Spiritual Misfits Podcast

I’m taking a little breather between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. Thankfully, there are so many incredible conversations in our back-log. I’m pulling a few favourites out to revisit - like this one! If you’re in Sydney (or willing to travel) join us on the 25th of Jan for Future Church Conference ( futurechurchcon.com ) with Joel Hollier, Safina Stewart, Karen Pack and Christine Redw...

How do we think about Christmas this year? What does it mean to celebrate the ‘Prince of Peace’ when the realities of war and genocide continue without ceasing?  What use is the Christmas story when church bells are drowned out by bombs? If our Christian spirituality doesn’t engage deeply with the darkness, what right has it to proclaim the coming of light? We’ve created an audio experience to hel...

We are currently cooking up a NEW Christmas listening experience/liturgy, which will be released next week on Christmas Eve. In the meantime, here's our Advent Liturgy from last year, which we still hold dear to our hearts. Whether you’ve listened to it previously or this is your first time, this is a grounding, stirring, contemplative audio experience, and we reckon there’s something here fo...

Mitch has now officially become a pastor in the Uniting Church, and has the sweet wardrobe to prove it. In light of this Will, Hannah and Mitch have a discussion about the relationship between tradition and progress. How do we know what from the past is worth holding onto? How do we know if we’re actually making progress? Plus the trio come up with a name for the metaphorical Spiritual Misfits pub...

Sara M. Saleh is a human rights lawyer, community organiser, writer and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. She has many very impressive achievements to her name including being the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, which she did back to back in 2020 and 2021. Sara’s debut novel Songs f...

Noah (8 years old) makes his podcast debut with a whole lot of wisdom on all the big questions. Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you. The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguide Sign up to our mailing list: https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/ Join our online Fa...

Radhika Sukumar-White is an ordained minister in the Uniting Church of Australia and she co-leads Leichhardt Uniting Church, a beautiful and vibrant community of faith, justice and creativity. We talk about Radhika's own story as well as some of the unique characteristics that make LUC the special place that it is and what other communities might be able to learn from their approach.  Want to...

Michael Frost (the kiwi version who hosts ' In the Shift ' podcast) and Shane-Meyer Holt join me for a rich conversation exploring their own stories and experiences around high control religious settings and their attempts to create much more open, gentle and generous communities these days. We talk about power dynamics, coercive control and the risk these things can pose to communities...

Mikali Anagnostis and Gabi Cabenhead are behind a new sacred art project called ‘ Marion St’ , an attempt to create “worship music that fits with the theology and experience of the progressive church.” Gabi and Mikali are also young, open-eyed about the injustices often attached to religious spaces, while simultaneously passionate about their faith and its expression in community. We explored some...

Olivia Jackson lives on the side of a windswept hill with two dogs. After spending most of her life in and around evangelical contexts, including nearly 15 years working for mission agencies in the UK and overseas, Olivia has been deconstructing her faith for the past few years. This eventually led her to seeking out the stories and experiences of others, through an online survey with over 400 res...

Gregg Morris returns to the pod (go back and listen to more of his brilliance on the episode ‘ Melbourne panel: Is Christianity still good news ?’) to share reflections on becoming culturally informed and examining what the referendum result reveals about Australia today.  Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from yo...

What a wild week on planet earth. In the first half of this episode we try to process the emotions and experiences of what we are seeing in the media cycle, without providing commentary on the circumstances themselves (we would each freely acknowledge there are far better voices for you to listen to than ours for these purposes). We explore the place of hope in a heavy world. During the second hal...

If you've joined us recently as a new listener chances are there are a bunch of great episodes in the back-log you haven't listened to yet! This is one of them. Benjamin Hastings is an incredibly gifted songwriter and lyricist, most known for some of the songs he’s written with Hillsong, including ‘So Will I’, ‘O Praise the Name’ and ‘Highlands’. His songs collectively have more than 500...

Grant Wilson is a pastor who became a quadriplegic after a mountain biking accident in 2021. In this conversation he shares with honesty and vulnerability about his injury and recovery journey, his faith, struggles and hopes.  This episode explores significant trauma, distress and grief.  It also provides an invitation to grow in empathy and understanding and to think seriously about accessibility...

Jarrod McKenna joins me for a rich and beautiful conversation about his own story and the story of healing we are all invited into. We explore how Jarrod McKenna became Jarrod McKenna, why nonviolence isn’t the same thing as non-violence, why Jarrod prefers not to draw a line between the private and the public work, and how to swap out death-dealing religion for a life-giving, liberating love. Thi...

Jon Reichardt (probably the coolest person at the David Bentley Hart event in Sydney) joins Mitch and Will for a chat about David Bentley Hart's classic theism. We talk about freedom, universalism, panentheism, theosis and a bunch of other nerdy stuff that we're still trying to get our heads around. If you don’t know what some of the words mean, don’t stress — they aren’t prerequisites f...

The excellent David Gushee returns to the podcast! If you are a newer listener  you may not have heard our previous episode with David around a year ago (we strongly recommend listening to that fantastic conversation exploring what comes after evangelicalism). This time round we’re speaking about David’s new book, ‘Defending democracy from its Christian enemies.’ The book explores anti-democratic...

Safina Stewart and Bianca Manning from Common Grace joined me for a conversation about the season of creation and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander spirituality, and about the historical moment we’re in, with the upcoming referendum. It’s such a rich conversation with beautifully overlapping themes of truth, beauty and justice, and I encourage you to listen deeply. Connect with Common Grace an...

Janet Kellogg Ray is a science educator who teaches biology at a large university. She's also a person of faith. In her US context, this puts her at odds with many evangelicals who are suspicious of science and deny evolution, climate change and COVID science. We discuss her upcoming book 'The God of Monkey Science' and why it's so dangerous for Christians to deny scientific ev...

Kelly Skilton is an artist and pastor who heads up new and digital communities for the Uniting Church in Victoria and Tasmania. A few years ago Kelly got a diagnosis of ADHD. We discuss neurodiversity, spirituality and creating inclusive communities with a focus on digital spaces. Kelly shares about Sonderverse, which you can check out here: https://www.sonderverse.org/ Want to reach out and let u...

Jesse Mawson is a prison chaplain studying a masters in spiritual direction, and finding a home within contemplative and celtic spirituality.  Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you. The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguide Sign up to our mailing list: http...

Sally Douglas comes on the pod to speak about her latest book, ‘ Jesus Sophia’ and we explore the divine feminine, the limitations of our metaphors, a trinitarian universe and more. Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you. The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survival...

Will Nicholas, the Odd Rev, joins me for a conversation about the meaning of life, the universe everything. Connect with Will at: https://oddrev.com/ Read AI reflections on the lectionary at: https://www.sonderverse.org/ Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you. The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https...

Hannah, Mitch & Will discuss a wide range of questions from poddy listeners covering ground like:  - What could multi-faith peace-making look like? - What's up with Christians buying into wild end-times conspiracy theories? - AI and personhood? - What are the alternatives to the institutional church?  - PSA?* - Evangelism for post-evangelicals?  - How open-minded can you be when questioni...

Will is still pro-Bible but struggling to read it. He wonders if everyone actually needs to aspire towards regular Bible reading or if we can just benefit from a 'critical mass' of people doing the work and passing on the goods? Mitch somewhat concedes Will's point/somewhat pushes back on it. They then talk about the influence of increasing conservatism on the broader Church and a d...