Between Bread and Stone

Last week, the pilgrimage took me into a room where the Church had once hurt people and called it healing.

This week, I found another church room. Behind its doors was a kitchen that has been feeding Hanford for forty years.

Church of the Saviour is small. The work it has built is not. People from across the town, across denominations and faiths, gather there every day because somebody is hungry and lunch needs to be made.

Maybe that is what Jesus meant when he said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Sometimes the clearest theology arrives slightly out of tune.

Episode 70 begins with a pipe organ that has developed a habit of landing certain notes a half step off, including one spectacularly unresolved Easter chord. From there, “The Slow Repair” turns toward Ordinary Time, the long green season when transformation rarely announces itself and faithful work can feel indistinguishable from waiting.

Paul writes of planting, watering, and refusing to grow weary. Perhaps that is where most of Christian life is actually lived: amid unfinished work, uncertain outcomes, and repairs we may never personally complete.

We are an Easter people living in a half-step-off world.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

There is a building in the corner of a cathedral campus in Fresno.

Inside that building is a door.

In that door is a window.

According to the history shared with me there, people once stood on one side of that glass while conversion therapy happened on the other.

Episode 69 of Between Bread and Stone begins with a pilgrimage and ends with a harder question: what does Christian witness require once suffering has been seen?

This episode includes conversion therapy, psychological violence done in God’s name, suicide, and an immersive account of aversion therapy. I give listeners informed consent before the descent begins, and a clear opportunity to step away before the hardest section.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

No part of this podcast episode may be reproduced in any way without the prior pen-to-paper written approval of Stephen R. Brewer, PsyD for specific approved purposes.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Psalm 88 from The Book of Common Prayer (1979), The Psalter or Psalms of David, according to the use of The Episcopal Church. Public domain.

Voices for the composite boy and preacher made with Elevenlabs.io

Father Luis would like everyone to know that he is absolutely, categorically, not going on sabbatical.

He is going on renewal.

This distinction matters enough that he preached about it before leaving, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens when a priest deeply devoted to Julian of Norwich is about to cross an ocean and spend several months near her cell.

Episode 68 follows him to the edge of that journey, where one carefully chosen word opens into something much larger about vocation, love, and the kind of Christ Julian encountered.

Also, yes, I tease Luis about his trip to England first.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

A cruel joke. A federal court case involving another man with my name. Twenty years of silence I could never explain.

This episode asks what happens when reputation outruns Truth, and what the Gospel requires before we decide who another person is.

Matthew 16 begins with Jesus asking, “Who do people say that I am?” Then he asks the harder question.

This week, that question became personal.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

I found St. Timothy’s in Winston-Salem, and I became suspicious of it.

The incense, brocade, chant, bells, and Solemn Mass looked so far outside what I knew that my first instinct was to ask whether this parish even belonged in the Episcopal Church. Then, I kept looking.

What I found was something much harder to dismiss: a refuge of beauty, a parish holding part of the Church’s memory, a priest trying to remain in communion across profound disagreement, and one grain of sand I still cannot make peace with.

Episode 66 is about beauty, exclusion, mutual flourishing, and what it might mean for a Bishop to guard the table rather than the throne.

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

A man danced during evening prayer, and my first instinct was to keep an eye on him.

That reflex has bothered me ever since.

This week on Between Bread and Stone, Bartimaeus cries out from the roadside, the crowd tells him to be quiet, and Jesus stops the entire procession.

What happens when we confuse disruption with harm? And what might we discover if, instead of managing the person who disturbs our sense of order, we simply stand still and let them belong?

You are welcome here.

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Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

This week’s Between Bread and Stone begins with gratitude for Bishop Jerry Lamb, whose courage helped hold this diocese together when almost everything visible had been stripped away.

From there, Episode 64 turns toward the strange, beautiful choreography of worship: standing, sitting, kneeling, bowing, crossing, stretching, singing, sighing, and sometimes just trying to follow the person in the next pew.

Underneath the comedy is a deeper question. What does the body know before the mind catches up? When does liturgy become performance, and when does it become freedom? Isaiah’s seraphim, Episcopal aerobics, incense, empire, and one honest man in a Bakersfield pew all meet in the same sacred smoke.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Comic-Con is a room full of strangers who somehow already speak the same language. So is a church, at its best.

This week’s episode moves from Anime Expo and a homemade Gogo costume to Star Wars, Star Trek, and a wedding at St. Paul’s. Along the way, it asks what resistance is for, what comes after the victory music, and how a community learns to recognize its own.

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Balboa Park has been sanctuary, civic icon, Pride gathering place, and a garden carrying the name of a conqueror who never set foot in California.

This week on Between Bread and Stone, I trace the story behind that name, cross-examine the Spanish account of violence attributed to Vasco Núñez de Balboa, and ask what happens when empire turns slaughter into divine judgment. The deeper question reaches beyond one park: how do we love places shaped by beauty and blood without allowing either truth to erase the other?

You are welcome here.

Protected Speech | Views My Own

Between Bread and Stone © 2026 Stephen Brewer. All rights reserved.

Podcast audio and full text may be quoted for noncommercial purposes with attribution.

Gospel text from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.