Put a person in a bare room with nothing but their own thoughts and a button that delivers a mild electric shock they'd already said they'd pay to avoid. Leave them there for fifteen minutes. In a study published in the journal Science, a striking number of people chose to shock themselves instead of sitting in silence: two-thirds of the men, and a quarter of the women. When we've lost the capacity to be still, what happens to our prayer, and what happens to us?

In this episode, Graham explores contemplative prayer, the ancient Christian practice of silence and loving attention to God, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the practice from Elijah meeting God in the thin silence at Horeb, to the stillness of the Psalms and Jesus rising before dawn to pray in a deserted place, to Mary sitting at Jesus' feet and the Spirit who prays within us in Romans 8, and he grounds the whole thing in the gospel of grace and the life of the Triune God. He engages with voices like Evagrius Ponticus, who named our distraction seventeen centuries early, alongside Augustine, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, and Simone Weil, together with the research of Timothy Wilson, Byung-Chul Han, and Cal Newport on attention, distraction, and the machine built to capture it. He offers practices you can start this week, from two minutes of silence to lectio divina, the Jesus Prayer, and the daily examen, and he looks honestly at the evangelical worries about contemplative prayer before answering them from inside the faith. And he asks what we lose when we can't be still, whether the God who spoke to Elijah in the thin silence is still speaking, and how a distracted people might learn to listen again.

Book recommendations: "Invitation to Solitude and Silence" by Ruth Haley Barton, "The Way of the Heart" by Henri Nouwen, "The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry" by John Mark Comer, and "Digital Monasticism" by Graham Joseph Hill.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

It's a Tuesday night in 2004. A pastor sits in his study with the door shut, a half-finished sermon on Isaiah 61 on the desk in front of him, freedom for the captives, release for the prisoners, and a glass in his hand. People in his church say he's the most spiritually alive person they know, and he's been drinking heavily every single day for years while almost nobody has the faintest idea. He's convinced himself that the day his church finds out is the day his ministry ends.

In this episode, Graham tells his own story of addiction and recovery, and builds from it a theology of grace and a picture of the church as a place where honesty is survivable. Unpacking the material from his book "Unshackled", Graham offers an account of addiction that holds four things together at once: a neurochemical dependence, an emotional refuge, a relational pattern, and a spiritual vacuum, and reads it through Augustine's restless heart in the Confessions, addiction as disordered love and a counterfeit sacrament. He works the Scriptures that recovery recognizes immediately, from the thirst of Psalm 42 and the cracked cisterns of Jeremiah 2, to Paul doing the very thing he hates in Romans 7, to the confession that heals in James 5:16, to grace made perfect in weakness in 2 Corinthians 12. He draws on Gerald May and Gabor Maté and the trauma research of Bessel van der Kolk, traces how Alcoholics Anonymous grew out of a Christian movement built on confession and surrender, and names the Australian picture with unusual candor, from the Rum Rebellion to a gambling economy that runs on the pokies and concentrates the harm in the most vulnerable communities. And he asks what it would take for a congregation to name addiction from the front, in the same tone it uses for grief or cancer, before anyone in the room has had to ask for help.

Book recommendations: "Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions" by Gerald G. May, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Gabor Maté, and "Unshackled: Breaking Addiction's Chains Through God's Grace" by Graham Joseph Hill.

If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015, and Alcoholics Anonymous on 1300 222 222. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline. All are free, confidential, and answered around the clock. Wherever you're listening, please find your local equivalents and talk to your doctor or a trusted person.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the church you can see is shrinking, and the church you can't see is the largest it has ever been? In a country town in New South Wales, Australia, a woman counts nineteen heads in a hall that once held two hundred and tells the story as though it were Christianity itself. On that very same Sunday, in Lagos and Nairobi and Seoul and São Paulo and Chennai, churches are packed to the doors and spilling into the street. The center of the Christian faith has moved, and most of us who grew up in Western churches were never told.

In this episode, Graham explores world Christianity, the astonishing shift of the faith toward Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He lays out the numbers, from 381 million European Christians in 1900 to a Global South (i.e., Majority World) that now holds most of the world's believers and is projected to hold 77 percent by 2050, and the prediction that China will soon have more Christians than any nation on earth. He traces the long story, from Antioch and the African theology of Augustine and Athanasius, to the Church of the East reaching Xi'an in the seventh century, to the Thomas Christians of Kerala, and shows how the center of this faith has always moved. He grounds it in Scripture, from the promise to Abraham that all the families of the earth would be blessed, to Pentecost and the languages God multiplied instead of erasing, to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, to Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 that we might grasp the love of Christ together with all the saints. He engages with voices such as Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, Kōsuke Koyama, Kwame Bediako, and Emmanuel Katongole, and he's honest about the hard questions, too: nominal growth, the prosperity gospel, and the danger of romanticizing the Majority World church. And he asks what all this means for a shrinking church in western Sydney, and for anyone who spent a lifetime assuming they were standing at the center.

