Ministry on the Move

Season three closes with the McNeills back home in East Texas at Pine Hill Baptist Church, where Pastor Bruce Bailey has just led his congregation through its 175th anniversary. Bruce and Chris spend the first half of the conversation tracing the church's history — a settlement, a revival meeting, and nearly two centuries of continuity — before Bruce shares the covenant renewal prayer he wrote...

Pastor Scott Johnston has pastored New Life Baptist Church in Wabash, Indiana, for seventeen years, after stops in Michigan, a hard-fought church plant in Kentucky, and nine years back home in Texas. But this conversation centers on August 2020, when a routine doctor's visit for his 20-year-old daughter turned into news no parent is prepared for. Scott is remarkably honest about what came next...

Part two picks up right where last week left off. Pastor Ross O'Dell finally answers the question Chris has been sitting on for two episodes: does the church replace Israel? Ross's answer runs through the grafting-into-the-vine image, a full walk through the biblical covenants from Adam and Eve to the new covenant in Christ, and a picture of Scripture's whole arc that's less about...

Pastor Ross O'Dell returns to Ministry on the Move for round two, two years after his first appearance, and this time the conversation goes straight into the deep end. Ross is gearing up to preach through the book of Revelation starting in September — a series he expects to take two to three years — and he and Chris spend this episode wrestling with how to approach a book most Christians eithe...

Part 2 picks up on a shared conviction: that the version of Christianity worth chasing isn't one made in our own image — comfortable parts kept, hard parts quietly edited out. From there, the conversation goes places this podcast doesn't often go — into what's actually happening at communion, why Lutherans baptize infants, and why being at peace with mystery might be a mark of mature f...

Pastor Jim Pearl leads St. John's Lutheran Church in St. Johns, Michigan, and this is his first appearance on Ministry on the Move, though it's the McNeils' second visit to the church itself. Jim spent 56 years as a Catholic before Grace — capital G, in the Lutheran sense — got hold of him. He and his wife were searching for something more, found a Lutheran church that felt like home,...

Part 2 opens with an idea that reframes the whole conversation: contemporary worship music may have quietly become the new catechism — the primary way kids absorb what they believe about God, often shaped by an industry more interested in selling a product than teaching theology. Kolby ties this to a broader pattern of outsourcing — dinner to restaurants, the lawn to the neighbor kid, and spiritua...

Kolby King is a camp pastor who stepped in at the last minute for his mentor Bubba Wright at the Watering Hole Cowboy Church youth camp. He holds a doctorate in biblical archaeology, with a dissertation focused on the final week of Jesus' life and the culture surrounding it — but his testimony starts earlier than that. At 15, despite years of church attendance, Kolby realized he didn't act...

Part 2 with Paul McQuery moves from the practical realities of pastoring a small church into a long, thoughtful conversation about eschatology. Paul contrasts his years at Valley Grove — a mid-sized church with a full staff — with Blue Grove, where he's the only paid staff member and everything runs on volunteers. He talks about earning trust in a new church: the advice to change nothing but y...

Paul McQuery pastors Blue Grove Baptist Church — this is our first visit there, though Paul has been on the podcast before and pastored Valley Grove in Stephenville when the McNeils sang there for several years. The conversation centers on Paul's decision to leave a thriving church — attendance up, giving up, double-digit baptisms, deacons telling him the church was better than when he arrived...

Part 2 of the Brashear roundtable with Dustin Cowden and Chris Wilcutt picks up mid-conversation and doesn't slow down. The topic wanders — intentionally — through some of the most fascinating corners of Scripture.   The conversation opens with psychotropics. People who ingest them, across cultures, tend to report the same things: spiritual beings, dragons, encounters with something they descr...

The McNeils are in Brashear, Texas for their second consecutive year of revival. Dustin Cowden pastors the church. Chris Wilcutt preaches the revival and comes up from Shreveport, Louisiana to do it. This roundtable was recorded before the week got rolling, and it went places none of them fully expected. The conversation opens with a simple question: what is the purpose of a revival in 2026? Dusti...

Hank Williams is an evangelist based out of Texas. Named after Hank Williams Sr. — his dad was in country music and wanted to bless his youngest boy with that name. Mom vetoed it. His legal name is Randall. He found out after they were married that his wife's middle name is the same. He's been in ministry 46 years, split evenly between itinerant evangelism and pastoral ministry, and he sat...

