The dreaded coronavirus, COVID-19, has struck your humble host. I’m Joel Fieri, host of What You’ve Been Searching For and president of Christian Podcast Central. Stay tuned for my COVID-19 story.

The name of our show is What You’ve Been Searching For and the goal is to find out the topics and questions that you, the Christian podcast listener, have in searching for. Well, it turns out in 2020, to no one’s surprise, the biggest topic on the internet for searching for Christian podcasts, listeners, Christians, non-Christians, anybody and everybody is, you guessed it, the coronavirus. Well, I have a coronavirus story as you might’ve guessed.

Early last month, I took a trip on a plane and when I came back a couple of days later, I started having some symptoms. And at the urging of my wife, I went and got a COVID test and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, which is the official name of COVID-19.

Now, if you’re expecting a dramatic report of survival, of a devastating case of COVID-19, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. I really wasn’t that sick. It was a mild cold that turned into a mild flu. I had a low-grade fever for a couple of weeks, had my sore throat, a few other symptoms. That was it. So what I’d like to do is tell you a little bit more about my experience and then I have some observations I’d like to tell you about on the whole COVID phenomenon that we’ve gone through in the past nine months or so.

First a little bit more about my experience. As I said, I wasn’t that sick. I have a proclivity to respiratory viruses. Twice in my life, in my younger years, I had pneumonia. I was in the hospital, very serious. And 10 years ago, I had a bad case of the swine flu, swine flu was much worse than COVID. So I know my way around respiratory diseases. This wasn’t that bad.

And I want to tell you my mindset going in. When I first got sick and I suspected I had COVID, my mindset was, “Good. Let’s get this over with. Let’s see who wins. COVID will either kill me or let me live my life.” So for two weeks, we did battle and I won. I’m fine. I’m healthy. No symptoms, no damage. I realize that’s not the case for everybody. But again, like I said, I’m telling my story here.

Also, another key part of my experiences, none of my family got infected. I was with my family for two weeks. We all quarantined like we’re supposed to, our kids who are working, they didn’t work for 10 days to two weeks. My wife was quarantined along with me. Our son got tested twice, both times he was negative. So it wasn’t nearly as virulent as supposedly everyone is saying it is.

Now, you might say, “Well, you got it, didn’t you?” Yes, I did. I probably either got it on the plane or somewhere where I was traveling. But honestly, if social distancing and mask-wearing are as effective as they say they are, I shouldn’t have got it. Everywhere I went people were wearing masks. The plane, everyone had masks on. The plane was sanitized, the hotel I stayed at. Everywhere I went people were wearing masks and social distancing. So by all rights, I should not have got it. But I did.

And the third observation is, quite frankly, I’m suspecting that I might’ve even had a false positive. I never lost my sense of taste or smell like everybody says you’re supposed to, the only thing I lost was about seven pounds because I lost my appetite. So pray that I keep it off. But I’m suspecting that I might’ve had a false positive.

Earlier this week I went into the blood bank to donate some blood and get an antibody test. If it comes back that I did not have COVID, I don’t have the antibodies, I had a false positive, and my question will be, “Do they now go back and take my positive test off of the statistical ...

The question is, how do we reach millennials and Gen Z with the gospel? That’s the ever-present question in Christianity these days, and I’ll do my best to give you my answer here on what you’ve been searching for on Christian Podcast Central, stay tuned.

Part one of our two-part episode on reaching millennials with the gospel, you know, that we talked about why we have this issue. Why doesn’t the gospel resonate with a whole generation of young people? And we talked about how basically the problem is rooted in how we, the baby boom generation, parented the millennials. And it was pretty much an echo of how our parents World War II generation, parented us. The main issue being, or the main goal being, in our parenting, we made sure that our children did not have the same experiences that we had as children. And now we wonder why they’re completely different people with completely different values. So, if you didn’t catch that, episode one, we’ll put the link down below. Make sure you catch it and it’ll give you some insight into part two, which is going to be, I’m going to talk about how we reach millennials.

