The Grimké Podcast

If the church won't talk about sin, no one will. It's still the problem Christ came to die for, yet pulpit after pulpit has traded the word for softer ones like “brokenness” and “imperfection,” leaving people with good news that never calls them to repent. So why does the church need to say it plainly, and what happens when it doesn't? This week, the profs stop avoiding sin and talk about why “brokenness” turns sinners into hopeless victims, why the words the Bible uses for what's really wrong with us matter, and how a thin doctrine of sin quietly reshapes our preaching, counseling, evangelism, and even the hymns we sing.

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Jesus said that apart from him we can do nothing, and prayer is what you do if you actually believe it. Yet a pastor can go years without praying and no one would ever know, because the sermons still get written and the schedule still gets kept. So why do so many Christians, pastors most of all, treat prayer as filler, a last resort, or a guilt trip? This week, the profs call prayerlessness what it is, take on the Reformed habit of explaining away “you have not because you ask not,” weigh whether posture matters, and offer practical counsel for young Christians and prayerless pastors alike.

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In 1965, when one in four black children was born out of wedlock, it was called a national crisis. Today it's seven in ten, and the silence is deafening. So how did marriage become optional, and who will lead the way back? In Volume III of the Grimké Review of Books, Delano Squires of the Heritage Foundation joins the profs to discuss his new book, The Vanishing Black Family: why slavery couldn't destroy the black family but welfare and feminism undermined it from within, why you can't sow Snoop Dogg and reap the Huxtables, and why rebuilding the home starts in the church.

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The way you dress says something about you whether you like it or not. Scripture has a category for respectable apparel and a warning about the two ditches on either side of it, and yet a generation of Christians has been taught that clothes are neutral, that the Lord looks on the heart, and that any standard of dress is legalism with a pocket square. So does it really matter what you wear? This week, the profs make the case that dress is a discipleship issue—the biblical category of respectable apparel, the two ditches of ostentation and slovenliness, the poverty and missional objections every pastor reaches for, and why there is no golden era but there are still golden things worth recovering.

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Scarcely one man in a dozen in the pulpit talks like a man. Spurgeon said that in the 1800s, and today the one who still does is the man everyone calls abusive. The Bible's dominant image for leading God's people isn't manager, life coach, or feel-good chaplain—it's shepherd, a kingly word for a man who leads, feeds, guards, and knows how to say no. So what does true shepherding actually look like, and why has it become a cultural heresy? To open Season 3, the profs take up the crisis of pastoral leadership—the four kinds of people sitting in every congregation, why goats get tolerated and wolves get put out, how to spot a hireling before the wolves show up, and why raggedy shepherds always make raggedy sheep.

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Jonathan Edwards wasn't run off over his doctrine—he was run off because he mishandled one sensitive case. Botch organizational leadership and you can tank your church, get fired, and make a lot of people miserable on the way out, no matter how faithfully you pray, study, and preach. So what does faithful organizational leadership actually look like, and where do pastors most often get it wrong? For the Season 2 finale, the profs count down the 12 organizational leadership issues they work through with pastors most—delegation that's really just abdication, the authority too many men are too scared to use, the bylaws you'll wish you'd read six months before you needed them, the yes-men who gave the world Jar Jar Binks, and more.

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The Churchmen Conference is in the books, and the profs are ready to offer some afterthoughts. They unpack what happens when hundreds of men gather around Christ and his church, why you can't replace community with content, what the word "churchman" actually means, and why the church should be 101-level for biblical masculinity, not a graduate elective, and discuss the "tithe life" Christians who give God 10% of their lives, communion with Pepsi and peanut M&Ms, panel questions about sacraments instead of shotguns, and an older churchman's testimony that nearly left the profs speechless.

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The internet is full of guys telling young men to skip seminary: it's too expensive, too soft, too outdated, and besides, AI can teach you everything now. The profs aren't buying it. In this episode they make the case for going to seminary, or going back, with eight reasons that reframe the whole debate around one idea: it was never about degrees, it's about divinity. Along the way: why Thomas Jefferson refused to hand out diplomas at UVA, what Richard Pratt would do with a "magic scepter" to turn seminary into battle simulation, why nobody learns to break up knife fights in an apologetics class, and how AI hands you the appearance of wisdom while leaving you unable to defend a single thing you think you know. Whether you're discerning a call or decades into ministry, the takeaway is simple: a pastor who stops learning stops shepherding (2 Tim 2:15).

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Somewhere along the way, "missional" went from a rallying cry to a punchline, and a lot of young, theology-loving guys quietly stopped talking about reaching lost people at all. Fresh off the SBC and PCA conventions, the profs revisit the word everybody used in 2005, nobody trusts in 2025, and almost no one actually understands. Where did "missional" even come from (hint: not the conservatives)? How does a church plant quietly become a "consolidated schism," and why do a hip-hop church, a cowboy church, and a fistful of flower seeds thrown out a car window all miss the point? The guys trace the term from Newbigin to Keller to its slow slide into compromise, then make the case that doctrine, politics, and theological precision are all "antepenultimate": good servants of a greater mission and terrible masters of it. Because here's the line that should keep every faithful church up at night. If you're doing a great job of being missional and nobody's getting saved, it's a fail (Luke 19:10).

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This week the guys sit down with David Schrock, pastor of Occoquan Bible Church in Northern Virginia and one of the leaders of Christ Over All, to trace his journey from a basketball-obsessed teenager to a pastor-theologian with a PhD on the priesthood and the extent of the atonement. Along the way they get into how COVID exposed the church's weakness on church and state, why the Christian nationalism debates generated more heat than light, and how the "Orthobros" are targeting young men who've never been taught what they're leaving behind. It's a conversation about reading the Bible deeply, recovering forgotten theological roots, and following Christ as Lord over all of life (Col 1:18).

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