In this episode I return to the foundation of everything I am trying to do here each week. Love creates value where there might not otherwise be value. The way you choose to love shapes the quality of your life and the lives of the people around you. Nobody can love the way you love, so the question becomes what you will do with that gift.

I talk about three essential principles that guide this whole journey. Love creates value. Each of us has a unique fingerprint of love to offer the world. And the human condition itself is hardwired to love and to be loved. When we live into those truths we begin to see how love strengthens us emotionally, spiritually, and even physically.

I also reflect on Mother Teresa’s powerful insight that there is more hunger for love in this world than there is for food. That is not sentimental language. That is a challenge to how we live right now in our homes, our relationships, and even in our nation. Love is not agreement or weakness. Love is the work that keeps us alive.

So today I am inviting you again to lean into love on purpose. Do not wait for a better time or a better mood. Tell someone you love them. Choose kindness. Choose presence. Choose the holy habit of love and watch what begins to change around you.

In this episode of I’m Alive to Love, I want to talk with you about something that sits right at the center of our lives. How do we arrive as our authentic self through love. So many of us spend years sending the actor out on stage because we have been hurt, disappointed, or afraid. Today I’m inviting you to come back to your truest self and let love be the guardian of your heart.

From the very first breath we take as a baby, every one of us is searching for love. Our story keeps being written every day by what we receive and what we give. I want to help you see how your life story has been shaped by kindness and by pain, and how you still have the power to write the next chapter with courage and compassion.

We also talk about something very practical. The daily habits of love. Kindness, generosity, patience, courtesy, forgiveness, and joy. These are not abstract ideas. These are the ingredients that shape your story and the stories of the people you meet along the way.

My hope for you in this episode is simple. That you rise and shine as your authentic self and choose love again today. Because love never fails, and even one small act of love can change someone’s story, including your own.

In this episode I’m talking about what the book of James calls the royal rule of scripture which is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. I believe that one command helps all the rest of the Bible make sense.

James challenges us in a direct and uncomfortable way. He asks whether we are showing favoritism to people in what I call the costumes of power while quietly moving those in weakness or poverty to the margins. If the royal rule really is love then how we respond to the least of these reveals what we actually believe.

I reflect on how churches including ones I have served have sometimes been drawn toward influence endorsement and appearances instead of toward the wounded presence of Christ among the poor. That is not an abstract idea for me. It is something I have had to confront personally over a lifetime in ministry.

So this episode is an invitation to notice where power has become attractive to us and where love may have been set aside. It is also an encouragement to return to something simple and beautiful which is learning to see Jesus in the people right in front of us and learning to say with intention and honesty I love you.

Let’s explore together what it really means to live by the royal rule of scripture and do something beautiful in the world today.

On this episode, I continue my conversation about love and the spiritual refugees - the 45 million people in this nation who have stepped away from the church but have not stepped away from spirituality. After pastoring for decades, I retired not to escape the work, but to go back and find out what went wrong and to listen. I believe this is a grand time for the church in America to recover what has been lost, and that begins with love and with paying attention.

As I look back over my own life and ministry, I’m willing to own my part. I regret that I spoke too often in the language of church instead of the language of the world around me. Because of love, we cannot assume people should understand us. Because of love, we must do the heavy lifting of communicating in ways people can actually hear and receive.

Many people are still deeply spiritual, but they have walked away from what I call “church incorporated.” They grew wise to manipulation, shame, pressure, and systems that no longer helped them live with freedom and dignity. My calling now is not to tell them to come back, but to listen—to learn from them and to help recover what has been lost with kindness, honesty, and compassion.

The biggest mistake we make is thinking we still have time. Be present. Be kind. Love more. Love now. Speak the language of the people you meet, regulate your heart even when you disagree, and find a way to look people in the eye and say the three most holy words in the human language: I love you.

I’m Bishop Randy Dean, and I’m here because I believe we are alive to love and everything else can drift into something hollow if we’re not careful. I don’t want to waste your time with anything I don’t truly mean. I want to make one connection with you, and that connection is love. If you’re new here, pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and let me share what I’m seeing in our world when it comes to spirituality in America.