Now, since we have this problem that we’ve created, this monster that we’ve created, what do we do about it now? How do we reach a generation that doesn’t resonate with the gospel because of the way we’ve raised them? The first thing we need to do is we need to stop thinking in generational terms. These generational terms like World War II generation, baby boom generation, millennial generation, whatever, they weren’t always here. These were pretty much creations of the mad men back in the old days. Advertising men who had to figure out a way of reaching us baby boomers, this giant generation of young people, who suddenly had all these resources and all this freedom, how were we going to market our products to them? And that’s when these labels, these generational labels, started coming. And to a certain extent, they fit, but to a certain extent, we can’t keep putting people in these generational boxes.

Millennials are still people. They’re still sinners, lost souls in need of a savior. They’re just like us. The gospel, as we heard it, as we accepted it, as our parents, and our grandparents, and all the other generations accepted it, still applies to them, and we need to approach them in that way. If we can stop thinking of them as this somehow special generation, that is different from the rest of us, or that we need to go through certain hoops to reach, I think we’ll do a much better job of actually reaching them. The second thing we need to do is we need to stop churching millennials the way we parented them. And I use the term churching for lack of a better verb there. But we have bent over backwards to make sure that we don’t offend them and heaven forbid actually bore them. We’ve made sure that they’ve heard nothing but good, safe messages, nothing about judgment from a Holy God, or sin, or anything like that.

And we’ve tried to raise their self-esteem by making the church look and feel of the church appeals to them, with the music, the lighting, the staging, young, mod looking pastors, all of this. We’ve made sure that church for them is nothing but a positive experience because that’s the way we raised them with, nothing but positive experiences. So they’ve developed this lens through which they see Christianity as something that’s safe and that’s not offensive, and doesn’t require much of them, and it’s certainly not something that they need to put any effort into. Since we have this generation, this monster we’ve created, that doesn’t resonate with the gospel, that doesn’t see the gospel that we know to be true, as something that’s appealing to them, what do we do?

We are five weeks into our new series, What You’ve Been Searching For here on Christian Podcast Central, and for some reason, we have yet to talk about millennials. It’s one of the topics you want discussed, and we’re going to talk about it here on What You’ve Been Searching For. I’m Joel Fieri, stay tuned.

So the question is how do we reach millennials and Gen Z with the gospel? I’m going to do a two-part series on this. Today, I’m going to talk about why millennials and Gen Z are the way they are. Why do we have this issue? Why is the gospel such a challenge for them? And next week in part two, I’ll delve into what I think is the solution. How we actually do reach them with the gospel.

So for today, I want to talk a little bit about why we have this issue and really what it boils down to in my view is, that our issue with millennials and Gen Z is pretty much an echo of the way we, the baby boomers or the parents of millennials and Gen Zs. The way we were raised by our parents, the World War II generation. I’ll start with just a quick story about my parents, just to use them as an example. My dad is a World War II veteran who was born in Chicago in the 1920s and survived the depression, and then spent two years on a 10 Candice story of World War II, only to have it blown up out from under him and barely surviving.

After the war, he met my mom who grew up on a dirt farm in Ohio, very poor. They were huddling together for warmth in the winter and working themselves to death in the summer, so they wouldn’t starve to death in the winter as well as freezing to death. So it was a very, very hard life for both of them in the early parts of their life. So like many in their generation, after the war, after saving the world, they got married and started to raise families.

The main focus of their parenting, the main goal of their parenting for us, for my generation, was that our generation would not experience the same hardships and struggles that their generation did. And that’s totally understandable. No parent who had that kind of upbringing in their early life would want their children to experience the same thing. So they made sure that we didn’t.

