Our hosts are joined by Rev. Alvin C. Bibbs & Rev. Marian Edmonds-Allen on the final episode of Walking Through Samaria

 

Rev. Alvin C. Bibbs, Sr. is a Justice, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Executive and a
highly sought-after motivational speaker, author (Crazy Enough to Care: Changing
Your World Through Compassion, Justice, & Racial Reconciliation, published by
InterVarsity Press) and serves as an organizational coach/facilitator to
congregations, corporations, and not-for-profit organizations across North America.
Along with currently serving as President & CEO of the Justice Journey Alliance™,
Leadership Foundation of Chicago.

Rev. Marian Edmonds-Allen is the executive director of Parity, an NYC-based
national nonprofit that works at the intersection of faith and LGBT concerns, and
the Director of Blessed by Difference. Marian has worked with youth and families
in various denominations and settings throughout the country for more than 20
years, focusing on strengths-based interventions and supports to affirm beliefs and
faith practices for LGBT persons. In 2013, Marian was named Person of the Year by
Q Salt Lake for her visionary leadership, and in 2015 was named a Petra Fellow for
her work with LGBT Homeless Youth. Marian attended Western Theological
Seminary and Eden Theological Seminary, she is a Doctor of Ministry candidate at
Eden Theological Seminary with the topic Covenantal Pluralism, Religious Freedom
and Mission: Evidence for Healing the LGBT and Faith Divide.

First - Mike is a husband to Karen, a dad of 5, and constantly learning what that all means.

Mike worked in Christian retail for 25 years at various levels. His last position was AVP of Ministry Partnerships at Family Christian where he advocated for orphaned, vulnerable children and families. He led efforts for customers to support Family’s ministry partners, and developed programs with: Back2Back Ministries, Children of Fallen Soldiers Relief Fund, Compassion International, iDisciple, Operation Christmas Child, Pray America, 410 Bridge, and World Vision.

He is currently the Advancement Director at Back2Back Ministries in Cincinnati, OH where he has been the last 5 years, being responsible for leading the fundraising and marketing teams since April of 2020.  

He serves on Cincinnati Children's Hospital Psychiatric Patient and Family Advisory Council and previously on the Ohio Interagency Council on Youth as a parent representative with lived experience.

He is passionate about organizational health, encourages vulnerability-based trust, authenticity ,and self-awareness in leadership.  Mike is also certified by The Table Group as a Working Genius Facilitator.

Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago is where Anthony Thompson’s life of resilience began. His mother gave birth at the age of 15 and continued her toxic behavior.  She would live 7 more years before she died of a drug overdose. Anthony’s biological father is still unknown to this day. 

Growing up with so many rejections and fears crippled Anthony for the majority of his life. As a result, Anthony buried his pain in drugs, sports, and status. 

While working with celebrities and Fortune 500 companies, Anthony received an invitation to work and travel with a renowned evangelist. Anthony accepted the offer and had an encounter with Jesus that changed his life. He later met and married the love of his life in Sydney, Australia. 

While in Australia, Anthony launched and grew a successful 6 figure social media agency. He also went on to serve alongside Hillsong and their executive team as Head of Growth.  

Most recently, Anthony’s personal access and observations of some of the greatest leaders in the world led him to focus his efforts on helping executives get healthy in spirit, soul, mind, and body. Having worked with executives from Meta, Salesforce, Google, Hillsong, and others, Anthony views these opportunities as God’s workmanship. 

Anthony, Chantelle, and their three children live in Scottsdale, Arizona where you can find them enjoying the incredible heat. 

Anthony has a passion to speak, write and inspire others to grow in spirit, soul, mind, and body. He believes God’s Word has everything you need to become the champion you were created to be.

 

Welcome Anthony to the Walking Through Samaria podcast!

Meet Peter Mutabazi. As a child in Uganda, he grew up with shelter, food and clothing scarcity. But more than that, he grew up with safety scarcity. He feared for his life from a father who threatened him, frequently called him “garbage” and “useless.” To survive, he ran away from home to live on the streets of the capital city, Kampala.

