Ministry on the Move

Chris McNeill
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Christianity
  • Updated Weekly

Celebrating pastors from around the USA, learning what it means to shepherd the body of Christ. Chris interviews pastors as we travel throughout the US, to find out how different and how similar the body of Christ is. For more information on The McNeills, please visit our website at mcneillmusic.tv/podcast

  1. 3d ago

    S3E32 - KolbyKing part 2 - Sitting on the Porch With God: What It Costs to Raise a Generation That Actually Believes

    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 spiritual formation to church staff. He shares a gutting story about a woman in her 70s who told his wife, in tears, "I've lost my children" — not to death, but to a faith that never took root at home despite years of youth group and mission trips. Kolby pushes back hard on low expectations for kids, telling the story of training children as young as sixth grade to lead their peers to Christ, and of a twelve-year-old girl named Ellen who memorized the entire book of James because her leader challenged the kids to memorize it alongside her — and did it himself. The conversation turns to what a pastor can actually control: guarding his own walk with God, guarding his family, and preaching truth without manufacturing revival through manipulation. Real change is a move of the Holy Spirit, not a program. The speed round covers "God's Smuggler" as Kolby's most-reread book, Joseph as his favorite Bible character, and a funeral story — a grieving, atheist mother who tried to climb into her son's casket to hug him one last time. The episode closes with Kolby's testimony: assurance of a calling since age seven, and a moment years later where God asked him to trade his ambition for something simpler — sitting on the porch with a cup of tea, content even if everything else were stripped away.

  2. Aug 10

    S3E31 - Kolby King p1 - Passed By on the Other Side: Reaching the People Church Forgets"

    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 actually know God. That drove him to start reading Scripture on his own, and within a month of devouring the New Testament, his life changed. By 18, God placed him as pastor of a small, dying inner-city church in Oklahoma City — poverty-stricken, no baptisms in a decade, surrounded by prostitution, addiction, and violence. He learned ministry there in the most unfiltered way possible: door to door, sitting on porches with men holding beer cans, watching a woman who'd been prostituting herself to fund an addiction give her life to Christ. The conversation turns to a hard truth Kolby has carried since: the church in America has largely lost personal evangelism. He tells two stories about passing by people in need — once at a revival, watching person after person walk past a homeless woman digging through a dumpster, and once with his own family in Washington D.C., choosing to steer his daughter away from a homeless person on a subway grate rather than stop. His wife's response afterward cuts straight to the point: his daughter didn't just miss an opportunity to help. She watched her father see a person in need and walk the other way. Kolby lays out three things he believes have to happen for real revival in America: the church has to return to the foot of the cross, the gospel has to leave the building, and the next generation has to be reached — not through church attendance alone, but through parents taking spiritual leadership at home. The conversation closes on what the gospel actually is, and how easily it gets reduced to head knowledge instead of surrendered lordship — including a story about training sixth graders to lead their peers to Christ, and a pushback email Kolby received objecting to the word "Lord" in a gospel tract.

  3. Aug 3

    S3E30 - Paul McQuery - BlueGrove Baptist - Trust, Transition, and Why Eschatology Still Matters

    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 your underwear in the first six months, and his personal rule that no one should ever have to question whether he loves them. From there, the conversation shifts into eschatology. Paul walks through the four major orthodox frameworks — dispensational premillennialism, historical premillennialism, postmillennialism, and amillennialism — using Romans 11, Matthew 24, the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, and the significance of Noah to work through where he lands and why. He holds his convictions firmly while giving every other view a fair hearing, anchored in what Albert Mohler calls theological triage — knowing what's primary, secondary, and tertiary. The speed round covers Boaz, Joseph, and Joshua as favorite Bible characters, the Bee Gees, Moonlighting, and fishing as the best way to waste an hour. Paul closes in prayer.