Chad Daniel pastors Community Church in El Dorado Springs, Missouri — deep in the bowels of Missouri. He's been going expositionally through Romans on Sunday mornings for about two and a half years and just hit chapter 11. On Wednesday nights, he runs a Q&A-style Bible study called Keys to the Kingdom, where he takes whatever questions his church brings and digs in. The conversation starts...

Part 2 with Steve McAbee gets into the deeper things. We start with a hard question: how do you love people whose lifestyle you don't approve of? How do you not endorse something while still showing Christ's love? Steve talks about the difference between making a judgment and being judgmental. You can say something is wrong without treating the person like they're wrong. Jesus did this...

I sat down with Steve McAbee, and we talked about what happens when tragedy hits hard and faith gets tested. Steve just got back from Kerrville, where on July 4, 2025, the Hill Country got hammered by historic flooding. The death toll was one hundred and thirty-seven. Many of them children. But what struck Steve wasn't just the tragedy — it was discovering that God was working in the middle of...

Part 2 with Pastor Rodney Sprayberry picks up in the deep end and stays there. Rodney and Chris work through the UFO and disclosure conversation — what to do when a congregant comes to you with an otherworldly encounter, why the church can't afford to be the last place people feel safe asking strange questions, and what it means that the Age of Disclosure is already underway whether the church...

In Part 1 of this conversation, Chris sits down with Pastor Rodney Sprayberry of New Zion Baptist Church outside of Bonham, Texas — a pastor who has spent 32 years in ministry and the last decade realizing the Bible is a much stranger book than seminary led him to believe. It starts with Bigfoot. Not as a joke, but as a genuine gateway into a conversation about the supernatural world the Bible des...

In this episode, Chris sits down close to home — just north of Greenville, Texas — with Pastor Colton Dowdy of Floyd Baptist Church. At 31, Colton is one of the youngest pastors on the podcast, but he arrives with a story that covers more ground than most. Colton traces his call to ministry back to a seizure diagnosis at 16 — 17 seizures in 15 days — and the slow realization that his suffering had...

Part 2 with Pastor Justin Wideman picks up right where Part 1 left off — which is to say, deeper than either of them planned to go. Justin unpacks his four-level discipleship model using the most relatable illustration you'll hear all season: a kid with untied shoes. Level one, you don't even know your shoe is untied. Level four, you're tying it mid-sentence without breaking stride. Th...

In Part 1 of this conversation, Chris sits down with Pastor Justin Wideman of Direct Baptist Church in Direct, Texas — a rural congregation that is defying every church growth statistic in the book. Families aren't trickling in one or two at a time. They're showing up in groups of six, eight, and ten — and they're staying. Justin talks candidly about what's driving the growth — and...

In this deeply personal episode, Pastor Scott Jones and his wife Kimberly open up about one of the most frightening seasons of their lives together. What Kimberly assumed was the flu quickly became something far more serious — sepsis and double pneumonia that landed her in the hospital for over a week, with oxygen levels in the 70s and a very real possibility she might not come home. Scott shares...

Last year, Pastor Scott Jones of First Baptist Rockport, Texas sat down with Chris McNeil and somehow broke the internet — or at least the Ministry on the Move podcast. That conversation became the most listened-to episode of the year for MotM. So when Chris drove back to Rockport, he decided to find out if lightning strikes twice. What starts as a conversation about music quickly becomes somethin...

Life on the road isn’t glamorous — it’s diesel engines, late nights, broken sound gear, gas-station dinners, and trusting God when the love offering doesn’t quite cover the bills. This week on  Ministry on the Move , Chris sits down with Larry DeLawder to talk about what itinerant ministry really looks like behind the curtain. They dig into: • why “calling” matters more than comfort • finding Sabb...

Sometimes ministry is serious. Sometimes it’s stretching. And sometimes… it’s just plain fun. In this episode, Chris sits down with Larry DeLawder — part storyteller, part road warrior, part harmonica-playing encouragement machine — for one of the most entertaining conversations we’ve had in a while. From life on the road to unexpected ministry moments (and a few laughs that feel straight out of a...