Jesus, Justice + Mercy: Bold faith, radical love and justice for the church

We use " shalom " as a Hebrew hello and goodbye, and mostly leave it there. But this word carries way more weight than a greeting. In Hebrew, shalom describes a state where nothing is missing, broken, or lacking; it shares a root with the word for paying a debt in full. To bring shalom means to restore what's broken back to completeness. You don't just have it. You make it. Thi...

Hesed: Not Kindness. Stubborn Covenant Love. Your Bible probably says kindness. Or mercy. Or lovingkindness. None of them quite get there. Hesed is the Hebrew word that shows up roughly 250 times in the Old Testament, and no single English translation has ever fully captured it. It's not a feeling that might produce a kind act. It's covenant loyalty in motion: the love that doesn't...

Mishpat. Your Bible probably calls it judgment, and that translation isn't wrong; it's just incomplete. In Hebrew, mishpat comes from the root shafat, meaning "to judge, to govern, to set right." It appears over 400 times in the Old Testament, and throughout Torah and the Prophets, the verdict it describes lands in favor of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant,...

Your Bible has been quietly mistranslating a word that shows up over 150 times, and the gap has shaped centuries of Christian formation. This week: tzedakah. Usually translated as "righteousness." Almost always meant something closer to justice. We trace it from the Hebrew prophets through to the Greek New Testament, where tzedakah becomes dikaiosynē , the same word your English Bible re...

I missed last week. Here's why. We lost one of our cats, and grief doesn't keep a production schedule. But there's more. After two years of this work, I find myself worn out, and I've been sitting with that honestly. So today I'm giving you a word: Shabbat. Not as a self-care buzzword but as a theological practice, commanded, ancient, and countercultural. And its companion...

Pentecost and social justice belong in the same sentence, and this Season 3 finale makes the case that they always have. This episode goes back to the room before the wind came. The locked room. Full of frightened, grieving, failing people. And that is exactly where Jesus starts. Two Pentecost accounts belong together. Acts 2 is the outer Pentecost: loud, public, multilingual. But Joel's prop...

Mental health in the church is one of the most underprepared gaps in the Christian community, and for families in crisis, that gap has real consequences. This episode is personal. Kristen reads a piece of writing kept private for years, a story about her son, suicidal ideation, and a 5150. After reading it aloud, she pauses to name what her body still carries: not just memory, but PTSD. The hyperv...

Women in church leadership is not a new idea; it's a biblical one. The record is full of women leading, prophesying, teaching, and apostling. The church just worked very hard to make you forget them. In this episode, we go directly into the text: Deborah, judge and military commander. Huldah, the prophet, the king sent his priests to. Junia, the apostle whose name was changed to erase her. Ph...

Grief doesn’t arrive alone. It brings everything you’ve ever lost with it. And the church has rarely known what to do with that.  In this episode, we sit with the women of Scripture who grieved loudly, honestly, and without apology, and ask what they knew that the church has largely forgotten.   The Women We Cover: •  Naomi | who insisted on an honest name for her pain and refused to perform welln...

What if the most dangerous thing happening in American Christianity right now isn't happening in Washington, it's happening in us?  In this episode, Kristen sits with two early voices: Paul writing to a fractured community inside Caesar's Rome and James writing to people who were hearing all the right things and walking away unchanged. Between them, they have a diagnosis for exactly...

Centering prayer isn’t about emptying your mind or saying the right things. According to Kieawnie Clar, it’s about finally stopping and letting God do what God needs to do. In this episode of Jesus, Justice and Mercy, Kristen sits down with Kieawnie, a minister, spiritual director, Executive Director of her local Street Chaplaincy, and founder of the Bethany Project, for a conversation about what...

What does it mean to offer care to people the church has already harmed? Conscious Coore, founder of Flamingo Trauma Recovery and educator in trauma-informed spiritual care, has been answering that question for years. In this first episode of the Everyday Prophets series, Kristen and Conscious go deep on what trauma-informed faith actually looks like in practice, why the church keeps collapsing re...

