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Today is my 500th podcast. There are 4.5 million podcasts ever reach 100 episodes and only a percentage of 1% will ever reach 500 episodes. So I begin today with my deepest gratitude for any and all of you who have listened.

With only few exceptions, I have produced at least one podcast per week since May of 2015. This podcast started then as “The KevKast” and it was a shorter, more raw observational criticism of life, religion, and power structures. In 2018, I was invited to try a radio program for a Christian radio station in Denver, and that’s when I changed the name to “Beyond Everything Radio.” This format was 30 minute, softened version where I removed the parental advisory, and went back to my love of teaching scriptures.

Beyond Everything Radio grew my weekly listenership to over 80,000…but at a cost. The station loved my program and gifted me with multiple free replays during the week, but their Christian audience was largely fundamentalist and Evangelicals who opposed the deconstruction my teaching invites. The station received more feedback from my show than any other on the air, but mostly negative, so we agreed, I wasn’t a fit.

Each podcast is the audio version of my blog, “Thrive in Exile” which began in 2012. I moved to online content back then because of my tremendous love for scripture kept challenging my own fundamental beliefs. I was the executive pastor of a church plant in Denver which was part of the Acts 29 movement back in the early 2000’s. As an elder and church leader I became frustrated that the majority of decisions were essentially business decisions. I sought to decouple the ministry from income, requesting all pastors volunteer just as I was, and then to reallocate our $400,000 budget to serve the city. It fell on deaf ears.

The business of selling God and imprisoning people into a culturally contrived religious system which produces very little transformation was breaking my heart. All the pastors knew better, but insisted on transactional ministry instead of transformation. They insisted on preaching conversion to the Christian religion instead of simply Christ following. They divided the world into saved and unsaved, and looked down upon those they were called to love.

“Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” (1 John 3:15)

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (1 John 4:12)

I just couldn’t get the business of Church to embrace these principles. So I left and went online.

My spirit animal is John the Baptist and my ministry his like his: to deconstruct every man-made part of religion, and point people back to the raw and present experience of Christ in and as their own life. My podcast mission is to free the Bible from 2000 years of Church history, and to be a beacon of freedom, personally and corporately, to all who would listen.

My two audiences:

My message is hard to hear at first. It can take people months to figure it out.

One of my audiences is the fundamentalist who is threatened by my call for self-criticism and deconstruction of their institutional religion. Those over-identified with tribal religion, denominations, their comfy buildings and ego projects, prefer a message that makes them feel slightly better than others. My message reminds the religious mind that it’s the most lost any soul can be. That’s when they unsubscribe just like Jesus’ religion did. While most deconstructionists feel the rejection from the devout community, they often go too far and abandon the Bible and embrace cultural trends which give them followers, but I can’t do this.

I love my fundamental brothers and sisters too much. I also know they won’t consider my mere opinion unless it’s backed up with sound biblical exposition. This’s why my podcast is biblically centered, theologically sound, and a constant invitation to those over-identified with religion. Trusting the Bible is more difficult than trusting the Religious Industrial Complex, but necessary, so I strive to be the best biblical scholar possible for their sake.

I’ve learned two things by working bi-vocationally since the 90’s:

1. First, is that it’s quite easy to (like Paul) serve in full-time ministry without taking a single dime from that ministry. The Bible admonishes pastors to work along side their congregations in secular vocations and not take money for preaching. This is devastating to the believability of the Gospel. Any pastor who won’t do their job for free, is simply not called by the Holy Spirit to do that ministry. I’m not Mormon, but their business model is far superior to that of Evangelicals and Catholics.
2. Second, I’ve learned that when a pastor is bi-vocational, their message is tested in real life where it’s believable and real. Too often pastors are ivory towered, separated from the realities of work and life. Full-time pastors talk a big spiritual game on Sunday, but rarely consider how that message registers in the lives of others. I discovered that people desire to talk about God and spirituality, but not with church goers. By working along side everyone else, like Paul as a tentmaker, I earn trust and respect because I share the same burdens as they do. Miracles are more visible.

My podcast is an invitation to put ministry back in the marketplace by not giving people a “thing” to prop up. There is no need to spend billions on a weekend big show, which tries to pull people out of their lives and into the church life by while imposing tax violence on them. I’ve proven I can reach 100 times more people for less than $1000 a year. I was right to leave the machine.

My other audience are the non-religious people who are rightly skeptical of spiritual claims. This group struggles to see and separate from their fundamentalism too. These have over-identified with politics, social hot-buttons, spiritual wounds, our their rebellious heart that opposes God. These always tell me I talk too much about Jesus and the Bible.

I love these people too much to placate them. I won’t give them a nebulous spirituality even though that’s what they think they want. I will always insist that their faith find its way to Christ, and I take great care to provide a biblical Christology, and not a religious one. This is nuanced and easily missed. I’m told they come back because they keep hearing something universally true which helps them. I require no conversion, just to seek their own completion in God.

I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your comments, feedback, criticisms, encouragement, have really kept me going all these years. I know that this podcast is an acquired taste, but I truly believe it’s an inspired and love-based conversation that incrementally invites people out of captivity and darkness into freedom and light. The fruit form ten years of work speaks for itself. People’s lives are restored..healed…empowered. They regain their lives, freedom, marriages, children, and loving relationships. People advance out of stuck, dead-end jobs, and begin to find their way into self-donating services that financially bless and prosper their lives and those of others.

So long as this is in my heart to do, I’ll be here to invite as many as will come into discovering their true self hidden in Christ and found in God. I offer everything for free, I give it all away, and I don’t require anyone to join anything, come anywhere, or do anything that isn’t in their heart to do. I’m not here to make anything out of myself, to give you a thing, or get you into my thing, I’m here to free you into God so you can have your life back, and have it to its fullness.

Thank you for 10 years of transformation with no transactions. I pray that you will invite others to come and discover what God is doing with this work, and if I can support any of you in your spiritual journey, please feel free to reach out.