 

“I was treated like a stray animal in most ways — as you say, we were street rats because that’s the way people looked at us,” said Mutabazi, who would get by on as little as one hour of sleep a day. “As early as [age] 4, I had kind up given up on life. … I think every morning, I felt like, ‘I wish I didn’t have to wake up. I wish I woke up and was gone.’ That was my wish every day because of the misery I was going through.”

 

He was eventually taken in by foster parents and it changed his life. He learned to speak seven languages. When he reached adulthood, he found himself in position to give back to vulnerable children. He wrote a book titled, “Now I Am Known,” and started a mission of the same name,  giving at-risk, foster children the message Mutabazi desperately needed to hear when he was in their position.

 

But Mutabazi still had unresolved feelings toward the father he fled that required healing.

 

“My hatred toward my dad, it was so, so bad that I wanted to harm him,” Mutabazi said.

 

Mutabazi gave his life to the Lord and realized that he couldn’t go down that path.

 

“I can’t live my life this way,” he concluded. “I have to forgive my dad.”

Meet Cole Forester. He’s the son of one of Walking Through Samaria’s recent previous guests, author Link Forrester III, and he’s also the co-founder of True Radical Love, a website devoted to fighting the pernicious evils of pornography. He and his co-founder wife, Kayla, have purposed “to end pornography one heart at a time, because if this evil will always exist, then the only way to win is to win the individual’s heart.”

 

Neither Cole nor Kayla arrived by accident at this mission, which they started in May 2020, at the height of COVID-19 quarantining. He was exposed to pornography at a young age, before he recognized the effect it would take on his life. She also recognized that sex slavery and trafficking were still prevalent in their suburban metro Atlanta backyard.

 

Recognizing it was one thing. Doing something about it, however, has been a much tougher task. But neither shies away from the challenge.

 

“Porn fuels the demand for trafficking, meaning it’s a progressional sin or issue,” Cole said. “Like my story, it’s started off whenever I was in secret, I could look at it. When I was at college, I could look at it whenever. And then when I was in the professional world, I would use my resources toward where my heart was going. People say that where your money is, your heart is also. With pornography, it’s backward. Your heart is being established in this sin and then when boys become men, or children go into adulthood, their money starts following where their heart is. Most people seeking prostitution or trafficked women, I’d be shocked if they don’t have a porn issue.”

Meet Brian Frazier. He’s the director of peer-to-peer fundraising for World Vision USA, a Christian humanitarian organization that tackles the causes of poverty and injustice in the world. He’s also one of the guiding forces behind World Vision’s involvement in Oregon’s annual Hood to Coast relay race, the world’s largest.

 

Teams of runners trek almost 200 miles from a snow-capped mountain in northern Oregon to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and Frazier — who is also one of its leading individual fundraisers — will pound the pavement in hopes of realizing World Vision’s 2022 goal to provide more people in South Sudan access to clean water.

 

A graduate of Texas A&M, Frazier and his wife of 21 years, Colette, are the parents of four children. He doesn’t just walk out his faith as an example to them and others — he literally runs with patience the courses God has put in front of him. That’s why he and World Vision were such a hand-in-glove fit, and together they bridge uncomfortable gaps to do the most good.

 

“At Team World Vision, we talk about meeting God on the other side of fear, and just stepping through that fear and seeing what God has for us on the other side,” Frazier said. “It’s when we’re talking about people that are different than us that God is at work in relationships — that is a perfect place to meet God, that’s where breakthrough can happen. When we’re stepping through those uncomfortable things, or the things we’re not used to … then, all of a sudden, that’s when magical things can happen.”

Meet Link Forester III. He’s an author whose life story, a winding path of triumph and tragedy, is readily identifiable with many of our own. The only difference is, he’s put his into a book titled The Side Road: Finding Joy and Purpose Through the Twists and Turns of Life, which takes him through an earlier-than-expected pregnancy, marriage and fatherhood in 1987 to an early and never-expected tragedy in 2011, when his son Tyler died.

 

Simple pleasures have helped him cope — the love of golf, good wine and grandchildren — but mostly it has been his strong faith in God. Through it all, from his initial days in sales at IBM to his management of a financial planning firm, Forester’s 35-year marriage to Carla has survived and thrived and he’s learned lessons about what traveling “the side road” really means.

