Part 2 of the Brashear roundtable with Dustin Cowden and Chris Wilcutt picks up mid-conversation and doesn't slow down. The topic wanders — intentionally — through some of the most fascinating corners of Scripture.

The conversation opens with psychotropics. People who ingest them, across cultures, tend to report the same things: spiritual beings, dragons, encounters with something they describe as Jesus — not the Jesus, but a Jesus. The takeaway isn't an endorsement. It's a question: what does it mean that people who are chemically forcing their way into a spiritual experience keep finding the same thing there?

From there it moves into the architecture of the afterlife. Sheol. Hades. Gehenna. Tartarus. Abraham's bosom. The third heaven. The Bible uses all of these terms distinctly, and collapsing them all into "heaven and hell" may be doing the text a disservice. Where did Jesus go for three days? The Apostles' Creed says he descended into hell. Most Baptists don't love that line. But the text seems to support it — he held the keys, he proclaimed to the fallen angels in chains, and Matthew records people seeing resurrected prophets walking the streets of Jerusalem immediately after the crucifixion.

The two witnesses in Revelation get a full treatment. The traditional view is Moses and Elijah — their signs match, and they represent the law and the prophets. But there's a second view worth sitting with: Hebrews says it's appointed unto men once to die. Enoch and Elijah never did. Maybe Revelation is where they finally keep that appointment.

The conversation finds its footing in the artistry of Genesis. Chris Wilcutt traces the thread: sin entered through a tree, atonement came through one. Thorns and thistles came through the curse, and they wound up on his head. The skin God placed on Adam and Eve required the shedding of blood — and in the New Testament, Christ clothes us in righteousness. The Tower of Babel scattered language. Pentecost reunited it. Moses was barred from the promised land — and the next time he appears, he's standing on the Mount of Transfiguration. The completion is everywhere, once you start looking.

The speed round covers AI-generated worship music, the Book of Eli, Friday (the 90s movie), Reacher, hospital visits for bloody noses, driving separate cars to church, and what it's like to pastor with ADD when people take it personally that you walked past them in the hallway.

Chris Wilcutt closes in prayer with a word for the pastors who quit every Monday morning. It lands.

The McNeils are in Brashear, Texas for their second consecutive year of revival. Dustin Cowden pastors the church. Chris Wilcutt preaches the revival and comes up from Shreveport, Louisiana to do it. This roundtable was recorded before the week got rolling, and it went places none of them fully expected.

The conversation opens with a simple question: what is the purpose of a revival in 2026? Dustin's answer is honest — you can't force God's hand, but you can create the conditions. His hope is that even one person walks away with a softened heart. He makes the point that adults need camp just as much as teenagers do. They need concentrated time away from the noise, saturated in the Word, with nothing else competing for their attention.

Chris Wilcutt picks up the thread and takes it somewhere harder. COVID taught the church that people didn't have to leave the couch to attend a service — and a lot of them decided they never would again. Online church gave people cover to slowly unplug from the body of believers, and most of them didn't even notice it was happening until they looked up and realized they were living a secular life. The question isn't just how to get people back. It's whether the church has been honest about why they left.

The conversation turns to culture. Both men push back on the idea that the church needs to compete with entertainment. Dustin's line is the one that lands: you can't out-culture the world. TikTok will always be more entertaining than a church service. The question is whether the church is trying to be the new show or actually worshiping the King. Christianity set the cultural standard for two thousand years — in art, in medicine, in architecture. The answer isn't to chase the world. It's to lead again.

They talk about the verse-of-the-day problem — the reduction of Scripture to a positive affirmation, a slogan on a wall, four seconds of engagement before moving on with the day. And they talk about monasticism, stillness, and the lost discipline of Christian meditation. One of them spent six hours alone with a Bible and a notepad as part of a seminary assignment and says the first thirty minutes were the most uncomfortable thing he'd ever done. Then something shifted.

The episode closes with a pointed observation: the church has become so focused on what Jesus did for me that it forgot the story isn't about me. It's about him. God didn't have to save anybody. He chose to. And when you really sit with that, it changes everything about how you worship.

Hank Williams is an evangelist based out of Texas. Named after Hank Williams Sr. — his dad was in country music and wanted to bless his youngest boy with that name. Mom vetoed it. His legal name is Randall. He found out after they were married that his wife's middle name is the same. He's been in ministry 46 years, split evenly between itinerant evangelism and pastoral ministry, and he sat down with Chris on the last night of a revival at Lake Murvaul in East Texas.