He is Risen. It is the most important sentence in human history. But we have treated it as the period at the end of the sentence when it was always meant to be the opening. This episode slows down inside the actual resurrection accounts. We begin in the dark with Mary Magdalene coming to tend a body, so deep in grief she mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener, until he says her name. Because resu...

Holy Week lament is not a detour from the Easter story, it is the part we keep skipping. In this episode, we slow down and walk the full arc of Holy Week: two processions entering Jerusalem from opposite directions, the compression of a week that was always going to end at the cross, and the devastating silence of Holy Saturday, a silence the church has nearly forgotten how to inhabit. This is an...

Scripture used against women has been one of the most damaging tools in evangelical culture, and today we're naming it directly. What if the church didn't just get it wrong? What if it used scripture to make sure you blamed yourself? In this episode of Jesus, Justice + Mercy, Kristen takes a hard look at three passages that have been weaponized against women, Ezekiel 34, Matthew 18, and...

Christian mercy and justice don't begin with grand gestures or perfect plans. They begin with a morning. A cup of coffee. The weight of a world that feels too broken to fix. And the question so many of us are carrying right now: what could I possibly do that would matter? In this episode of Jesus, Justice + Mercy, Kristen starts exactly there - on her back porch, holding the weight of a bombe...

Neighborhood justice may not be what you think. Every day for over thirty years, Fred Rogers changed his shoes, hung up his jacket, and asked the same question: won't you be my neighbor? He understood something the church has largely forgotten, that the neighborhood is not a backdrop. That the people next door are not a project or a mission field for someone else. They are neighbors. And neig...

Reconciliation without repair won’t hold. In this episode, we explore why Scripture consistently ties reconciliation to restitution, accountability, and honest repair. From Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls, to the restitution laws in the Torah, to Zacchaeus’ fourfold repayment in Luke 19, the biblical pattern is clear: unity that lasts is built on truth. Too often, the church reaches for reco...

When certainty cracks and the foundations you once trusted feel unstable, it's easy to believe something has gone wrong. But what if disorientation isn't the opposite of faith? What if it's where deeper formation begins? This week, we close out the Re-Member movement by naming what happens inside us when our theological frameworks shift. Defensiveness. Curiosity. Humility. The ache...

White Christian nationalism shaped more than politics. It shaped discipleship. In this episode, Kristen traces the formation story beneath today’s headlines. Long before it became a political slogan, white Christian nationalism formed reflexes on what felt holy, what felt threatening, and what felt worth defending. This conversation explores: • How “chosen nation” theology reshaped American Christ...

The Cost of Staying Awake can feel unbearable. This week isn’t a teaching episode ; it’s a lament. In this raw and personal reflection, Kristen shares how cultural hypocrisy, sacred language used as cover, and the grief of watching injustice normalized have weighed heavily on her heart. Drawing from Psalm 13’s cry “How long, O Lord?” this mini episode holds sorrow and defiant trust together. This...

What is Black theology, and why does it matter for Christian discipleship today? In this episode, Kristen offers an introduction to Black theology, not as a political framework or academic debate, but as wisdom forged in survival, resistance, and hope. Drawing from history and the voices of Black theologians, pastors, and writers, we explore how faith shaped under oppression reveals a gospel that...

The empire wants you exhausted. Because exhausted people don't resist, they can only survive. This week, we're talking about rest as resistance. Not self-care. Not work-life balance. But Sabbath as protest against a system that defines your worth by your productivity. We explore: How Sabbath was woven into creation itself, and became an act of defiance under Pharaoh Why Jesus withdrew co...

What does holy risk actually look like, and how is it formed? In a moment when the church has confused nationalism with faithfulness and cruelty with obedience, we need to recover what it means to follow Jesus courageously. But courage isn't something we summon in a crisis. It's cultivated long before the moment arrives. This episode explores the essential components of holy risk through...

What King said about white moderates still confronts the church today. In this MLK bonus episode, Kristen reflects on being born in 1963, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail, and what his words reveal about comfort, delay, and Christian resistance to justice. Rather than beginning with King’s now-famous letter, this episode starts with the lesser-known statement...