 

“Just being a follower of Jesus puts you on the side road,” he says. “It’s an easy club to join but it’s a hard life to live. It can be a lonely life.” Yet it is one full of purpose and perspective and leads to a lot of hilarious tales that his son, Cole, finally got him to put into print and he recounts some of them with Dan and David on the Walking Through Samaria podcast.

Meet Talli Moellering. For the last 13 years, she has been the executive director for A Beacon of Hope, a metro Atlanta-based organization that assists women facing unplanned pregnancies — and particularly women who feel that abortion is their best or only option.

 

In the light of the recent Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which had the effect of overturning the 1973 precedent-forming case Roe v. Wade, Talli provides expert insights into what it will mean. No matter which side of the abortion debate you favor, she says, the only true victory is when pregnant women are addressed and treated with compassion.

 

“There’s no way we can just focus on the baby,” Talli says. “The only chance that we have of saving the life of the pre-born is if the mother feels heard and cared for. That’s what the focus needs to be.”

 

Talli wrote “Let’s Talk About Sex,” a book which has become a tool for parents. Published in 2015, the book is based on Talli’s 20-plus years of teaching sexual health education in private and public schools.

A graduate of Indiana Wesleyan University, Talli leads a team of 18 employees and 25 volunteers at A Beacon of Hope. They strive to ensure that every patient who enters her clinics in Decatur and Johns Creek feels safe, and is informed, prior to making a choice.

Talli has been married to David for 32 years and they’ve considered Atlanta home since moving from the Midwest 20 years ago. The Moellerings have three married daughters, three grandchildren, and two grand dogs, all of whom live in Georgia.

Meet Kelly Miller. Formerly a standout in the software industry, Miller became the Dean of Student Life for the Amazima School in Jinja, Uganda, and visits the Walking Through Samaria podcast to talk about what the Holy Spirit has done and is doing in the lives of people who are “going against culture to follow Jesus” and becoming examples in their own communities.

 

He has been married to Danlyn for 25 years, and though they have no biological children of their own, they became father and mother figures to their Ugandan students, who used to call him “Uncle Kelly.” He’s undertaken 13 overseas mission trips, but upon rigorous self-examination questioned whether what he was doing was genuine service to God as opposed to a point of religious pride. Once he resolved that question, he says, he found himself on a “journey to unshakable faith and complete joy” which led him to write an upcoming book called “No Greater Joy.”

 

The key, Miller says, is being properly motivated.

 

“If somebody’s motivation is for the other person’s benefit, whatever we’re doing — whether it’s buying somebody’s Starbucks coffee or just asking somebody, ‘Hey, what do you know about Jesus?’ — you can do ministry everywhere, anywhere, anytime,” he says. “If we want to do something meaningful for others, meaningful for the Kingdom, and faith-building for us in our own walk with Christ, we have to do it with the strength of the Holy Spirit. If we try to do it on our own, we will fall into selfish motivations.”

Meet Matt McKee. An author, entrepreneur and ordained pastor, among other things, he has found his sweet spot at the intersection of parenting and technology. He likes to think of himself as “just another guy trying to make a difference.”

 

Married for 23 years to Jessica, with whom he has two teenaged sons, McKee has — and is in demand to speak publicly — a wealth of information and insights about raising kids in the digital age. He has written Parent Chat: The Technology Chat for Every Family and co-wrote Parenting in a Tech World with Titiana Jordan.

 

“As a parent, we really have to up our emotional intelligence more than anything else in helping our kids deal with all the difficult things happening on tech,” he says.

 

In addition to founding three technology companies, McKee also is the senior vice president of business development with Bark.us, an internet safety solution that helps parents and schools keep children safer across social media, text messaging, and email. One of the solutions that makes the most sense to McKee, that builds greater trust and rapport with your child, involves making your kid your teacher.

 

“Go ask your kid, ‘Can you teach me how?’ ’’ McKee says. “Can you teach me how this app works? Can you teach me how this video game works? Can you teach me how this device works? And what you’ll start to see is technology through the lens of your child and because of that, you will be able to give them purpose, and without purpose you can’t have accountability. Without purpose, you can’t get them to the places you want them to go.”