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There may be spelling / grammar mistakes in my articles that make it through my editing, and that’s on purpose. I’m a recovering perfectionist (who was once VERY hard on himself) and one of the ways I’m learning to be compassionate on myself is by allowing mistakes to just … be.
Friends.
I got an email over the Summer from “Million Podcasts” to let me know that they are featuring the What If Project in their top 90 Exvangelical Podcasts, ranking it at number 24.
Cool, right?!
Here’s the image they sent me:
I was reflecting on the show’s journey last week and it’s pretty awesome. The first episode dropped all the way back on August 24, 2018, but the show was birthed way before that in October 2017 while sitting in a hotel room in Nyack, NY where I spent my nights reading and studying and working on some course work for the last class in my doctoral program.
2017 … that means the show will turn TEN years old next Fall.
I was up there for a week long intensive class where we were in class every day from 8-5 and then had reading, writing, and group assignments to complete at night. The class was about “Evangelism”; but more than asking the question of “how to share the Gospel to people” - it pushed us to go even deeper and wonder “what IS the Gospel?”
And that got my mind spinning in all sorts of directions as I encountered perspectives on the Gospel message of Jesus that I had never heard before (or if I HAD heard of them before, I had NOT hear about them in the context of my very Evangelical seminary!) while the professor(s) guided us into the ideas of people like Brian McLaren and Barabara Brown Taylor and even Rob Bell.
Our final project for the class was to write a paper detailing what the Gospel was and a project we could implement (in real life) to share that Gospel with people in our modern day contexts. The paper had to be 15 pages, but mine was around 30 as my mind exploded with all sorts of ideas that revolved around a podcast I would call the “What If Project” where we would explore the question, “what if there are ways of thinking about God and faith that are different than what our traditions have handed us.”
The paper received an “A”.
I even got an “A” in the class.
BUT.
The podcast I would go on to start would draw criticism and fire from the very school that encouraged me to think outside of the box. Thinking outside of little boxes is good, I suppose, unless you start thinking outside of the main box that the System tells you to never think outside of!
Oh.
And here’s a photo I snapped in the hotel room that week - I had LINED the walls with poster boards and stayed up every night watching the Yankees (who were in the playoffs that year) and brainstorming for my dissertation and final class project until well after midnight …
… So interesting to me to see how my thoughts have grown and changed. Some of the ideas on that board took root and are STILL alive and well today (podcast, YouTube channel, leaving Apple, etc.). Others never really seemed to fit with the direction the project went. And others, still, continue to brew in the back of my mind - like learning the Adobe Suite so I can up my design skills with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, etc.
Ahh. But more on that another time. Might be a fun 10-year anniversary show for next year.
Anyways.
Just wanted to share the news about the podcast landing in the middle of the top 90 Exvangelical shows and thank you all for being on the journey with me.
Much love, my friends.
Glenn || SUPPORT / ART STUDIO
That’s pretty cool! I was trying to remember when I ran across your stuff. I know it was around the time you were considering writing your first book, so how ever long ago that was. Good stuff!