The Arsenal Church

What if the thing your faith trained you to pay attention to is the thing that quietly made you who you are? Chad closes the Unforced series with two weeks in Costa Rica — a trauma retreat with 50 veterans, an ant hauling a pink flower petal across a path, and six tattooed men standing in a row staring up into a tree at a macaw. None of that is the point. What happened in his body while he watched...

What if confession was never about getting back into God's good graces — and was never supposed to cost you your dignity? Chad's back from two weeks away, and the distance made something obvious: every practice in this series has been the same practice wearing different clothes. Noticing. Lament. The table. Rest. All of them are coming out of hiding. This is the week that says it out loud. The que...

You don't have to believe what I believe to belong in this space. Eric Villalpando tells his story, and it starts in two rooms on the same morning — a Catholic church and this one. He grew up fully Catholic: Catholic school, every sacrament, a theology degree from St. Mary's. He's careful about what happened next. He didn't deconstruct, exactly. He demystified. The hinge is a summer at Deer Creek...

Rest isn't the reward at the end of the design. Rest is the design. Britney Carrasco teaches on Sabbath — and opens by admitting she might be the last person who should. She's a nurse and an Enneagram two, wired to earn love by doing things for people. Hand her a to-do list for rest and she'd dominate it. Two things she won't let you skip. Humans arrive on day six, which makes the first full day o...

A third of the Psalms are lament. Church gave grief one sentence. Week three of Unforced opens with a confession: Chad is not good with grief. Not his, not yours. He traces where that comes from — personality, a nervous system trained over deployments in Iraq, and mostly how he was raised, including and maybe especially in church. Nobody taught him to grieve. He was taught to get past it. They're...

What if God isn't showing up — and you're just finally waking up? Week two of Unforced starts with a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral, who came home from a walk with his dog covered in burrs and, instead of grumbling and brushing them off like every human before him, put one under a microscope. That's where Velcro came from. The burr was always sticky. Nature was never hiding anything. Someb...

What if the life you're trying to earn is one you've already been given? Chad opens Unforced — an eight-week series on the rhythms of grace — by going back to where the summer left off. Four people stood on this stage and told their stories, and across four very different lives one word kept surfacing. It wasn't a churchy one. It was safe. From there he opens Matthew 11 in Eugene Peterson's transl...

What if the faith that formed you also handed you the things you'd spend years unlearning? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop knowing people as a category and actually hear what they've lived. Taryn Tipton shares her faith journey: growing up in a small town where church, school, and family were so intertwined that "every part of my life was connected and colored by church." It w...

What happens when you finally learn the history of the church that raised you? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop filing people away as "the guy in the back row" and actually hear what they've lived. Chad opens by introducing Nate: one of the kindest and smartest people you'll meet, and someone who has been in church a long time. Then Nate Kindig tells his story. He grew up South...

What if the hardest thing to admit at church is that you're not okay? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop saying a quick "hi" and actually hear what people survived to walk through the door. Chad opens on why the #1 source of awe across cultures isn't a canyon or the sky but *other people*, and how moral beauty — watching one human being love another — is the thing that undoes us....

What happens when the house you built your whole faith inside of suddenly stops feeling safe? We're kicking off a new series — Arsenal Stories — on a simple conviction: you've been saying hi to people for years without ever knowing what they survived to walk through the door. Chad opens by tracing why the number one source of awe across cultures isn't the sky or a canyon — it's other people — and...

To close our "Who Told You That?" series, Chad opened the floor to your questions — submitted live via Slido — with Britney Carrasco moderating. It's an honest, unscripted conversation about everything the series stirred up. Chad lays the groundwork in Genesis 3 — the garden, and how the real story of the Fall is distrust that makes us hide, not just rule-breaking — then works through your hardest...

What if "the fear of the Lord" was never meant to be terror? In the final message of our Who Told You That? series, Pastor Chad Belew traces the difference between fear and awe — from a blackout patrol base in Baghdad to a garden where God came walking in the cool of the day, asking not "gotcha," but "Where are you?" If you've spent your life bracing for a God who's disappointed in you, this one r...

