Episode 2 Arrives Monday, and an Important Question for You
We have crossed 10,000 members. Here is what your support is already building, and where we are going next.
A few weeks ago, I did something I never particularly enjoy doing.
I asked you plainly to help support this work.
And many of you responded.
At the time, approximately 2 percent of the people in this community were paid subscribers. Today, we have reached 2.8 percent.
Eight-tenths of one percentage point may not look terribly dramatic on paper. Here, however, it represents real people who decided that Message From the Margins was worth helping to carry.
It also gave me something enormously valuable: hope.
You showed me that this community believes in what we are building together. So, because the last ask worked, Father is summoning his courage, passing the collection plate once more, and asking again.
But first, let me show you what you are helping to build.
Tomorrow, I will present you with one of the most important things I believe I have ever written:
“For the Love of God, Please Do Not Lose Your Family for Donald Trump.”
It is my attempt to give you the words you may need to have an extraordinarily difficult conversation with someone you love about Donald Trump, the future of our country, and the demands of our faith.
If you do not want to have that conversation yourself, I have written it so that you can simply forward it.
There are families being pulled apart by this political era. There are people who genuinely want to reach someone they love but no longer know where to begin. I cannot promise that one letter will repair those relationships. I can offer you the most careful, honest, pastoral words I know how to write.
Then, on Monday, Episode Two of the Message From the Margins podcast will arrive.
I am stoked about this one.
It is called “How the Church Became the Church,” and, in my opinion, it is considerably better than Episode One, which I already consider a huge success.
We are going back into the strange, wonderful, occasionally chaotic, and deeply mystical first two centuries of Christianity. We will explore how a scattered community of people following Jesus became the Church: worshipping in homes, sharing the Eucharist, carrying letters between cities, recognizing leaders, surviving persecution, and discovering, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, what this new Christian community was becoming.
The first episode asked how the Bible became the Bible.
The second asks how the Church became the Church.
And we are just getting started.
You may also have noticed that Father has dramatically increased the number of videos he is posting on social media.
The internet is currently a swamp of manosphere videos, Christian nationalism, and toxic theology, so Father has apparently decided to stand in the middle of it with a microphone and shout about Jesus of Nazareth.
Remember that guy? The one with the “love thy neighbor” stuff?
Someone has to.
Those videos are helping us reach people who may never walk through the doors of a church, purchase a theology book, or sit through an hour-long lecture about second-century Christianity. They are finding us through the little glowing rectangles in their hands, and some of them are beginning to discover a version of Christianity they thought had disappeared.
Meanwhile, this community recently crossed 10,000 members here on Substack.
For one glorious day, Message From the Margins was also the #1 Rising publication in Substack’s Faith and Spirituality category.
Father may or may not have taken a screenshot. There may or may not have been some strutting around the house. Figgy was unimpressed and tried to trick me into giving him a second breakfast while I was distracted.
In an unexpected turn, my inbox is now bursting with messages from people who want to appear on the podcast. Some of them have knowledge, experience, stories, and spiritual wisdom that I would love to place before you.
More accurately, they want to speak with all of you.
Yes, you.
They want to become part of this community and contribute to what we are building here.
So, alongside the main podcast, I am developing a second, interview-based format. The historical and theological episodes will continue, while this new format will allow us to bring fascinating people into the conversation and broaden what the podcast can offer you.
I am also reasonably satisfied with my work on the live Bible study programs that will begin in mid to late September.
Our opening edition will be on… you guessed it… the Prodigal Son.
You have no idea how much richer that story is than, “A kid moves away, screws up, and comes home.”
It will rock your socks.
And if all that were not enough, I am developing modular, self-paced courses that you will be able to enjoy whenever your schedule permits.
The first will be:
Thirty Days with Jesus of Nazareth
Because we always start with Jesus.
Then, thanks to your input, the next will be:
Thirty Days with the Great Women of the Bible
These will be thoughtful, accessible programs you can move through at your own pace. No grades. No awkward group projects. No stern nun appearing at your door because you fell three days behind.
The goal is simply to help you know Scripture more deeply, understand Jesus more clearly, and develop a faith capable of sustaining the complexities of an adult life.
Now for the less exciting part…
Several of the software companies and platforms I use to create and distribute this work have recently sent me everyone’s favorite sort of email:
“We’re updating our pricing.”
Which is corporate language for, “Father, kindly open your wallet.”
Podcast hosting, video production, research tools, email systems, editing software, and distribution platforms all cost money. As the ministry grows and the production becomes more ambitious, those costs grow with it.
I am not raising the subscription price in response to these increases. I will absorb them for as long as I can.
But I can also be honest with you and say:
Let’s do this together.
Substack’s guidance to creators says a healthy publication should set a goal of 10 percent of readers supporting it financially.
By coincidence, 10 percent is also the point at which, by my calculations, this ministry reaches enduring financial stability.
We are currently at 2.8 percent.