Book recommendations: "World Christianity: An Introduction" by Graham Joseph Hill, "Global Christianity" and "Women in World Christianity" by Gina Zurlo, "Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West" by Lamin Sanneh, "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity" by Philip Jenkins.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

In July 2005, a pastor stood at his kitchen sink, poured a bottle of spirits down the drain, and fell to his knees on the floor and wept. He'd been preaching most Sundays for years, teaching in a theological college, and caring for a congregation, and drinking heavily every single day for about a decade while almost nobody knew. Someone in your church is living in that same gap this week. They're setting up the chairs, running the sound desk, teaching the four-year-olds, and going home to something they can't put down. In this episode, Graham tells his own story of addiction and recovery, and builds from it a theology of grace and a set of practices for the church. He's now been sober for more than twenty years, and he got there through God's grace, through his wife and family, through a doctor and a psychiatrist and a Christian counsellor, and through a church that carried him when he couldn't carry himself. Graham offers an account of addiction that holds four things together at once, a neurochemical dependence, an emotional refuge, a relational pattern, and a spiritual vacuum, and reads it through Augustine's restless heart, addiction as disordered love and misplaced worship, and the freedom of the one whom the Son sets free. He's honest about the second turning point, the ten years he stayed silent about the depression underneath the drinking, and about why so many people in our pews stay silent too, having noticed which sins get named from the pulpit with sympathy and which get named with contempt. He gives concrete practices a congregation can adopt this year, naming addiction from the front, knowing what to do when someone tells you, caring for the family, and supporting the leader who's struggling, and he names the wider picture too, including the conflict of interest that keeps gambling harm flowing through the most vulnerable communities in Australia. And he asks what it would take for a church to become a place where honesty is survivable. Book recommendation: "Unshackled: Breaking Addiction's Chains Through God's Grace" by Graham Joseph Hill, written after twenty years of sobriety for anyone still in the grip of something they can't put down. It walks through eight movements from denial to surrender, healing, forgiveness, amends, new habits, and community, with appendices mapping the Twelve Steps and the clinical picture. See the book on Amazon here: https://a.co/d/00Pdxeg6 If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline 1800 250 015, Family Drug Support 1300 368 186, Gambling Help 1800 858 858, and Alcoholics Anonymous 1300 222 222. In the United States: 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline, with Al-Anon at al-anon.org and AA at aa.org. Every one of these is free, confidential, and answered around the clock. Wherever you're listening from, please find your local equivalents and talk to your doctor or a trusted person. Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/ Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the person singing three rows back on a Sunday is using everything he has just to put his feet on the floor each morning? A man rings his pastor on a Tuesday and says he needs to tell him something, and asks him not to be shocked. He describes two years of mornings that felt like someone had packed his chest with wet sand. He'd been smiling at the church door through all of it, week after week, and nobody had any idea.

In this episode, Graham explores faith, anxiety, and depression through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He shows how honestly the Bible carries mental suffering, from the psalmist asking why his nephesh is cast down, to the deep calling to deep in Psalm 42 where the word is tehom, the chaos waters of Genesis, to Psalm 88 ending in the dark with no resolution and God letting it stand, to Elijah under the broom tree being given sleep and food before anything else, to Jesus in Gethsemane perilypos, his soul surrounded on every side by sorrow. He opens up the Greek merimnaō behind "do not be anxious," and the ancient diagnosis of acedia that Evagrius and John Cassian mapped in the desert centuries before we had our language for it. He tells the story of Charles Spurgeon, the most famous preacher of his age, who knew despair from the inside, and engages with voices like Martin Luther, William Cowper, Julian of Norwich, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Kelly Kapic, and Walter Brueggemann, alongside the research and reflection of Viktor Frankl, Curt Thompson, Jonathan Haidt, and Andrew Solomon. He's fair to the believers who worry that treatment and medication let us off the hook spiritually, and fair to the young woman with a diagnosis, a prescription, and an app that reminds her to breathe, who told him she'd never felt so managed and so alone at the same time. And he asks what it would take for the church to become a place where people can say the true thing out loud, and be held.

