Cultivator Podcast

Kingdom CO-OP

The Cultivator Podcast is a conversation for everyday people who want to follow Jesus in the midst of everyday life and make a Kingdom difference in the world. Through honest conversations, practical teaching, inspiring stories, and plenty of laughter along the way, we'll explore what it looks like to live the Way of Jesus beyond the walls of the church. Whether we're unpacking the Cultivator Way of Life, talking with everyday people doing extraordinary Kingdom work, or wrestling with the challenges of following Jesus today, our hope is simple: you'll leave encouraged, challenged, and equipped to take one more step toward becoming the person God created you to be, and to help cultivate the Kingdom wherever you are.

  1. 3d ago

    Episode 14 - The Second Triad of the Beatitudes

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Justin, Dave, and Scott are six verses into Matthew 5 and in no hurry. This week is the second triad of the Beatitudes: those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, and the pure in heart. If the first triad answered who’s included in the kingdom, this one answers what kind of people Jesus is making. Start with righteousness. It’s the same word as justice, and it’s relational. It means relating rightly to God, to your neighbor, to money, to food, to time. Things the way they’re supposed to be. And hunger isn’t your four o’clock snack wearing off. It’s craving. So the prayer isn’t “Lord, bring righteousness.” It’s “make me hungry.” Then mercy. One of the guys describes the picture behind the word: a womb. Mercy is standing inside someone else, seeing it the way they see it and feeling it the way they feel it. Most of us help at arm’s length. One of them remembers a mom who would just start crying with people, feeling what they felt. It’s a boomerang Beatitude: you give it, you get it. And notice Jesus could have said blessed are those who dominate. He didn’t. Last, the pure in heart. Pure gold is only gold. Pure in heart means one devotion that informs every other devotion. When that devotion splinters, we stop seeing God, and not because he left. We’re scattered. The opposite of purity is duplicity, the habit of looking clean while hiding what’s underneath. So here’s the question to take with you. Where is your devotion splintered right now? Pray the three prayers this triad hands you: make me hungry, make me merciful, make me undivided.

  2. Oct 29

    Episode 13 - The First Triad of The Beatitudes

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Justin, Dave, and Scott are back in Matthew 5, finally past the first word and into the first three Beatitudes. Fair warning: they say out loud they may never get through this at this pace. They’re fine with that. Start with how you read it. Most of us treat the Beatitudes like a to-do list. Be poor in spirit. Go mourn. Try harder to be meek. But Jesus isn’t prescribing. He’s describing. Picture a surgeon talking to a patient who has to stay awake: you’ll feel some pressure here, now I’m working over here. He’s telling you what he’s doing in you. Your part is cooperation, not performance. Then notice who’s in the room. Everyone in that crowd assumed the kingdom belonged to the Pharisees. Jesus opens with the spiritually bankrupt, the unimportant, and the grieving, and says the kingdom is theirs. Spiritually bankrupt, you’re in. Unimportant, you’re in. Life flattened you, you’re in. We’ve turned the things of God into an exclusive club. Jesus starts by taking down the velvet rope. Along the way the guys wrestle with the Greek: a tiny word like “for” that could mean “because,” a verb that isn’t actually in the text, and who does the comforting, the Spirit or the people. They land on both. They also admit they might be wrong, which is worth hearing. One of them tells a story from a little church beside a highway. A hot summer day, a knock on the office door, and a sweaty, worn-out man who’d walked from his daughter’s college graduation and was walking home. He got some cash, a clean shirt, and a pretty stern speech about not getting scammed. Then the man prayed. It was the most beautiful prayer the pastor had ever heard. When he stepped outside to see him off, the man was gone. Poor. Unimportant. Heavenly. He says he met the kingdom that day. So here’s the question. When Jesus says “blessed are the poor in spirit” and looks your way, is your first reaction “not me”? It’s everyone in that crowd. Maybe the better question is who you’ve been overlooking, and what kingdom might be standing right in front of you.

