No BS Bishop

I've come to believe that an uninjured love doesn't exist. If you've chosen to love people, you've also chosen to experience disappointment, rejection, misunderstanding, and heartbreak along the way. But what if those injuries aren't the end of your story? What if an injured love, when it's allowed to heal, becomes a passionate love? In this episode, I invite you to reject...

What does it mean to love the world the way God loves the world? For years, many of us have been taught to keep this world at arm's length, as though loving it somehow distracts us from heaven. But Jesus said, "For God so loved the world." I believe it's time we take those words seriously. In this episode, I reflect on the beauty of creation, the difference between loving the wor...

What if the most important commandment isn't a list of rules, but a single word: love? In this episode, I reflect on a powerful quote from Saint Augustine: "Love God and do whatever you please." At first glance, that might sound reckless, but Augustine's deeper point is that a life genuinely shaped by love naturally moves toward what is good, beautiful, and life-giving. Together,...

Fear is what actually creates a loveless life. I don't believe anybody is born to hate. We're born to love. But when we live too long in the zone of fear and hurt, hate can become part of the curriculum. I've lived there, and on this episode I want to tell you about finding the exit signs. As Father's Day approaches, I share some of my own story growing up in a dysfunctional family...

What if the walk of faith is actually much simpler than we've made it? In this episode, I explore one of Jesus' first instructions after the resurrection: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven." I believe those words point us directly to the walk and way of love. Too often, we've become experts at pointing out failures, assigning guilt, and drawing lines between...

Love is not easy. I've spent years saying that it's a mountain climb, a marathon, and a lifelong commitment to choosing something better than hate. But in this episode, I want to flip the script just a little. We live in a time when outrage, division, and negativity seem to be everywhere. Hate can feel powerful. It can even feel good in the moment. But I want to suggest that we need someth...

In this episode, I’m talking about something I believe with my whole heart: spirituality rooted in love should offer a vision for the world, not spend all its energy raging against it. Far too much modern faith has become a constant drumbeat of blame, fear, and outrage, and I believe we’ve lost sight of the central message Jesus actually gave us. I reflect on the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’ prayer for u...

I want to challenge you with what I believe is the greatest mountain climb in all of life: love. Not lightweight love. Not sentimental love. I’m talking about the kind of love that asks everything from us. The kind of love Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 13 when he says faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love. I spend time unpacking why I believe that chapter has far mor...

This week, I want to ask you a question that has stayed with me for years. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” Well then, if we are the light of the world, why is everything so dark? That question became the doorway for this entire conversation. Not a conversation about blame or shame, but a conversation about what light is actually for. I believe we have often mistaken our role in the w...

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...