The conversation centers on the family. Hank's framework is rooted in Genesis: God created three institutions — family, church, and government — and he created the family first. The order matters. Jesus first, then spouse, then children, then vocation. Not as a checklist, but as a living priority that shows up in your calendar, your energy, and what you say yes and no to.

Hank spent his evangelism years asking every pastor he met two questions: what are your priorities, and how do you maintain them? The gap between the answers was instructive. A lot of men could articulate biblical priorities clearly and live them poorly. That tension drove his ministry focus toward discipleship — specifically, one-on-one, life-on-life investment in men and women, a year at a time, through a process he called Intentional Discipleship.

He talks about travel ball and what it did to church attendance — his education director did a deep dive and identified an average of 700 people a weekend missing from a 3,500-member church because of travel sports. Rather than rail against it, Hank built a travel ball ministry: curriculum, voluntary hotel Bible studies, connection tools for families on the road. He's not anti-sports. He's pro-intentionality.

He closes with the question left by the previous guest: what's your best advice for time management as a pastor, balancing ministry, community, and family? It was the thesis of his doctoral work. His answer: rhythms. Not schedules. Rhythms. Sacred Fridays with Mary Ann. Date nights on the calendar. Accountability relationships he's been in for 40 years. Defining finishing well as establishing biblical priorities and maintaining them reasonably well over time.

That's a life's work distilled into one sentence. Worth the listen.

Chad Daniel pastors Community Church in El Dorado Springs, Missouri — deep in the bowels of Missouri. He's been going expositionally through Romans on Sunday mornings for about two and a half years and just hit chapter 11. On Wednesday nights, he runs a Q&A-style Bible study called Keys to the Kingdom, where he takes whatever questions his church brings and digs in.

The conversation starts with why people are suddenly asking about the Nephilim. Chad's theory: it's not really about giants. It's about people trying to re-anchor themselves in Scripture when the skeptics are getting louder. The frontal assault on Christianity — evolution, the existence of God — hasn't worked as well as people hoped. So now they're flanking. Find the weird stuff, poke holes in it, and if you can get someone to say "well, that part might not be true," you've chipped away at the whole foundation.

Chad's response? Lean into the weird stuff. He brought cardboard cutouts of spearheads to his Wednesday night group — standard Bronze Age spearheads at two to three inches, next to the ones excavated from archaeological digs in Israel at twenty-two to twenty-six inches. The visual alone changed the room. The Bible says there were giants. The archaeology says something very large was throwing very large spears. The physical evidence doesn't create faith, but it sure does confirm it.

They talk about Israel, the Holy Spirit as the forgotten person of the Trinity, and the difference between asking God why and questioning His authority. Chad spent five years asking God the wrong question — why — before realizing he was looking for an answer instead of looking for God. The Passover Seder comes up, and the parallels to Christ are staggering: the matzah has to be unleavened, pierced, and bruised. Isaiah 53 hiding in plain sight, and most people at the table have no idea.

Chad's Wednesday nights sound a lot like this podcast — he never knows what question is coming, and that's the whole point. One week it's Israel. The next week it's Bible translations and he never even opens his notes. He's learned to say "I don't know" out loud, and he thinks that might be one of the most important things a pastor can model.

The episode closes with a story Chad shares about a little girl he baptized a few weeks ago. The look on her face when she came out of the water — that's the thing that carries you when everything else falls apart.

Part 2 with Steve McAbee gets into the deeper things.

We start with a hard question: how do you love people whose lifestyle you don't approve of? How do you not endorse something while still showing Christ's love? Steve talks about the difference between making a judgment and being judgmental. You can say something is wrong without treating the person like they're wrong. Jesus did this with the woman caught in adultery — he didn't condone her sin, but he was present and real with her. He met her where she was, and then he said, "Go and sin no more." The church needs to do the same: meet people where they're at, but don't leave them where they're at.

Then Steve tells the story of his trip to India. He preached a crusade where he had a platform ten feet in the air and as far as he could see, thousands of people showed up. He preached the Mars Hill sermon — Paul encountering a culture with thousands of gods. The third time he gave an altar call, a thousand people came forward to be saved. Then he made a distinction: if you're just adding Jesus to your collection of gods, go home. If you're not willing to forsake all the other gods and hold only to Christ, you're not ready. By the end of it, two hundred and fifty people stayed.

He talks about what that taught him. In Hinduism, the mindset is addition — just one more, just one more. In Christianity, it's exclusivity — Christ is not one among many, he's one and only. That's a fundamental chasm between the two worldviews.