  3. Oct 8

    Episode 12 - Boots on Turkish Ground

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Justin just got back from the trip of a lifetime: walking the seven churches of Revelation, all the way to Patmos, with his dad. Dave and Scott grabbed him while it was still fresh, and this one's a tangent worth taking. Start with the dad. Lloyd Stice grew up a sharecropper's son outside Wellington, Texas, in a four-room house with eight people, no electricity until second or third grade, no running water, and everybody out picking cotton. He's about to turn eighty, has two knee replacements, and averaged thirteen thousand steps a day on this trip without complaining once. Justin will tell you he's not sure he got that kind of grit. Then there's the story Lloyd told the tour group in Laodicea. Twenty years in as a top paint salesman, he'd been fighting a call into ministry. The morning he finally surrendered, he felt the Lord say neither hot nor cold. That night, a revival preacher opened Revelation 3, the letter to Laodicea. Lloyd traded a big house in Amarillo for a two-bedroom apartment in Wilmore, Kentucky. Here's what standing in that place changed. Justin grew up hearing that lukewarm means not on fire enough for Jesus. But Laodicea sat between hot spring water piped in from Hierapolis and cold, refreshing water from Colossae. Lukewarm isn't a mood. It's a useless faith. It was never about volume. It was about being so rich, so self-sufficient, and so comfortable that you don't need God for anything. That's why the trip landed where it did. Justin had been running on mission fatigue, asking what are we even doing. Then he read what John wrote to churches under real pressure and saw that Revelation isn't mainly a timeline of what's coming. It's a call to live the kingdom now, in the middle of Babylon, as a different kind of people. Same problems as the first century. Same idols, new names. So here's the question to carry out of this one. Where are you still keeping a foot in the guild, the job, the paycheck, the identity you'd have to loosen your grip on if you fully trusted Him? Know what it meant before you decide what it means for you.

  4. Oct 1

    Episode 11 - Harvest for Hope

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast, special edition! This one's not a teaching episode. It's an invitation. On October 22nd, Kingdom CO-OP is hosting its first ever fundraiser gala: Harvest of Hope. And if you've ever wondered what Kingdom CO-OP actually does beyond the parts you've personally run into, a meal, some clothes, this conversation is the fullest picture we've ever put into one place. Justin gets honest about it: fundraising used to scare him. He didn't want to ask people for money. But somewhere along the way that shifted. "God's not short on cash," he says now, and watching people steward what they've been given, generously, without being asked twice, has changed how he thinks about the whole thing. Here's what your ticket actually funds. A Sunday night meal that feeds about 125 people, no charge, no strings. Hope Clothes, which gives away more than 25,000 items of clothing a year. And Hope for the Hub, a job training and placement program that's been paused since funding fell through, the one Justin's most eager to get back online, because it doesn't just feed somebody for a night. It changes the trajectory of their whole life. All of it runs out of a building that's almost a hundred years old, gifted to Kingdom CO-OP after Asbury Methodist Church closed its doors. When they got the keys, there were snacks from the eighties still in the cabinets. Now it houses fifteen different ministries who need a place to work out of, not somebody to run their operation for them, just a room, some resources, and someone saying, "What do you need? How can we help?" That's the whole idea behind the name, actually. Kingdom CO-OP, like a small-town farmers' co-op. Nobody's lording over anybody. Everybody just pools what they've got so the whole harvest goes further. So here's the invitation: come out to Adelphos Wine Cellars on October 22nd at 6:30. Wear your pearl snaps, wear your pearls, it's West Texas, not a tuxedo required. Eat some Cast Iron Grill, listen to Junior and Micah Vasquez play, and see with your own eyes what God's actually doing in this city. Then decide what part you want to play in it. https://harvestofhope.kingdomco-op.com/landing-page#about

  5. Sep 24

    Episode 10 - Trio Talks - Self-Portrait

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Justin, Dave, and Scott read the whole thing out loud this week: the actual Beatitudes, Matthew 5, verses 3 through 12. Not a preview. Not a paraphrase. Just Jesus' own words. And here's the first honest reaction most people have reading them: I suck. I'm not poor in spirit. I'm not mourning. I'm not meek. I could never live up to this. Good news: that was never the assignment. There's not a single verb of command anywhere in the Beatitudes. Jesus never says "go be this." He's doing something else entirely. As one of the guys puts it, if you've ever wondered what Jesus looked like, go read the Beatitudes. That's his self-portrait, and he's inviting you into it, not grading you against it. Even better: this was never written to you alone. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas calls the Sermon on the Mount "the constitution of a people," not a heroic ethic for isolated individuals. You can't live it out solo. That's not a flaw in the plan. That's the plan. Somewhere in your community, someone is poor in spirit. Somewhere, someone is mourning. Somewhere, someone is showing mercy. Together, you're the self-portrait. Justin gets honest about the first time he read this list as a brand new believer, decided it was impossible, and landed on "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." He didn't try to manufacture that hunger himself. He just prayed, "Lord, make me hungry." That prayer's been getting answered ever since. So here's what's true whether you feel it yet or not: an inheritance, a comfort, a kingdom, these aren't rewards for the people who figure it out. They're promises for the people who show up broken and let Jesus form something in them they couldn't build on their own. Read the Beatitudes yourself this week before we come back and go through them one at a time. Come honest. Come as you are. That's apparently the whole point.