  4. Jul 27

    S3E29 - Paul McQuery - Blue Grove Baptist - You Are Where You Are Until You're Not: How a Pastor Walks Through Downsizing

    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 — for a smaller, rural congregation less than a third the size. He walks through why: a lifelong passion for small communities, a conviction that numbers were never the measure of faithfulness, and a clear sense that God was calling him there. His philosophy on transitions: "You are where you are until you're not." He stayed fully pastoral to Valley Grove — funerals, hospital visits, everything — right up until the move. Midway through, a tornado warning cuts the conversation short. Chris and his family cleared out, drove 30 miles south, waited out the storm, and came back to finish. It's real, it's unplanned, and it's part of the episode. The conversation closes on why obedience rarely makes sense in the moment — Moses got his sign 40 years later, Abraham was told to go without being told where. Faith, not logic, is the whole point.

  5. Jul 20

    Chasing Rabbits: Levels of Hell, the Two Witnesses, and Why the Weird Stuff in Scripture Actually Holds Together

    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 describe as Jesus — not the Jesus, but a Jesus. The takeaway isn't an endorsement. It's a question: what does it mean that people who are chemically forcing their way into a spiritual experience keep finding the same thing there?   From there it moves into the architecture of the afterlife. Sheol. Hades. Gehenna. Tartarus. Abraham's bosom. The third heaven. The Bible uses all of these terms distinctly, and collapsing them all into "heaven and hell" may be doing the text a disservice. Where did Jesus go for three days? The Apostles' Creed says he descended into hell. Most Baptists don't love that line. But the text seems to support it — he held the keys, he proclaimed to the fallen angels in chains, and Matthew records people seeing resurrected prophets walking the streets of Jerusalem immediately after the crucifixion.   The two witnesses in Revelation get a full treatment. The traditional view is Moses and Elijah — their signs match, and they represent the law and the prophets. But there's a second view worth sitting with: Hebrews says it's appointed unto men once to die. Enoch and Elijah never did. Maybe Revelation is where they finally keep that appointment.   The conversation finds its footing in the artistry of Genesis. Chris Wilcutt traces the thread: sin entered through a tree, atonement came through one. Thorns and thistles came through the curse, and they wound up on his head. The skin God placed on Adam and Eve required the shedding of blood — and in the New Testament, Christ clothes us in righteousness. The Tower of Babel scattered language. Pentecost reunited it. Moses was barred from the promised land — and the next time he appears, he's standing on the Mount of Transfiguration. The completion is everywhere, once you start looking.   The speed round covers AI-generated worship music, the Book of Eli, Friday (the 90s movie), Reacher, hospital visits for bloody noses, driving separate cars to church, and what it's like to pastor with ADD when people take it personally that you walked past them in the hallway.   Chris Wilcutt closes in prayer with a word for the pastors who quit every Monday morning. It lands.

  6. Jul 13

    S3E28 - Dustin Cowden and Chris Wilcut Round Table - You Can't Out-Culture the World: What Revival Actually Looks Like in 2026

    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? Dustin's answer is honest — you can't force God's hand, but you can create the conditions. His hope is that even one person walks away with a softened heart. He makes the point that adults need camp just as much as teenagers do. They need concentrated time away from the noise, saturated in the Word, with nothing else competing for their attention. Chris Wilcutt picks up the thread and takes it somewhere harder. COVID taught the church that people didn't have to leave the couch to attend a service — and a lot of them decided they never would again. Online church gave people cover to slowly unplug from the body of believers, and most of them didn't even notice it was happening until they looked up and realized they were living a secular life. The question isn't just how to get people back. It's whether the church has been honest about why they left. The conversation turns to culture. Both men push back on the idea that the church needs to compete with entertainment. Dustin's line is the one that lands: you can't out-culture the world. TikTok will always be more entertaining than a church service. The question is whether the church is trying to be the new show or actually worshiping the King. Christianity set the cultural standard for two thousand years — in art, in medicine, in architecture. The answer isn't to chase the world. It's to lead again. They talk about the verse-of-the-day problem — the reduction of Scripture to a positive affirmation, a slogan on a wall, four seconds of engagement before moving on with the day. And they talk about monasticism, stillness, and the lost discipline of Christian meditation. One of them spent six hours alone with a Bible and a notepad as part of a seminary assignment and says the first thirty minutes were the most uncomfortable thing he'd ever done. Then something shifted. The episode closes with a pointed observation: the church has become so focused on what Jesus did for me that it forgot the story isn't about me. It's about him. God didn't have to save anybody. He chose to. And when you really sit with that, it changes everything about how you worship.

