Paul Banks spent his early childhood living in an intentional Christian community — it wasn't perfect, but it 'spoiled' him for church spaces that never quite replicated the taste of an integrated communal life in the same way. 

Paul has moved in, out and back in to communities of faith across his journey. In a sense, he has never stopped pursuing spaces where art, story and community come together in meaningful and transcendent ways. 

Paul and his wife are the founders and hosts of Simba Sessions, a monthly night of poetry, storytelling and music in Kyneton, Victoria.

The next Simba Sessions is taking place on September 11. More info and tickets are here: https://events.humanitix.com/simba-sessions-fundraiser-timothy-coghill-will-small-kavisha-mazzella-and-special-guests

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Will and Caro discuss some surprising findings from the recent Spiritual Misfits listener survey and then continue their series looking back at excerpts from Future Church Conference keynotes — this time, Simon Buckingham Shum's exploration of AI and the Church. His talk pushes past the "AI will save us / AI will doom us" binary and asks a much better question: not is AI good or bad, but what is the quality of each interaction, and who is it being trained to serve?

Watch Simon's full talk from Future Church Conference here:
https://youtu.be/Q5zLFaK-pDw?si=JH6Pq3hwzW-pYR4y

Check out the Center for Humane Technology's podcast, mentioned in this episode: Your Undivided Attention
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast

Slides from Simon's talk can be viewed here:
https://simon.buckinghamshum.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Simon_FCC26.pdf

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Fr. Joash P. Thomas comes from a long line of misfits — literally: a St. Thomas Indian Christian whose people had followed Jesus since the earliest days of the church, but were labelled heretics by colonial missionaries who showed up fifteen centuries later.

In this conversation, Fr. Joash makes the case that justice isn't a side quest for the church, it's the main mission. We talk about the moment he realised he'd "sold his soul to Empire," what it means to decolonise the Great Commission, why deconstruction without decolonisation is pointless, and what ancient Celtic and Indian Christianity can teach a Western church that's forgotten how to hold doubt and diversity together. It's a conversation full of provocation, hospitality, and a lot of flavour!

Connect with Fr. Joash P. Thomas
Read his book: The Justice of Jesus
Subscribe to his newsletter: Masala Chai Theology Substack
Follow him on insta: https://www.instagram.com/joashpthomas

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Adam Gowen is a Wiradjuri man with deep cultural ties to Ngunnawal and Yuin country, a husband, father of three, not-for-profit board director, and campus manager at the University of Wollongong. In this conversation with Carolyn Meers, Adam traces his path from a childhood where his family's Aboriginality was known but rarely spoken of, through the education journey that gave him language for his identity, to recent years of actively stepping into cultural practice.

The conversation centres on what Adam calls "the displaced middle": the experience of belonging fully to neither one world nor another, and finding that this in-betweenness can be a privilege rather than a deficit. 

SPIRITUAL MISFITS LISTENER SURVEY — We want to hear from you! Take 5 minutes to fill out our listener survey here and shape the future of Spiritual Misfits:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe9TY7zaFqW6Zlaq3h9gjKzp7LO2PNxVTqvBXhCzlKQjSJUeQ/viewform?usp=header

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We continue our Future Church series where Will and Caro listen back to a highlight excerpt from Future Church Conference and then debrief what it sparks for them as they think about their lives and faith communities.

This time, we listen to 10 minutes from Tanya Riches' talk, where she invites us into a wider and deeper understanding of the 'Imago Dei.' Is the Image of God exclusively reflected in humans? Or might we find it in the face of a cockatoo?

Tanya Riches directs the Masters of Transformational Development at Eastern University and is an all-round fantastic human. Her reflections spark Will and Caro's imagination and they discuss a range of ideas you might want to try out in your own life and/or faith community.

Listen to Tanya's full talk from Future Church (and all other keynote sessions) here: 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsFveo-xYmS3nYRJAMrVmew

SPIRITUAL MISFITS LISTENER SURVEY — We want to hear from you! Take 5 minutes to fill out our listener survey here and shape the future of Spiritual Misfits:
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Will, Mitch and Caro get round the table and discuss some listener questions, like: Is it actually unethical to have kids given the state of the world? how do you respond to thought-stopping church clichés? And then Will shares the question on his mind: do you believe in aliens, and would it matter to your theology if they showed up tomorrow? 

