The Lionborn Studios Podcast

For about fifteen years, every story about young adults and church was a decline story. We were leaving, we weren't coming back, it was over.

That's not what the data says anymore. Barna's tracking — a sample of more than 130,000 adults over 25 years — now shows Gen Z and Millennials driving a church attendance resurgence while older generations decline. Bible sales jumped 22% in a year while print books overall barely moved.

Darryl Marin pastors The Hills Church in Evansville, which sees around 2,500 people a weekend. We get into the sentence keeping the most people outside the most doors. Not "I don't believe it." I'd come, but I need to get my life together first.

Topics: Who he was before ministry · Why he'd rather not be on stage · What the global church showed him · The attendance data and its limits · What young adults are actually looking for · Why a whole room can feel fake with nobody lying · Mark 1 and the clean-up-first lie

Guest: Darryl Marin — Lead Pastor at The Hills Church, Evansville, Indiana.

https://thehillschurch.com

There's an entire industry built on choosing hard things. Cold plunges, 75 Hard, up at four. A lot of it is true, and none of it has anything to say to a person whose life got wrecked without their permission.

Nate Critchfield chose one of the hardest sports in America — wrestling at Evansville Mater Dei, a program with nine straight state titles to its name. Then in high school he got handed something he didn't choose: spinal surgery. He's lived both sides, which makes him the rare person who can tell you the difference from the inside.

First half is his story — the room, the diagnosis, the rehab nobody films, the comeback. Second half is the thing almost nobody is talking about: the hard thing you didn't pick. Why chosen hardship has a reason, an end date, and an exit — and why the other kind has none of the three. What people said to him that didn't help. What actually did. And why the resurrection body kept the scars.

Topics: What wrestling demands · Identity built on performance · Rehab and the hidden season · Chosen vs. unchosen suffering · Why grit has nothing for a bad diagnosis · Post-traumatic growth and its limits · Job's friends · Paul's unanswered prayer · What the fire actually changes

If you're in a dark place: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 in the U.S., any hour. This conversation is encouragement, not medical or mental-health advice.

The moon has never produced one particle of its own light. It’s about as reflective as a parking lot. And nobody has ever looked at a full moon and called it fake.

You were never supposed to generate the light. You were supposed to face the right direction.

In this episode, we go after the oldest lie ever told to a human being — be your own source — and trace it from Genesis 3 to a sign in somebody’s kitchen. We get into why you can’t tickle yourself and why that’s the exact same reason your own pep talk never sticks, why Moses asked “who am I?” and God changed the subject to Himself, all seven “I AM” statements in John and what they were answering, and why Adam grabbed at being God while Jesus let go of it on purpose.

Plus the one night a month the moon is closest to the sun and you see nothing — because it’s facing the wrong way.

Proximity was never the variable. Orientation was.

Whatever you’re not — He is.

Keep the Faith.

In this episode, we answer some questions — including what to actually read if you’re new to the Bible, whether Halloween is satanic, why “in Jesus’ name” isn’t a password, the difference between humility and self-hatred, how to tell if it’s God or just you, what to do when prayer feels like nothing, and the one thing I believe that would get me in trouble with other Christians.

No fluff. Including the ones where the honest answer is I don’t know.

Send more questions. We’re doing this again.

Keep the Faith.

The generation that watched God stop a river raised children who didn’t know His name.

Not because of persecution. Not because anyone fought them for it. Because the story was so obvious to the people who lived it that it never occurred to them it would have to be told.

In this episode, we go after Judges 2:10 — the verse that names exactly how that happens — and make the case that faith isn’t a marathon. It’s a relay. You can run a flawless leg and still lose the race at the handoff.

We walk through Deuteronomy 6 and the Hebrew word shanan, why God commanded a pile of rocks in Joshua 4 whose only job was to make a child ask a question, what the three-generation handoff from Lois to Eunice to Timothy actually looked like, and why this isn’t just a parenting episode — because everybody is in a relay, whether they know it or not.