The most famous verse in Christianity may be the most misread. Chad takes John 3:16 back to the late-night conversation it actually came from — Jesus and Nicodemus — and shows how a verse we memorized as a gospel-tract about heaven, hell, and a transaction at the cross was, in the original Greek, never about any of that. "Born again" is better read "born from above." "Perish" means lost, not damne...

We trained our dogs to stay off the couch — and they’re perfect angels, right up until no one’s watching. Chad opens there because it’s how a lot of us learned to follow God: behave when you feel watched, fall apart when you don’t. This message names the fear underneath that kind of obedience — the quiet question, "if I’m not afraid of getting caught, what’s to stop me?" — and gently turns it over...

Chad opens with his own prescription bottle and the chair he sits in once a week to talk with his VA therapist — and asks a question most pastors won't: what is fear-based theology actually doing to the bodies of the people in the pews? Pulling Edwards, chick tracts, and modern wrath-preachers next to trauma research, neuroscience, and his own EMDR work, he makes the case that a God installed in t...

For weeks we've been tracing where our picture of God actually came from — and last week we named the framework most of us inherited: penal substitutionary atonement, where sin is a legal problem, God is a judge, and Jesus absorbs the punishment we owe. This week Chad asks the question that was left hanging: if that's not it, what does Jesus actually say the human problem is? The answer reframes n...

Most of us were handed one answer to "Why did Jesus die?" — God required a payment, Jesus took the punishment we deserved, the debt is settled. We were told this is simply the gospel, the plain meaning of the Bible. But that framework has a name (penal substitutionary atonement), a birthplace (an 11th-century feudal court), and a history — and it isn't the one the church held for its first thousan...

Picture God looking at you on your worst day, right after you've done the thing you swore you'd never do again. What expression is on His face? For a lot of us, the honest answer isn't "love" — and that gap between the God we'd describe and the God we actually brace for runs deeper than we realize. Chad names the difference between our God concept (what we say we believe) and our God image (what w...

What if the deepest question isn't "what do I believe?" but "who told me to see it this way?" Opening with the "overview effect" — what astronauts describe when they see Earth from space and watch borders, tribes, and arguments shrink while our shared belonging grows — Chad launches a new series asking where our maps of God, ourselves, and our neighbors actually came from. Walking back through Gen...

If Christianity is a relationship and not just a religion, then what happens when we actually look at it like one? On Resurrection Sunday, Chad reads the whole story — garden to cross to empty tomb — through a relational and psychological lens, and lands somewhere most Easter sermons don't. The problem in Eden wasn't bad behavior; it was broken trust. The serpent didn't make Eve defiant first, he...

We've been taught to read the cleansing of the temple as a flash of righteous anger — Jesus losing his temper over noisy commerce in church. But the night he arrived, Jesus walked in, looked around at everything, and left. The table-flipping came the next day, on purpose. This is the story of what he actually saw: not a worship service gone sloppy, but a "city-temple-state system" where religion,...

We tend to read Jesus' "triumphal entry" as a humble, gentle ride into town — but for the people watching, it was loaded with meaning. Pastor Chad walks us back into Passover week in Jerusalem, where a city remembering its liberation from Egypt was now living under Roman oppression. On the same week, two processions enter the city: Pilate riding in from the west on a war horse, surrounded by soldi...

We tend to think the world has gotten darker — but maybe our vision just needs recalibrating. Just like your eyes need light to reveal the color that was there all along, Jesus came as the light to show us what humanity looks like at its best: love in action. Walking through the healing of the bent-over woman in Luke 13, Chad reframes the old "What Would Jesus Do?" question by watching Jesus break...

We're wired to miss the gorilla in the room. Chad opens with the famous "invisible gorilla" experiment to show how attention works: when fear narrows our focus, we go into threat-detection mode and our world shrinks to enemies, categories, and the next disaster. But awe does the opposite — it widens the frame until people stop being symbols and start being human again. Walking through Mary and Mar...