Steve also shares a story that haunts him. A pastor in India who was a government official left a good job — going from twenty dollars a day to nothing — to become a pastor. The community shunned him. They wouldn't sell to him, wouldn't trade with him. They threw bombs through his window. They tried to burn his crops and his house. He paid a real price for his faith.

And that's where Steve sits with the reality of American Christianity. We're comfortable. We're safe. We don't know what it costs to follow Jesus the way believers in other parts of the world do. And maybe that needs to change something in us.

The conversation ends with them running short because Steve's got a Palm Sunday sermon to preach, and he talks about Jesus' triumphal entry — the moment when the messianic secret is out and all gloves are off.

I sat down with Steve McAbee, and we talked about what happens when tragedy hits hard and faith gets tested.

Steve just got back from Kerrville, where on July 4, 2025, the Hill Country got hammered by historic flooding. The death toll was one hundred and thirty-seven. Many of them children. But what struck Steve wasn't just the tragedy — it was discovering that God was working in the middle of it. A couple stuck in their attic with water rising, praying, and a window that had never opened opens while they're praying. A couple floating down a river on a couch, rescued. These moments don't make the news. But they happened.

We got into the deeper things. The problem of pain. How a pastor sits with suffering instead of trying to fix it with answers. We talked about Job — suffering without deserving it. And we talked about something I think we need to hear: American Christians are comfortable. We're affluent. And we don't understand what it means to actually lose everything for your faith the way believers in other parts of the world do.

Steve also got real about the church. We've built this idea that we need to have it all together. We perform. We hide. And when people finally see who we actually are, they check out. He talked about seeing people not as image bearers of God, but as objects that get in our way. How we've built a culture that values accomplishments and what someone can do for us, instead of relationships. And he talked about something his dad taught him that I think applies to everything: control what you can control. Don't worry about changing the whole culture. Be faithful in your corner. Be present with the people in front of you.

Part 2 with Pastor Rodney Sprayberry picks up in the deep end and stays there.

Rodney and Chris work through the UFO and disclosure conversation — what to do when a congregant comes to you with an otherworldly encounter, why the church can't afford to be the last place people feel safe asking strange questions, and what it means that the Age of Disclosure is already underway whether the church is ready or not.

From there the conversation moves through the four theories of how the Nephilim survived the flood, why the surgical destruction of the Canaanites makes a lot more sense when you factor in DNA, and what it tells you about God that some of David's mighty men came from the giant clans and switched sides.

Rodney also weighs in on eschatology — not with a clean answer, but with the kind of honest wrestling that makes for good radio. He's fuzzy on the timing of the rapture, fuzzy on the millennium, and absolutely certain that American Christians have no business assuming they'll be the first generation in history to skip persecution.

The speed round includes Tertius — Paul's scribe in Romans who inserted himself into the letter and whose name literally means "three" because his mother apparently ran out of ideas — the Red Clay Strays, Stranger Things, and the hairy goat beings of Isaiah.

Also: Laodicea repented for 500 years, N.T. Wright doesn't believe in the rapture, and Psalm 22 is not what you think it is.

In Part 1 of this conversation, Chris sits down with Pastor Rodney Sprayberry of New Zion Baptist Church outside of Bonham, Texas — a pastor who has spent 32 years in ministry and the last decade realizing the Bible is a much stranger book than seminary led him to believe.

It starts with Bigfoot. Not as a joke, but as a genuine gateway into a conversation about the supernatural world the Bible describes and the church mostly ignores. Rodney traces his fascination with the unexplained back to childhood library books and a road in South Carolina called Latta Lights — and then forward to Michael Heiser, the divine council, and Deuteronomy 32:8-9.

From there, the conversation moves into the Tower of Babel, the sons of God, the Nephilim, and what it means that every major religious tradition in the world tells some version of the same story. Rodney makes the case that rationalism — not atheism — is the greatest threat to a biblical faith, because rationalism demands that the strange parts of Scripture fit into a neat category they were never meant to occupy.

As a hospice chaplain, Rodney has also seen things he can't explain — a grandfather clock that had never worked suddenly chiming eight times at the exact moment a patient died, a veteran who sat straight up in bed to say no before taking his last breath, and an aura he saw on a dying Native American shaman that opened a door to the gospel. He doesn't have categories for all of it. He's made peace with that.

Also in this episode: the divine council, Psalm 82, why Elohim is not a name, why angel is a job description and not a taxonomy, and why the under-40 crowd in his congregation is more ready for these conversations than anyone gives them credit for.