Book recommendations: "Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness" by Kathryn Greene-McCreight, "Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering" by Kelly M. Kapic, and "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression" by Andrew Solomon.

If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636, both available twenty-four hours a day. Wherever you are, please talk to your doctor or a trusted person.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919

Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12

Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef

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Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212

Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the good life your culture is selling you, the success, the status, the winning, turns out to be the very thing that costs you your soul? A skeptical teenager in the western suburbs of Sydney picks up the four Gospels to close the door on Christianity for good, and meets a Person on a road instead. The first followers of Jesus were called people of "the Way," and forty years later, Graham is still walking it. In this episode, Graham explores the Jesus Way and ten movements that carry us out of self-interest and into radical discipleship through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He walks through all ten: material success to spiritual riches, competition to compassion, power to servanthood, retribution to forgiveness, indifference to justice, conflict to peacemaking, legalism to grace, exclusion to embrace, expressive individualism to community, and frenetic activity to slow discipleship. He traces the Way through Scripture, from Isaiah's highway of holiness in the desert, to the early believers called followers of the hodos in Acts, to Jesus asking in Mark 8 what it profits a person to gain the world and forfeit the psyche, to the self-emptying kenosis of Philippians 2, to the call to abide, to menō, like branches on a vine in John 15. He engages with voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and Emmanuel Katongole, alongside the research of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Tim Kasser on individualism, the self, and what a life organized around money and image does to us. And he asks how the church recovers a Way that costs something without turning discipleship into a new performance, what these ten movements look like on an ordinary Tuesday in Sydney, and why the whole thing begins and ends with grace. Essential book: "Ten Movements of the Jesus Way" (InterVarsity Press) – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514015641/ Book recommendations: "Ten Movements of the Jesus Way" by Graham Joseph Hill, "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard. Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/ Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the story that was supposed to bury God starts to run out of road? A lifelong atheist, one of the sharpest people you'll meet, turns his coffee cup in his hands and admits he's begun to wonder whether we threw out something we needed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a leading atheist, announces she's now a Christian, and Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian. And a culture that spent two centuries sure it had outgrown faith keeps finding the oldest questions surfacing again.

In this episode, Graham explores the surprising rebirth of belief, and whether secularism is actually dying, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces a long thread of Scripture engaging a sceptical world, from Paul at the Areopagus in Acts 17, to "he has set eternity in the human heart" in Ecclesiastes 3, to the Word and the light the darkness has never put out in John 1, to the God of Isaiah who makes a way in the wilderness. He engages with voices like Augustine, Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Lesslie Newbigin, alongside the research of sociologists like Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Rodney Stark on the breakdown of the secularisation thesis. And he asks why the confident modern prediction that we would outgrow God has run into trouble, what kind of belief is being reborn and whether a Christianity valued only for its usefulness can hold, and where the church should look for hope when the decline in the West is real and the headline data is easy to get wrong.

Book recommendations: "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" by Justin Brierley, "Dominion" by Tom Holland, and "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the church builds its life around marriage and the family, and treats everyone else as a guest still waiting in line? A woman, faithful for eleven years, tells her pastor she still feels like a problem nobody has worked out how to solve. A widower watches the casseroles stop two weeks after the funeral. And a church that follows a single Saviour, and learned its faith from a single apostle, keeps treating singleness as a condition to be cured.

In this episode, Graham explores singleness, loneliness, and the church's obsession with marriage through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the Bible's surprisingly high view of the single life, from "it is not good for the man to be alone" in Genesis 2, to Paul calling both marriage and singleness a gift in 1 Corinthians 7, to Isaiah's promise of a name better than sons and daughters, to the God of Psalm 68 who sets the lonely in families. He engages with voices like Stanley Hauerwas, Henri Nouwen, Augustine, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Rodney Clapp, alongside the research of Vivek Murthy, Robert Putnam, and John Cacioppo on the loneliness epidemic. And he asks why a church that follows a single Lord treats marriage as the summit of a faithful life, how we can honour marriage and singleness together without making either one the measure of the other, and what it would take for the church to become the family God always meant it to be.

Book recommendations: "7 Myths About Singleness" by Sam Allberry, "Redeeming Singleness" by Barry Danylak, and "Spiritual Friendship" by Wesley Hill.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode:

https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Listen Notes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800