Part 2 picks up on a shared conviction: that the version of Christianity worth chasing isn't one made in our own image — comfortable parts kept, hard parts quietly edited out.

From there, the conversation goes places this podcast doesn't often go — into what's actually happening at communion, why Lutherans baptize infants, and why being at peace with mystery might be a mark of mature faith rather than a lack of answers. Chris shares a personal story about his grandmother's funeral that ties it all together in an unexpected way.

The speed round is a good time, as always, and the episode closes with a question passed down from a previous guest — one that gets an answer more honest than expected.

Pastor Jim Pearl leads St. John's Lutheran Church in St. Johns, Michigan, and this is his first appearance on Ministry on the Move, though it's the McNeils' second visit to the church itself. Jim spent 56 years as a Catholic before Grace — capital G, in the Lutheran sense — got hold of him. He and his wife were searching for something more, found a Lutheran church that felt like home, and three years later Jim was ordained. He was installed at St. John's in February 2020, just weeks before COVID changed everything.

The conversation opens with the basics: the three solas — grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone — as a two-minute summary of Lutheran belief. Jim explains why liturgy matters to him: the sense of praying in the footsteps of 2,000 years of believers, and the biblical depth embedded in the readings and structure that some traditions may not fully appreciate. He places LCMS Lutheranism in the middle of the spectrum, between the more progressive ELCA and the more conservative Wisconsin Synod.

From there, the conversation turns to Martin Luther himself. Jim and Chris walk through the Diet of Worms — the two simple questions put to Luther, whether the books were his and whether he'd recant — and the humility in Luther's request to go home and pray before answering. Jim makes the case that Luther never wanted to start a new denomination. He wanted to reform corruption, particularly the indulgence trade that was exploiting poor people, and he remained, in his own mind, Catholic until his death.

The conversation lands on legalism — Chris's own reflection that we don't clean people up in order to bring them to Jesus, we bring them to Jesus and let Him do the cleaning. Jim agrees, and the two land on a shared conviction that this impulse, more than any doctrinal dispute, may be one of the things the modern church most needs to let go of.

The episode closes with a shared conviction: the church has time to lose in denominational infighting it doesn't have. The real work is going outside the walls, being the hands and feet of Jesus, and remembering that the fight was never supposed to be with each other in the first place.

Part 2 opens with an idea that reframes the whole conversation: contemporary worship music may have quietly become the new catechism — the primary way kids absorb what they believe about God, often shaped by an industry more interested in selling a product than teaching theology. Kolby ties this to a broader pattern of outsourcing — dinner to restaurants, the lawn to the neighbor kid, and spiritual formation to church staff. He shares a gutting story about a woman in her 70s who told his wife, in tears, "I've lost my children" — not to death, but to a faith that never took root at home despite years of youth group and mission trips.

Kolby pushes back hard on low expectations for kids, telling the story of training children as young as sixth grade to lead their peers to Christ, and of a twelve-year-old girl named Ellen who memorized the entire book of James because her leader challenged the kids to memorize it alongside her — and did it himself.

The conversation turns to what a pastor can actually control: guarding his own walk with God, guarding his family, and preaching truth without manufacturing revival through manipulation. Real change is a move of the Holy Spirit, not a program.

The speed round covers "God's Smuggler" as Kolby's most-reread book, Joseph as his favorite Bible character, and a funeral story — a grieving, atheist mother who tried to climb into her son's casket to hug him one last time. The episode closes with Kolby's testimony: assurance of a calling since age seven, and a moment years later where God asked him to trade his ambition for something simpler — sitting on the porch with a cup of tea, content even if everything else were stripped away.

Kolby King is a camp pastor who stepped in at the last minute for his mentor Bubba Wright at the Watering Hole Cowboy Church youth camp. He holds a doctorate in biblical archaeology, with a dissertation focused on the final week of Jesus' life and the culture surrounding it — but his testimony starts earlier than that.

At 15, despite years of church attendance, Kolby realized he didn't actually know God. That drove him to start reading Scripture on his own, and within a month of devouring the New Testament, his life changed. By 18, God placed him as pastor of a small, dying inner-city church in Oklahoma City — poverty-stricken, no baptisms in a decade, surrounded by prostitution, addiction, and violence. He learned ministry there in the most unfiltered way possible: door to door, sitting on porches with men holding beer cans, watching a woman who'd been prostituting herself to fund an addiction give her life to Christ.

The conversation turns to a hard truth Kolby has carried since: the church in America has largely lost personal evangelism. He tells two stories about passing by people in need — once at a revival, watching person after person walk past a homeless woman digging through a dumpster, and once with his own family in Washington D.C., choosing to steer his daughter away from a homeless person on a subway grate rather than stop. His wife's response afterward cuts straight to the point: his daughter didn't just miss an opportunity to help. She watched her father see a person in need and walk the other way.

Kolby lays out three things he believes have to happen for real revival in America: the church has to return to the foot of the cross, the gospel has to leave the building, and the next generation has to be reached — not through church attendance alone, but through parents taking spiritual leadership at home. The conversation closes on what the gospel actually is, and how easily it gets reduced to head knowledge instead of surrendered lordship — including a story about training sixth graders to lead their peers to Christ, and a pushback email Kolby received objecting to the word "Lord" in a gospel tract.

Part 2 with Paul McQuery moves from the practical realities of pastoring a small church into a long, thoughtful conversation about eschatology.

Paul contrasts his years at Valley Grove — a mid-sized church with a full staff — with Blue Grove, where he's the only paid staff member and everything runs on volunteers. He talks about earning trust in a new church: the advice to change nothing but your underwear in the first six months, and his personal rule that no one should ever have to question whether he loves them.

From there, the conversation shifts into eschatology. Paul walks through the four major orthodox frameworks — dispensational premillennialism, historical premillennialism, postmillennialism, and amillennialism — using Romans 11, Matthew 24, the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, and the significance of Noah to work through where he lands and why. He holds his convictions firmly while giving every other view a fair hearing, anchored in what Albert Mohler calls theological triage — knowing what's primary, secondary, and tertiary.

The speed round covers Boaz, Joseph, and Joshua as favorite Bible characters, the Bee Gees, Moonlighting, and fishing as the best way to waste an hour. Paul closes in prayer.

Paul McQuery pastors Blue Grove Baptist Church — this is our first visit there, though Paul has been on the podcast before and pastored Valley Grove in Stephenville when the McNeils sang there for several years.

The conversation centers on Paul's decision to leave a thriving church — attendance up, giving up, double-digit baptisms, deacons telling him the church was better than when he arrived — for a smaller, rural congregation less than a third the size. He walks through why: a lifelong passion for small communities, a conviction that numbers were never the measure of faithfulness, and a clear sense that God was calling him there. His philosophy on transitions: "You are where you are until you're not." He stayed fully pastoral to Valley Grove — funerals, hospital visits, everything — right up until the move.

Midway through, a tornado warning cuts the conversation short. Chris and his family cleared out, drove 30 miles south, waited out the storm, and came back to finish. It's real, it's unplanned, and it's part of the episode.

The conversation closes on why obedience rarely makes sense in the moment — Moses got his sign 40 years later, Abraham was told to go without being told where. Faith, not logic, is the whole point.

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.