The Pivot

MY GOODNESS. I loved this conversation.

Douglas McKelvey is a most fascinating human. He’s the author of two incredible books of liturgies, the second actually releases this week and is called Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2: Death, Grief and Hope. He’s also a fantastic songwriter who doesn’t sing or play music, but has penned the lyrics to over 350 songs recorded by a variety of artists including Switchfoot, Kenny Rogers, Sanctus Real, ...

Lynn Holloway was an Imagineer for Disney and has designed all kinds of amazing things, from theme parks to Danish parades to Super Bowl halftime shows. He’s a visual storyteller working in three dimensions and his work is fascinating.

But this is really more of a love story; How a fear of intimacy left him in years of loneliness, and how finally facing those fears in the shadow of his father’s passing, set him on a new path toward...

After 20 years as a singer/songwriter, Jill Phillips went back to school to get her Masters in counseling and is now a full-time Marriage and Family therapist (who still plays music!)

To anyone who knows Jill at all, this career transition is not surprising. She is an incredibly wise and empathetic friend to many, and even her songs are often based on the themes of carrying each other’s burdens, and holding grief and hope together ...

Rob Touchstone is co-founder of The Well Coffeeshop, a chain of non-profit coffeeshops who donate their profits to providing clean water wells to communities in poverty all over the world. (It’s also just a really good coffeeshop.) Besides that, Rob is an entrepreneur, a business professor, and a pastor here in Nashville, TN.

This is a great story, how Rob moved from being a theologically trained youth pastor to the creator and Dir...

David Zach is an abolitionist in a rock and roll band. He has traveled all over the world, going undercover to help rescue girls from slavery and sex trafficking. It’s a wild story.

But 9-to-5, David is the frontman for the band, Remedy Drive. The band started as four brothers and we got to talk about how they had to quit being in a band together to be good brothers. It is also a pretty wild story. Maybe not quite as wild as going ...

I’m not sure exactly when I started following Michael Wear’s work. I think I just gradually noticed that a lot of people I respected continued to quote him and reference him, so I had to go see who this guy was.

Well, it turns out, this guy is pretty dang amazing. The headline is that he led the faith outreach for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, served in the White House, leading evangelical outreach and helping to manage The White H...

This conversation I had with Justin McRoberts was one of my favorites in a long while. I took a few great practical things away from this, as well as just deeply enjoying the time. 

Justin’s work has taken on many shapes over the years: pastor, author, singer/songwriter, YoungLife guy, career coach, podcaster… but at the heart of it, he’s really done one thing this whole time. You’ll have to listen to find out what it is.

Also...

Stu G. The legend. Like many of us, I first learned about Stu through his epic guitar presence in the band, Delirious, who basically introduced the world to modern worship music.

Over the years I have heard people talk about Stu in hushed whispers and deep reverence. People don’t just like his guitar playing; This is a guy who carries deep respect. About a year and a half ago I started to find myself in the same rooms and got to kn...

Songwriter, author, recording artist, mother… These are just a few of the hats Cindy Morgan wears. As a songwriter she’s been a part of many more songs than you would imagine, from artists like Vince Gill, India.Arie, Rascal Flatts, Ricky Skaggs, Amy Grant, Mandisa to Brandon Heath, Sandra McCracken, Josh Garrels, Sierra Hull, and EchoSmith. As you’ll learn, Cindy just writes ALL the time.

I’ve gotten to work with her musically a f...

FRIENDS!! It has been a long time!! I did not intend to take this long between episodes, but between the election and a little Christmas covid (all recovered now, thankfully) it’s felt like a good time to take a little break. But we’re back now with a GREAT one!!

Professor Paul C. H. Lim (PhD, Cambridge) is associate professor of the history of Christianity (Divinity School) and affiliate professor of history (College of Arts ...

Santosh John is from India and now lives in Atlanta, where he recently founded the3CG.com - a ministry for people of a Third Culture, who don’t live in their birth or heritage country but also don’t quite fit into the culture in which they live in now.

This was the first ever LIVE episode of The Pivot. Santosh John and I got to have this conversation as a part of the Rabbit Room’s virtual 2020 Hutchmoot Homebound conference.

We got...

It’s safe to say that not many kids grew up more deeply in the bubble of evangelicalism than Barnabas Piper. It’s led to some amazing books: about being a pastor’s kid, about doubt, and about having the ability to ask hard questions of God.

Now Barnabas is an author, a father, and a new pastor after two decades in the book publishing business. He wrote a new book called “Hoping For Happiness” as he was making that career change.

I ...

Every single person who knows Tim Timmons seems to have this same response when his name comes up: “Dude! Timmons! I LOVE that guy!” It just seems like he has poured his heart and life into every third person I’ve met in the past few years.

He’s a musician, a pastor by default, a writer and a family man. The crazy thing? Twenty years ago he was told he had five years to live. Talk about a pivot, right? For Tim this has led to a con...

Ben Young is an author, a speaker, and a pastor at Second Baptist Church in Houston (one of the largest churches in Texas), But what’s super fun about this for me is that he is the brother of one of my former bandmates, Cliff Young, of Caedmon’s Call. I used to see Ben ALL the time, as the band really used Second Baptist as our headquarters. It’s where we rehearsed, borrowed musical gear (with at least the intent to eventually retu...

Davy Basinger was the lead singer of a band called Bleach. If you were in a youth group in an American church in 1998 then you know EXACTLY who I’m talking about. Bleach and my first band, The Normals, were on the same label and had the same manager, and so we found ourselves getting to play a bunch of shows with them when we were getting started. They were a few years ahead of us and they became like super cool older cousins to us...

Christine Dente is best known as one half of the duo Out of the Grey, but of course, she’s much more than that, particularly to their three kids and now two grandkids.

I don’t know her terribly well, but I saw she had just written her first novel and that fascinated me, so I was thrilled when she was into coming over and chatting about it.

I won’t lie, I jumped in way too deep too fast for any trained interviewer. But I’m not a tra...

Chris Llewellyn was excited to come over and NOT talk about music. I met him years ago when I worked closely for a season with his band, Rend Collective. That crew is easily the hardest working bunch of musicians I’ve ever met, and quarantine, while not great for business, has given Chris some time to breathe deep and take a little break for a bit.

It was fun to catch up and talk about Chris’s journey from the coast of Northern Ire...

I’m a big fan of Savannah Locke. She is an incredibly gifted writer and communicator, and as always, my conversation with her went places I did not expect. We talk about hiring your replacement, starting a business, John Mayer’s middle name… We call a number of grown men “angel babies”.

Most powerfully for me, we got to unpack the season of life where we met: When she was trying to see if the musician career path was for her, and I...

You might know Janice Gaines as an award-winning Gospel singer, which she is. But there are so many other incredible things about Janice you have to know: She is brilliant. She got her Masters of Divinity because learning Greek and Hebrew sounded FUN. She’s a mother of two young boys, a wife, a nationally recognized speaker, and she’s on staff at her local predominately white church, as directory of diversity. In 2020. She’s got a ...