Let's be clear: church services work just great for a whole lot of people and a whole lot of Blue Ocean Faith churches. But lots of ex-churchgoers and current churchgoers find themselves triggered by things they used to like. Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer and fellow Blue Ocean leaders Christina Roberts and Ryan Bauers are each leading local conversations about messing with what churches look like. What are they learning? 

Mindfulness is being taught in most public schools, in businesses, in seminars--but often not in churches. Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer is joined by fellow Blue Ocean leaders Christina Roberts and Ryan Bauers. Ryan, a former evangelical pastor, discovered that regular mindful practices "took his anxiety from a 7 to a 4." Christina has reconnected with Orthodox roots and discovered that her version of mindfulness has opened up her relationships and ability to connect with God in more of her day. 

Kevin Roose writes a new column in the New York Times called The Shift. Focusing on technology, it deploys him to understand people who run alt right sites or to figure out the impact of Russians manipulating Facebook among many other things. Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer and New York Times reporter Peter Eavis (he returns to his beat at the Times next week) talk with Kevin about how pervasively the internet changes everything for us. We close by asking Kevin about his 2009 book The Unlikely Disciple in which he went undercover at Liberty University to better understand these evangelical students.

So many people dread reading the day's political news. But both Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer and longtime Blue Ocean World co-host Val Snekvik can imagine a kind of politics that would encourage them. For Dave, it's a sort of ideal dialogue between conservatism and liberalism. For Val, it's one that values data and problem solving. With that as a starting point, Dave and Val have a freewheeling conversation about topics including Diane Feinstein and machine politics and, in the end, about where to find hope in the political world.

Blue Ocean Faith tries to be things with names like "centered set" and "solus Jesus" and "third way"--all related ideas. Val Snekvik, longtime BOW co-host, rejoins Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer to talk about how she's tried to raise boys who are shame-free, courageous, and connected to Jesus by raising them third way. 

New York Times financial reporter Nathaniel Popper joins Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer and Peter Eavis, who's written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to talk about Bitcoin and what it means. It's been huge news recently for its astounding rise (one Bitcoin cost $1,000 at the beginning of 2017, rose to $20,000 by the end, and then quickly fell back somewhat). Will it change the world? Does it have some parallels with faith? 

News about North Korea is scary! Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer lives in Los Angeles, one of the cities allegedly threatened by North Korea's nuclear arsenal. MIT historian Hiromu Boschee Nagahara has a grandfather who survived Hiroshima's nuclear attack. He and Dave talk about the key role Christians play in such an anxious time.

After publishing a book about a fresh take on faith, Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer fields several calls and emails a week from readers who are concerned that, after questioning their faith, they'll be left with nothing. Dave talks with MIT historian Hiromu Boschee Nagahara about how to deconstruct a faith and discover something even livelier on the other side.

In the last several years, National Geographic has sent Dan Buettner to so-called "Blue Zones"--parts of the world where people either live far longer or are notably happier than the rest of the world. And in the last year it's sent Morgan Freeman to embark on a related project with its TV series "The Story of Us." Longtime Blue Ocean World cohost Val Snekvik joins Dave Schmelzer in exploring what it might look like to dream of a happy life not so much from individual choices as from seeing the context of the life we already have in a whole new way.

Every day seemingly brings a new story of a famous man brought down by long-buried stories of sexual abuse, usually of women. Churches--as in the case of Roy Moore--sometimes get involved in the story. Longtime Blue Ocean World cohost Val Snekvik joins Dave Schmelzer to talk about the implications for women and men, for parenting, for faith communities, and for their own views of how the sexes connect.