  6. Sep 17

    Episode 9 - Trio Talks - Blessed

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Justin, Dave, and Scott spent thirty minutes on one word this episode. One word. And by the end, you'll understand why. The word is blessed, the very first word of the Beatitudes, the doorway into the whole Sermon on the Mount. Ask most people in West Texas what blessed means and you'll get the same answer: I got the parking spot. I got the raise. Hashtag blessed. It's commodity language. It's about what you've acquired. That's not what Jesus meant. The Greek word is makarios, and in its original context it described the life of the gods. Not what the gods had. What the gods were. So when Jesus opens his most famous sermon with "blessed are the poor in spirit," he's not describing a transaction. He's painting a self-portrait, and inviting you into it. It's not about what you acquire. It's about who you're becoming. There's a woman who used to work the counter at a McDonald's Dave frequented years ago. Every single time you asked how she was doing, she said the same thing: blessed. Older in life, working a register, and she said it like she meant it. That's a woman speaking a different kingdom into existence with one word, regardless of her circumstances. Here's the line worth sitting with: the kingdom has to be cultivated within us before it can be cultivated through us. Before there's any doing, there's becoming. Before there's any output, there's an identity Jesus is remaking in you, whether you've noticed or not. So here's your assignment this week: two columns. On one side, write down what your culture, your bank account, your Instagram feed has taught you blessed looks like. On the other, write down what blessed looks like in the Beatitudes. Be honest about the gap. That's where the unlearning starts

  7. Sep 10

    Episode 8 - Cultivator Interview - Kinsey Tolley of Clothed in Grace

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Kinsey Tolley spent years building a career in fashion design. What she didn't expect was for God to ask her to use it. She prayed for a sign, and told God, “If this is your will for me, put a butterfly in my path.” He did. More than once. That's the kind of confirmation that's hard to explain away, and it's exactly the kind of thing that turns a good idea into an act of obedience. That obedience became Clothed in Grace, a clothing ministry that isn't really about clothes. It's about confidence. Identity. Women hearing, in a fitting room instead of a sermon, that they're seen and loved by God. Kinsey talks about what it actually took to get there: patience, obedience, and community, in that order, and how none of it moved on her timeline. “God uses girl math in the sense that He makes it work,” she says, and if you've ever tried to build something on faith instead of a spreadsheet, you know exactly what she means. At the center of it is one line that could be the whole episode by itself: “Women need these clothes, and God told me to help.” No five-year plan. No perfect strategy. Just obedience, one step at a time. So here's the question worth carrying into your week: what's the ordinary thing you're good at that you've never once considered God might want to use? Kinsey didn't either, until He made it obvious.

  8. Sep 3

    Episode 7 - Trio Talks - The Sermon on The Mount

    Welcome back to the Cultivator Podcast! Justin and the guys spend this one in the Sermon on the Mount, which might be the most quoted scripture in the whole Book. Here's the question underneath the whole conversation: are you in the crowd, or are you a disciple? Jesus preached to both. He fed the crowd. He formed the disciples. The difference was never how much they heard. It was whether they built anything on it. Because that's the whole point of the sermon: "You gotta be the wise builder." Two guys hear the same words, build two different houses, and only one is left standing when the storm hits. The information was identical. The application wasn't. That's the tension the guys keep circling: the kingdom of God is a present reality and a future hope at the same time, and understanding it means unlearning almost everything culture has taught you about power, ownership, and who wins. The Beatitudes aren't a checklist. They're a description of what that unlearning actually looks like on a person. "Information doesn't equal transformation." You can know the Sermon on the Mount by heart and still be building on sand. "Knowing it is not enough; practice it." So here's the question to sit with after this one: what's one line from the Sermon on the Mount you've heard a hundred times and never actually built your life on? Start there.

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About

The Cultivator Podcast is a conversation for everyday people who want to follow Jesus in the midst of everyday life and make a Kingdom difference in the world. Through honest conversations, practical teaching, inspiring stories, and plenty of laughter along the way, we'll explore what it looks like to live the Way of Jesus beyond the walls of the church. Whether we're unpacking the Cultivator Way of Life, talking with everyday people doing extraordinary Kingdom work, or wrestling with the challenges of following Jesus today, our hope is simple: you'll leave encouraged, challenged, and equipped to take one more step toward becoming the person God created you to be, and to help cultivate the Kingdom wherever you are.

Information

  • Creator
    Kingdom CO-OP
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Kingdom CO-OP
  • Show Website
    Cultivator Podcast