Take the Spiritual Misfits Listener Survey (5 minutes, helps shape exciting new things we're working on): https://forms.gle/Ce596SzAaDMFiXap7

Previous Spiritual Misfits episodes mentioned:

• Blood, Wrath & Love: What Actually Happened on the Cross? (with Mitch Forbes) 
• A More Christlike God: Bradley Jersak on Faith After Deconstruction
• Future Church Series: Uncle Ray Minniecon and the Scarred Tree

The Documentary Will mentions:

UFOs: Investigating the Unknown — National Geographic documentary series on Disney+

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We're kicking off a new mini-series looking back at talks from Future Church Conference 2026 — after playing a short excerpt from the talk, Will and Caro unpack it together. 

First up: Uncle Ray Minniecon, a Kabi Kabi and Goreng Goreng elder of South East Queensland, with South Sea Islander heritage. Uncle Ray co-founded Scarred Tree Ministries in Glebe, Sydney, and has spent decades as a leading voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander justice, reconciliation, and self-determination within the Australian church.

The full version of Uncle Ray's talk (and all other Future Church keynotes) is now available at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsFveo-xYmS3nYRJAMrVmew

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Janet Kellogg Ray returns to Spiritual Misfits to talk about her new book, Fish with Feet: Human Evolution and the Image of God. We dig into why human evolution remains uniquely offensive even to people who accept evolution everywhere else, debunk the "if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" myth, and explore what it means to be evolved creatures, made in the Image of God.

Janet argues the real motivation behind most anti-evolution theology isn't evidence, it's a need to protect a prior doctrine (original sin, biblical inerrancy), and that starting with the evidence instead doesn't have to mean losing your faith, it might mean finding a more honest one.

Order the new book here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802885616/fish-with-feet/

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Matthew Vines has spent many years making the case that Christians can and should embrace same-sex marriage — his book God and the Gay Christian helped a generation of people reconcile their faith and sexuality. So when he recently distanced himself from queer theology, first in a conversation on the Uncommon Ground podcast and then in a New York Times piece titled "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters," it set off a firestorm.

Karl Hand — pastor at Crave Church (Metropolitan Community Church), theologian, and longtime friend of the show — joins Will to sit inside the mess of it. This is a conversation that tries to hold two things at once: real, substantive pushback on where Matthew's argument goes wrong, and real gratitude for what his earlier work made possible. Along the way, Karl untangles what "queer" actually means across identity, activism, and theory, three things Karl argues Matthew's article quietly collapses into one.

A note before you press play: this conversation touches on trauma connected to church rejection, queerphobia, and sexual ethics. Take care of yourself, and feel entirely free to skip this one if it's not what you need right now.

The Matthew Vines NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/opinion/queer-gay-rights.html

Books Karl references:

Butler, Judith (1990).  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Rubin, Gayle (1984). "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston: Routledge.

Halperin, David M. (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford University Press.

Matthew Vines quoted Halperin without providing broader context. Here are those quotes in their original context:

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. "Queer," then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children—with, perhaps, very naughty children.” p. 62

“Perhaps I should say that I don't intend this argument to be understood as advocating the adoption of the term "queer" in preference to the term "gay" or as providing partisan support for the politics of Queer Nation. First of all, it is not for me to suggest what words the members of sexual constituencies should use to designate or identify themselves. Second, the only thing that need be said about Queer Nation in this context is that it is significantly less queer, in the sense in which I am using the term, than, say, ACT UP, whose style of direct-action politics and activist glamor Queer Nation has attempted to replicate for the purpose of creating a movement of young lesbian and gay radicals defined by no other issue than that of sexual orientation.” p. 63

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Today is a replay of one of the most listened-to Spiritual Misfits episodes of all time — not because of a spike when it dropped, but because people just keep coming back to it. Every week, someone finds this conversation and sends it to a friend, or stumbles across it scrolling back through the feed.

Becca, Caro and Will discuss the question: for those of us who grew up in evangelical Christian households, how are we raising our kids today?

Even if that's not your exact story — not everyone grew up evangelical, not everyone has kids — there's something about reflecting on inheritance: what we keep, what we leave behind, and why it matters to think carefully about both.

This episode is three years old, which means we're all in slightly different places than we were then. We're planning to revisit this topic in an upcoming episode — and before we do, we'd love to hear from you. Got a question or a story about how parenting and faith has shifted for you over time? Email [email protected].

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