Part 2 with Steve McAbee gets into the deeper things.

We start with a hard question: how do you love people whose lifestyle you don't approve of? How do you not endorse something while still showing Christ's love? Steve talks about the difference between making a judgment and being judgmental. You can say something is wrong without treating the person like they're wrong. Jesus did this with the woman caught in adultery — he didn't condone her sin, but he was present and real with her. He met her where she was, and then he said, "Go and sin no more." The church needs to do the same: meet people where they're at, but don't leave them where they're at.

Then Steve tells the story of his trip to India. He preached a crusade where he had a platform ten feet in the air and as far as he could see, thousands of people showed up. He preached the Mars Hill sermon — Paul encountering a culture with thousands of gods. The third time he gave an altar call, a thousand people came forward to be saved. Then he made a distinction: if you're just adding Jesus to your collection of gods, go home. If you're not willing to forsake all the other gods and hold only to Christ, you're not ready. By the end of it, two hundred and fifty people stayed.

He talks about what that taught him. In Hinduism, the mindset is addition — just one more, just one more. In Christianity, it's exclusivity — Christ is not one among many, he's one and only. That's a fundamental chasm between the two worldviews.

Steve also shares a story that haunts him. A pastor in India who was a government official left a good job — going from twenty dollars a day to nothing — to become a pastor. The community shunned him. They wouldn't sell to him, wouldn't trade with him. They threw bombs through his window. They tried to burn his crops and his house. He paid a real price for his faith.

And that's where Steve sits with the reality of American Christianity. We're comfortable. We're safe. We don't know what it costs to follow Jesus the way believers in other parts of the world do. And maybe that needs to change something in us.

The conversation ends with them running short because Steve's got a Palm Sunday sermon to preach, and he talks about Jesus' triumphal entry — the moment when the messianic secret is out and all gloves are off.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Part 1 of this conversation, Chris sits down with Pastor Justin Wideman of Direct Baptist Church in Direct, Texas — a rural congregation that is defying every church growth statistic in the book. Families aren't trickling in one or two at a time. They're showing up in groups of six, eight, and ten — and they're staying.

Justin talks candidly about what's driving the growth — and gives most of the credit to his people. Direct Baptist has cultivated something rare: a church that doesn't expect you to act saved before you get there. Young families are finding a home, kids are running the hallways, and Sunday school classes are so full they need to split them just to breathe.

But Justin isn't satisfied with full pews. The harder question he keeps asking is whether the church is actually producing disciples — devoted, developing, and deployed. He breaks down what Direct Baptist means by discipleship, why so many churches are fishing with the wrong bait, and what it looks like to teach a generation of new believers who speak an entirely different language than the one the church has been using for decades.

Also in this episode: why Noah understood building committees, why there's no golf in the Bible, and what 100% of Christians actually believe about the virgin birth.

In this deeply personal episode, Pastor Scott Jones and his wife Kimberly open up about one of the most frightening seasons of their lives together. What Kimberly assumed was the flu quickly became something far more serious — sepsis and double pneumonia that landed her in the hospital for over a week, with oxygen levels in the 70s and a very real possibility she might not come home.

Scott shares what it looked like to keep showing up in the pulpit while his wife was critically ill — not because he didn't care, but because he'd learned to compartmentalize, trust God with what he couldn't control, and do what needed to be done. Kimberly reflects on what it meant to finally be forced to slow down — something her ADHD-driven mind had resisted for years. She opens up candidly about living with OCD, depression, and ADHD, and how this illness became an unexpected invitation to rest, release control, and let go of things she'd been holding far too tightly.

Together, Scott and Kimberly wrestle honestly with faith — the kind forged not in a single crisis, but over years of unanswered prayers, mental health battles, and a God who doesn't always show up the way we scripted. They talk about the humility of admitting weakness, the arrogance of thinking we're in control, and what it really means to trust the Lord through the shadow — not just past it.

Also featured: a "lightning" round with big feelings about hymns, Colin Hay, The Chosen, Eugene Peterson, the largest pipe organ in Texas, and the best way to waste an hour.

Last year, Pastor Scott Jones of First Baptist Rockport, Texas sat down with Chris McNeil and somehow broke the internet — or at least the Ministry on the Move podcast. That conversation became the most listened-to episode of the year for MotM. So when Chris drove back to Rockport, he decided to find out if lightning strikes twice.

What starts as a conversation about music quickly becomes something much deeper. Scott and his wife Kimberly open up about the Christian music industry, critical thinking, and why a label doesn't always mean what we think it does. As Kimberly puts it, Christian music can sometimes be more dangerous than secular music — because we stop asking questions.

From there, Scott and Chris wade into some genuinely surprising territory — the Christian's duty to culture, what it means to be present without being controlling, and why Scott believes the only way a Christian truly fails is to withdraw entirely. "If I withdraw," Scott says, "I'm not having any influence. But as long as I'm a part, I'm having at least some influence."

The conversation takes one more unexpected turn when Chris raises a question that's been rattling around in his head — is everything that goes wrong in this world really the result of sin? Or did God bake something else into the original equation? Scott's answer might rearrange some theological furniture.

Honest, wandering, and occasionally correcting Chris on his 80s rock trivia, this is exactly the kind of conversation Ministry on the Move was made for.

Life on the road isn’t glamorous — it’s diesel engines, late nights, broken sound gear, gas-station dinners, and trusting God when the love offering doesn’t quite cover the bills.

This week on Ministry on the Move, Chris sits down with Larry DeLawder to talk about what itinerant ministry really looks like behind the curtain.

They dig into:
• why “calling” matters more than comfort
• finding Sabbath when Sundays are work days
• bus breakdowns and real-life faith
• the danger of chasing fame
• a powerful story of forgiveness that changed a man’s life
• and yes… Barney Fife jokes, animal noises, and road-trip madness

If you’ve ever wondered what life in full-time ministry on the road is actually like — the good, the hard, and the hilarious — this one’s for you.

Because the bus might run on diesel…
but the ministry runs on prayer.