Turn around. Reach back. Somebody’s running behind you.

Keep the Faith.

Every major religious founder in human history has a grave. Muhammad's tomb is in Medina. Confucius has a cemetery in China maintained for over two thousand years.

So where is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth?

In this episode, we take the historical case for the resurrection seriously — not as a faith exercise, but as an investigation. We steelman every alternative explanation, walk through why a crucified Messiah was a theological category error for first-century Jews, look at why the women at the tomb is one of the strongest arguments for authenticity in the account, and land on the one question Paul said the whole thing rises or falls on.

He refused to let Christianity be a nice story that helps you cope. He staked it on something you could go check.

So go check it.

Where's the body?

Keep the Faith.

Curt and Chelsie Garrett run Revival Coffee in Evansville, Indiana, lead a mission team to Cuba, and are raising their son in the middle of it all.

In this conversation, we talk about starting a small business as a Christian couple, what the church in Cuba taught them about faith, and why they brought their son along. If you've ever wondered whether your ordinary life matters to God, this one's for you.

Topics: Starting a small business · Business and calling · Marriage and work · Leading a Cuba mission team · Short-term missions · Parenting and faith · Ordinary faithfulness

Guest bio: Curt and Chelsie Garrett are owners of Revival Coffee Co., located inside The Hills Community Center in Evansville, Indiana. They lead mission trips to Cuba and live in Evansville with their son.

Links: 

Revival Coffee Co.: revival-coffee.co

Revival on Facebook: facebook.com/therevivalcoffeecompany

Follow for more honest, long-form conversations about faith, purpose, and building a meaningful life in a confused culture.

This conversation is for encouragement and discussion. It isn't professional financial, legal, or medical advice.

Nobody arrives at the bottom in one step.

In this episode, Kole sits down with Luke Hancock — a man who survived a suicide attempt, spent time at a treatment center, and walked into a church for the first time two weeks later. We didn't build this episode around the shock of that. We built it around the snowball — where it started, what he poured into the hole, what it cost him, and what happened after.

We walk through what depression actually feels like from the inside, the lie it tells everybody in the same words, why the most functional person in the room is usually the one nobody checks on, and why getting clinical help before he ever set foot in a church is one of the most important parts of the story.

Then we get into 1 Kings 19 — God's response to a suicidal prophet — and why it wasn't a sermon. What Abba meant in first-century Aramaic and what Roman adoption legally erased — and why both matter for anyone who grew up without the father they needed.

This isn't a clean testimony. The mess is in it on purpose.

988 — call or text, any hour.

Keep the Faith.

If Satan wanted to take you out — how would he do it?

You already know. Because it's worked before. Probably the same way every time. And you've never once sat down and named it.

In this episode, we walk through 1 John 2:16 and the only three lures your enemy has ever had: the desire to feel, the desire to have, the desire to be. We get into the Greek word epithumia and why temptation almost never looks evil — it looks like something good with the volume cranked to eleven. Then we watch Jesus get hit with all three in sequence in Luke 4 and beat every one the same way.

He never offered Jesus one evil thing. He offered good things by the wrong road. That's the only trick he's got.

Your enemy is beatable because he's predictable. He's got three lures and no imagination.

Study the tape. Name the lure. Stand.

Keep the Faith.

Everyone has had a song undo them. In a car. At a funeral. Alone at 1am. And nobody really knows why that works.

In this episode of Lions and Lambs, Kole sits down with musician Isaac Butler to chase that question all the way down — from neuroscience to the Roman world to a battlefield in 2 Chronicles where an insane king put his choir in front of the army.

We get into why there are no non-worshippers, the honest gap between performing worship and actually doing it, what proskuneō meant under Caesar, Ezekiel 28 handled without flinching, Isaiah 14's five "I will" statements, Paul and Silas singing at midnight in a cell while everyone else's chains fell off, and why you can't hold onto anything with your hands in the air.

Jehoshaphat put the singers in front. The ambush came when they began to sing — not after they won.

Praise before the outcome.

Keep the Faith.