Dominic sat down with Shelbi Shutt for a thoughtful conversation about suffering, faith, and what redemption looks like over time.

Shelbi is a pastor, speaker, and writer who has spent years helping people navigate faith honestly, especially in seasons marked by limitation and uncertainty. She’s served in church leadership for a long time, including A Jesus Church in Portland, and she currently serves at Church of the City New York with pastor Jon Tyson. She has also been involved with work through Alpha USA, Practicing the Way, and other formation spaces focused on lived discipleship.

In this conversation, Shelbi shares about being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a teenager and how that moment reshaped her sense of identity, faith, and the future she imagined. She talks openly about grief, weakness, and the slow work of learning how to stay present to God without rushing toward easy answers. Together, Dominic and Shelbi reflect on dependence, presence, and belonging, drawing from Scripture and voices like Eleonore Stump, Augustine, Irenaeus and John Swinton.

They also talk about forgiving God and why the church’s response to disability and long-term suffering needs to be rethought. The conversation keeps returning to one central idea: healing doesn’t always mean things change, but it does mean not being alone.

Mentioned in this episode: Rich & Lydia Dicas - Still Here EP

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Dominic Done speaks with Stan Jantz, author, publisher, and founding CEO of the Come and See Foundation, the organization behind the global distribution of The Chosen. Stan has spent decades shaping how the Christian story is told, from leading a major Christian bookstore chain to co-authoring more than 75 books, and now helping bring the life of Jesus to audiences around the world through one of the most watched faith-based series ever made.

Much of the conversation centers on The Chosen and why it has struck such a nerve. Stan talks about how the series presents Jesus as attentive, present, and fully human, and why that matters for people who feel tired of religious performance or wounded by church culture. They reflect on moments from the show that slow the story down, linger with pain and doubt, and allow viewers to encounter Jesus rather than be argued into belief.

The conversation also moves through Stan’s own story of change. He reflects on leaving a successful family business, the quiet grief that often accompanies real calling, and the strange in-between space where faith has to be lived without certainty. Dominic and Stan talk about imagination, beauty, and storytelling not as decoration, but as the way faith becomes believable again, especially for those who have been disappointed or disillusioned.

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In this episode of Pursuing Faith, Dominic sits down with his friend Jesse Lusko, a pastor in Portland whose life and ministry were reshaped by a mental health breakdown that cost him the church he planted and nearly his life. They talk openly about childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, and the months of despair that followed his collapse, including stepping away from ministry and leaving the city he once loved.

Years later, Jesse returned to Portland with clarity and hard-won self-knowledge, planted a new church, and now leads a thriving community in one of the most secular cities in the country, baptizing people who once identified as atheists. This conversation explores mental health in the church, faith after breakdown, and the quiet work of return. It’s an honest and hopeful look at what can remain when certainty collapses but faith endures.

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