I’ve been giving my life to reaching people I call spiritual refugees, the millions who have stepped away from organized religion but not from spirituality itself. These are people I deeply love. My calling is simple. I’m going after the one, just like the shepherd Jesus described, not to fix them or send them back, but to love them and listen. That’s it. No agenda, no pressure, no attempt to pull them back into something that may have hurt them.

What I’ve heard in their stories is real pain. There is trauma tied to institutions, to leadership failures, to exclusion, to systems that lost their way. At the same time, I’ve seen leaders exhausted and overwhelmed trying to keep something afloat that may already be sinking. And through all of it, I keep coming back to this. If love isn’t the center, if love isn’t the only thing we’re offering, then we’ve missed it.

So my role now is not to rebuild institutions. My role is to love and to listen. To bear burdens. To sit with people where they are. I believe if we ever find our way forward, it will be through a return to love as the only creed that matters. Until then, I’ll keep showing up this way, inviting you to breathe, to be present, and to say the words that can still change everything. I love you.

Today we are tackling the hardest subject of love in just two words: Enemy Love. Most of us have been trained to think that "loving our enemies" just means being nice to people who gossip about us. But I’m here to step in the path and say that being nice is not the same as loving. Jesus flipped the script on a world built on "us versus them," and his way of enemy love eventually got him a death sentence.

In this episode, we’re going deep into the elimination of the "pitched battle" between good people and bad people. I’m talking about managing your own soul not the other person and learning to see people as "wholes, not souls" to be won or conquered. This isn't a once-and-for-all arrival; it’s a heavy-lifting mountain climb.

I refuse to be the enemy of anyone, anywhere, at any time. It’s a tall order, but it’s the only way to live that’s superior to all the BS of our world. Ugly is getting done to death—let’s go out and do something beautiful instead.

Want to dive deeper? I’d love to hear from you or share more about the "heavy lifting of love." You can reach me at RandyDeanMinistries@gmail.com.

In this episode, I’m reflecting on what it really means to take a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves. Borrowing from the fourth step of recovery, I invite us to look honestly into the “kitchen of our soul” and ask what’s really cooking inside of us. If we want to live lives rooted in love, we have to face the places where anger, resentment, or hatred might still be burning within us.

Too often in religious spaces we become experts at taking other people’s moral inventory while ignoring our own. But the invitation of Jesus is something far more demanding and far more beautiful: love your enemies. That kind of love doesn’t come from bumper-sticker spirituality. It comes from deep inner work, from examining ourselves honestly so we stop projecting our own brokenness onto the world around us.

I explore what Jesus meant when he said, Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. This isn’t about flawless performance, it’s about setting our sights on the far horizon of love. When our aim is love, it reshapes how we see enemies, neighbors, and even ourselves. The work of faith becomes less about condemning others and more about transforming our own hearts.

At the end of the day, the revolution I’m talking about is simple but demanding: a life devoted to love alone. That means breathing in love, letting go of fear and retribution, and learning to say the three words that can turn a life around, I love you. When we commit to that path, we begin to do something beautiful in a world that’s already had far too much ugly.

Why Love?

After seven years behind this mic and more than seven decades of living, I want to answer a simple but dangerous question: why love? Why has love become the center of my faith, my work, and this podcast?

This episode is personal. I talk about growing up in a home shaped by addiction and silence, the moment my father finally said “I love you,” and how that single sentence changed the trajectory of my life. From the Lord’s Prayer to Love’s Creed, from Jesus’ call to lay down our lives to the words of Brené Brown, I trace why real love is not sentimental, commercialized, or safe. Real love is gritty, justice-seeking, and life-risking.

I’m not interested in religious performance, slogans, or spiritual noise. I’m interested in the kind of love that actually transforms people, communities, and faith itself. The kind of love Jesus talked about. The kind that costs something.

If you’ve ever felt burned out on religion but still hungry for meaning, beauty, and truth, this conversation is for you.

I’m Bishop Randy Dean. I’m alive to love. And I’m glad you’re here.