That means we still have a considerable distance to travel. But after watching this community move from 2 percent to 2.8 percent so quickly, 10 percent no longer feels like some absurd number scribbled on a whiteboard.
It feels possible.
The sooner we reach it, the sooner that support begins changing the quality and reach of this ministry.
At 10 percent, Message From the Margins reaches something resembling smooth sailing.
More importantly, 10 percent gives us the working capital to produce better videos, stronger podcasts, thoughtful courses, and a genuinely professional experience without filling this place with intrusive advertisements or whatever diet miracle Father would otherwise have to hawk between paragraphs.
Do you really want to hear about my skincare routine?
I didn’t think so.
It’s atrocious anyway.
Father might even be able to hire a part-time helper so that he is not working from approximately seven each morning until ten at night.
I love this work enormously. I would also like enough room in the day to take Figgy for a nice walk, especially while the weather is still nice.
More importantly, reaching 10 percent gives the five-year plan a real chance to come alive.
And I want you to understand what I mean by that, because “the five-year plan” sounds suspiciously like a dreadful meeting topic.
I want to take you to the Holy Land.
I want to create a full YouTube series exploring the people and places at the margins whom Christ encountered. I want to stand beside the roads, wells, shorelines, villages, and city gates where these stories unfolded and show you what the geography, history, and lives of the people there reveal about Jesus.
Many people in this community may never be able to make that journey themselves. I want to bring as much of it as I possibly can to you.
I want us to hold retreats where we can finally gather in person.
I want us to pray together, study Scripture together, share meals, laugh, worship, and discover that the person whose comments you have been reading for two years possesses an actual voice and is approximately three-dimensional. I might even make my Grandmother’s Sunday Sauce for you.
I want to create spaces where people who have felt wounded, unwelcome, or intellectually suffocated by the Church can experience Christian community without surrendering their dignity or pretending their questions have disappeared.
I also want to establish what I am tentatively calling The Matthew 25 Society.
This would give Message From the Margins a practical ministry devoted to doing and funding the works of mercy Jesus commands: feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, clothing those in need, and remembering the imprisoned and forgotten.
Our words about compassion would be joined to material acts of compassion. When someone in our wider community faces a genuine crisis, I want us to possess the organization and resources to do more than wish them well.
I want to bring you more courses, more interviews, more live Bible studies, and more pastoral resources for the situations people are actually facing.
I want this ministry to be able to respond when someone writes and says, “My family is falling apart,” “I believe God has abandoned me,” or “I want to return to faith, but I am terrified of the Church.”
I want Message From the Margins to endure for decades, reaching people none of us have met yet and carrying a healthier, more compassionate Christianity into places currently overwhelmed by cruelty and fear.
These plans already exist as outlines, budgets, course materials, episode ideas, and a truly unreasonable number of notes.
At 2.8 percent, I can begin building them.
At 10 percent, we can plan responsibly, hire the help we need, invest in quality, and build a ministry strong enough to keep serving people without lurching from one Software as a Service invoice to the next.
To be perfectly clear, the five-year plan contains no private jet.
It does contain a few coach seats, camera batteries, retreat-center deposits, folding chairs, and probably coffee.
Definitely coffee.
That is what I mean by smooth sailing.
It means having enough stability to stop merely imagining what this community could become and begin building it together.
If you are currently a free subscriber and have the financial room to become a paid member, I am asking you to join us.
I hesitate to say that it is not a lot of money, because for many people, it is. Ten dollars can be the difference between having enough and coming up short, and I will never pretend otherwise.
But for some of you, $9.99 a month is comfortably within reach. It is approximately the cost of a fast-food meal, a fancy cup of coffee, or, apparently, one family-sized bag of chips in the year of our Lord 2026.
If that amount will not create hardship for you, it can do lasting work here. Your subscription helps us bring hope into the world while keeping this ministry freely available to people who cannot contribute financially themselves.
So I have to ask you directly: Will you help us move from 2.8 percent to 10 percent today?
If an annual subscription is within reach, it will save you some money and provide us upfront capital to do God’s work on Earth. A founding membership is a larger investment in the future of this ministry and will help us build what comes next even sooner.
If paying would create hardship for you, please release yourself from any guilt whatsoever. Read, pray, comment, and share this work with someone who needs it. Nearly everything I produce will remain freely available because I refuse to place the Gospel behind a paywall.
And if you already support this ministry financially, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You are helping keep the doors open for everyone else. You are funding the podcast, the videos, the courses now being built, and the pastoral work that will never appear on a balance sheet.
Every time I answer someone who believes God has abandoned them, help a wounded person reconsider faith, or place another name into my Book of Prayers, you are there with me.
We have crossed 10,000 members.
We have launched the podcast.
We are carrying a healthier, more compassionate Christianity into places currently overrun with anger, cruelty, and nonsense.
Now we need to build the foundation beneath it.
We can do this together.
And after what you have already helped accomplish, I genuinely believe we will.
With Gratitude,
