No BS Bishop

On this episode, I’m inviting you to slow down with me and think about something I believe we need now more than ever, and that is the power of beauty. Not surface beauty and not decoration, but the kind of beauty that grows out of a life grounded in love. I’ve come to believe that lesser values than love easily devolve into BS, and I’m just not willing to live that way anymore. We’re living in a...

In this episode I ask a simple question: are you going to live for love, or are you going to die by hate? I grew up in a church tradition where people were often asked to decide whether they were going to heaven or hell if they died that night. I understand the intention behind that question, but after more than fifty years of pastoral ministry, I’ve come to believe there’s a better question to as...

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 wh...

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 f...

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...

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 h...

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 com...

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 eventuall...

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...

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 traj...

The Bible has been co-opted as a book of hate, and I am here to tell you that is BS. Love alone is credible. Love alone tells the truth. Whenever any lesser value replaces love, it quickly turns into manipulation, fear, and spiritual violence. In this episode, I speak plainly about how Scripture gets cherry-picked and weaponized, used to shame, control, and threaten people into belief systems that...

In this episode, I strip spirituality down to what actually holds: faith, hope, and love. I’m not interested in religious performance, fear-based preaching, or bait-and-switch faith. Love alone is credible, and if love isn’t at the center, everything else eventually collapses into noise. I challenge the idea that spirituality is mostly about what happens after we die. I believe eternity isn’t some...

I’m a pastor of half a century, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in fifty years, it’s that we as people of faith should be known for one thing and one thing alone: Love. In this episode, I’m talking about why I’ve decided that love has won my full attention. We live in a world that is loud, noisy, and frankly, full of bait-and-switch "spirituality." I call that the BS of religious c...

I believe love is credible. I believe it is the only thing that truly stands the test. And if I am honest, it can stink to love people. In this episode of the No BS Bishop Podcast, I talk plainly about the cost of loving others when it hurts. I have been betrayed. I have had promises broken. I have watched people disappear. I have felt fear, disappointment, and exhaustion show up fast and loud. An...

I hear people ask all the time, “What is God’s purpose for my life?” and while I can’t tell you whether you should be a veterinarian or a stay-at-home dad, I can tell you that the purpose of life is not to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The real purpose is to be aimed at Love—love for ourselves, our neighbors, our families, our communities, and even our enemies. We get so easily distracted and bese...

Reflecting on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I share how his writings saved me as a young teenager navigating the astronomical racial tensions of 1960s Milwaukee. I’m unpacking his profound idea of a "soul generated by love," exploring how a heart full of grace is the only true requirement for greatness. We often mistake our lives for a competition, thinking we have to conquer...

This world can feel like a dangerous place—not just because of those who do evil, but because of the rest of us who see it and do nothing. In this episode, we cut through the noise and get to the heart of what it truly means to live a life that matters. I’m here to talk about The Way of Love, and I believe it demands three things from us: Kindness, Action, and Change. It’s not a soft or passive id...

In this episode, I’d like to share something I believe is essential for our time: the evolution of love. Love isn’t static—when it stands still, it stops being love at all. Just as humanity has grown in strength, understanding, technology, and faith, so too must our grasp of love deepen, widen, and mature. I’ll reflect on how our understanding of God, Scripture, and human relationships has gently...

In this episode, I’m stripping away the "bait and switch" of lesser values to focus on the highest magnetism in human existence: The Sacred Word of Love. Inspired by the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane’s legendary album, I explore why we must stop treating the word "love" as a glib, throwaway cliché. I share a moving observation of a family interaction that reminded me how easi...

"Love is the only answer, but medieval talk about love does nothing." I’ve been sitting with those words from the mystic Thomas Merton, and they’ve hit me right where I live. If you’ve been with me for the last seven years, you know my creed: I am alive to love, and I believe all lesser values devolve easily into "BS"—that bait-and-switch that keeps us from the reality of how w...

Advent invites us to celebrate the multiple paths of how Love is defined by this greatest of all stories in Christmas. “For God so loved the world…that He gives us His Son.” SO LOVED that He gave. SO LOVED that the virgin Mary was visited by the angel of the Lord to announce that she had been chosen. SO LOVED that shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night were serenaded by a choir of ange...

For six years now, this show has been a labor of love for me, a discussion of the pinnacle of life: Love, and love alone. It is the credible, supreme value for my entire religion. Today, I’m diving deep into my topic: the transcendent supremacy of love. I'm convinced love is this power, this supreme, nuclear force that stands above all others. It’s what launches lives, families, and churches....

In this episode, I am asking you two fundamental questions: Who do you love? And what do you love? Believe it or not, there is a lot more there than meets the eye. I invite you to sit down and actually make a list. Whether it is your spouse, your friends, your "fur baby" like my dog Dixie, playing a guitar, or even just a solid nap, identifying these loves establishes your priorities. I...

I'm here to tell you, love is a far more sustaining human practice when it's taken into a practical work of our life. It's the heavy lifting of life the mountain climb, the marathon, because if we don't succeed at the project of love, far too many other things just don't matter. Listen in as I give you these 10 practical practices, including: Being a hospitable person, welcomin...

I believe a hard truth: We, folks of faith, are not here to defend the institutions of Christianity, nor are we here to defend the institutionalized leaders who demand unquestioning allegiance. Institutional Christianity has its own "spiritual asbestos" that needs to be removed. All the passion we spend defending the institution should be redirected only to love God, to love our neighbor...