  7. Jul 6

    S3E27 - Hank Williams - Evangelist: Rhythms and Remnants: One Evangelist's 46 Years of Chasing What Actually Works

    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 down with Chris on the last night of a revival at Lake Murvaul in East Texas. The conversation centers on the family. Hank's framework is rooted in Genesis: God created three institutions — family, church, and government — and he created the family first. The order matters. Jesus first, then spouse, then children, then vocation. Not as a checklist, but as a living priority that shows up in your calendar, your energy, and what you say yes and no to. Hank spent his evangelism years asking every pastor he met two questions: what are your priorities, and how do you maintain them? The gap between the answers was instructive. A lot of men could articulate biblical priorities clearly and live them poorly. That tension drove his ministry focus toward discipleship — specifically, one-on-one, life-on-life investment in men and women, a year at a time, through a process he called Intentional Discipleship. He talks about travel ball and what it did to church attendance — his education director did a deep dive and identified an average of 700 people a weekend missing from a 3,500-member church because of travel sports. Rather than rail against it, Hank built a travel ball ministry: curriculum, voluntary hotel Bible studies, connection tools for families on the road. He's not anti-sports. He's pro-intentionality. He closes with the question left by the previous guest: what's your best advice for time management as a pastor, balancing ministry, community, and family? It was the thesis of his doctoral work. His answer: rhythms. Not schedules. Rhythms. Sacred Fridays with Mary Ann. Date nights on the calendar. Accountability relationships he's been in for 40 years. Defining finishing well as establishing biblical priorities and maintaining them reasonably well over time. That's a life's work distilled into one sentence. Worth the listen.

  8. Jun 29

    S3E26 - Chad Daniel - Show Me the Bones: Why the Weird Stuff in Your Bible Actually Matters

    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 with why people are suddenly asking about the Nephilim. Chad's theory: it's not really about giants. It's about people trying to re-anchor themselves in Scripture when the skeptics are getting louder. The frontal assault on Christianity — evolution, the existence of God — hasn't worked as well as people hoped. So now they're flanking. Find the weird stuff, poke holes in it, and if you can get someone to say "well, that part might not be true," you've chipped away at the whole foundation. Chad's response? Lean into the weird stuff. He brought cardboard cutouts of spearheads to his Wednesday night group — standard Bronze Age spearheads at two to three inches, next to the ones excavated from archaeological digs in Israel at twenty-two to twenty-six inches. The visual alone changed the room. The Bible says there were giants. The archaeology says something very large was throwing very large spears. The physical evidence doesn't create faith, but it sure does confirm it. They talk about Israel, the Holy Spirit as the forgotten person of the Trinity, and the difference between asking God why and questioning His authority. Chad spent five years asking God the wrong question — why — before realizing he was looking for an answer instead of looking for God. The Passover Seder comes up, and the parallels to Christ are staggering: the matzah has to be unleavened, pierced, and bruised. Isaiah 53 hiding in plain sight, and most people at the table have no idea. Chad's Wednesday nights sound a lot like this podcast — he never knows what question is coming, and that's the whole point. One week it's Israel. The next week it's Bible translations and he never even opens his notes. He's learned to say "I don't know" out loud, and he thinks that might be one of the most important things a pastor can model. The episode closes with a story Chad shares about a little girl he baptized a few weeks ago. The look on her face when she came out of the water — that's the thing that carries you when everything else falls apart.

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About

Celebrating pastors from around the USA, learning what it means to shepherd the body of Christ. Chris interviews pastors as we travel throughout the US, to find out how different and how similar the body of Christ is. For more information on The McNeills, please visit our website at mcneillmusic.tv/podcast

Information

  • Creator
    Chris McNeill
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    109
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Chris McNeill
  • Show Website
    Ministry on the Move