If you listen to baby boomers these days, you would think our childhood was the most idyllic childhood in the history of the world, and it might’ve been. We were what’s called free range children. Our parents let us go. All you have to do is listen to us, we’ll tell you. We drank water out of dirty garden hoses. And we went on 50 mile bike rides across LA freeways without helmets or anything. And we played on the monkey bars and we fell off and we broke our arms and legs. And we showed off our casts and we had sunburns and we peeled all summer long because we were sunburn all summer long. That was our childhood. And it was pretty much my childhood. My childhood was that way because our parents let us go. They didn’t want to see us until the street lights came on.

And they did that because they wanted us to have carefree, adventurous childhood’s, free of the responsibilities and the pain that they had, and they wanted it to be adults. They wanted to enjoy their lives, that they felt that they had earned as adults. So they let us go. But there was a problem with that. Because our parents did that, because they raised us without any of the experiences they had as children in their formative years that formed their strength and their values, they couldn’t understand why we didn’t have the same strength and the same values they did. They couldn’t understand why we were growing our hair long and listening to that rock and roll music or doing drugs or burning American flags or all of the silly things that the baby boomers did..

Our parents didn’t understand why we were doing that.

The Chosen, VidAngel’s record setting series about the life of Jesus. Is it yet another in a long line of poorly produced, cringe-inducing Christian media, or is this one something different? Well, that’s the answer you’ve been searching for. I’m Joel Fieri, president of Christian Podcast Central. Stay tuned.

In our research on what you, the Christian Podcast listener want to hear discussed in Christian Podcast, we found a desire for a review of the miniseries, The Chosen. And this is put on by VidAngel. It set all kinds of fundraising records. And as you might’ve guessed, I’ve watched it. I’ve watched season one and I want to share my thoughts with you on it. Now, being an amateur movie reviewer or TV reviewer, this is my first one actually, I’m just going to divide it up into what I typically look for whenever I’m watching a new show. There’s four areas that I picked. The first area is the writing. Second area is the casting. The third area is the acting performances. And for the fourth area, I’m going to talk about the goals of the show. Did they accomplish what they set out to do?

First off, the writing. The writing on The Chosen is good, I was going to say very good. They’ve done something very interesting, a couple of things, very interesting. They’ve given backstories to some of Jesus’s miracles and some of his teachings. They’ve given backstories to some of the disciples. One is kind of far-fetched, but for the most part, I think what the writers did is they thought beyond the biblical text. Now a lot of people don’t like that, but if you actually look at the biblical text, there’s really not enough in the gospels for a full episode of dialogue and storyline. So what the writers did it seems to me was they thought, well, what would make the fishermen stay up all night fishing? Or what was the lead up to the wedding?

Why did they run out of wine at the wedding? Whose wedding was it? And like I said, it’s extra biblical. If you’re one of those people that only likes when they stay precisely to the biblical writings, you won’t like that, but I liked it. But the thing I like most about the writing is they refer back to the Old Testament. In some of the episodes, some of the instances of Jesus’s life, some of the miracles he performed, or some of the people he came in contact with, they tied it back to the Old Testament, which I think is a message the writers are sending saying, guess what? The Old Testament is important. You can’t unhitch from the Old Testament. Otherwise, what Jesus said and did doesn’t mean anything.

So in a couple of the episodes, we get to see Jacob and we get to see Moses, and we get to see Joshua. So the writing I’m going to say is pretty good. The one weakness would be maybe the backstory is a little contrived, but that’s being kind of nitpicky on that. The casting. The casting is very good. Everybody looks the part. Jesus, obviously the most important casting decision, they didn’t cast a pretty boy, Jim Caviezel type. He looks like a middle Eastern guy, a carpenter. He’s tall, but that’s about it. He definitely does not look like the pasty face picture, old picture of Jesus in the back of the church where he almost looks feminine. So they did a good job casting Jesus, everybody else I think is really well cast.

Everybody looks the part. They look like middle Eastern Jewish people. The Romans look like Roman soldiers. So the casting was good. I was going to say casting is very good. The performances I’m going to say are superb. I was really impressed. As I said in my intro, I’ve seen too much really poorly produced cringe-inducing Christian media, and acting performances, and bad writing, the acting performances in The Chosen are very good.