your faith journey. Why it's important to God's whole story. You can find us on all of the different social channels that we've been on Instagram, Facebook, and we'd love to continue the conversation there.
In the meantime, a great day. Bye. See ya.
