Soil and Roots

Episode 145 continues the story of where Soil & Roots is heading—and why the next chapter is centered on Greenhouses. Brian is joined by spiritual director Rhonda Jenkins and pastor, coach, and trainer David Smith, two advisors helping shape the future of the Soil & Roots deep discipleship journey. Rhonda and David share how performance-based Christianity, institutional ministry, suffering, and encounters with the Wall drew them into a deeper experience of Jesus. Their stories reveal the difference between knowing about God and experiencing His presence, love, and delight in the hidden places of the heart. The conversation also explores why churches are often well equipped for the early stages of faith but struggle to accompany people through the inward journey. Brian, Rhonda, and David discuss spiritual direction, double knowledge, self-exploration, the limits of information-centered discipleship, and the importance of trusted people who remain present when life becomes difficult and messy.

In this bonus episode, Brian steps away from the usual Season 7 format to share the personal story behind Soil & Roots. Episode 144 traces the last five years: betrayal, loss, the dark night of the soul, chronic Lyme disease, financial uncertainty, and the slow emergence of a deeper calling. Brian shares how Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, A.W. Tozer, C.S. Lewis, the Critical Journey, and the language of hidden ideas helped shape the Soil & Roots vision. This episode also explains what has been happening behind the scenes this summer: the SEO and discoverability overhaul, the review of five years of content, the refining of the Greenhouse model, and the emerging two-year pathway through the inward journey. At the center is a simple question: how do we help people facing the wall move toward depth, healing, self-knowledge, and deeper life with Jesus?

What do we do when we find ourselves doubting God’s goodness? In this Greenhouse episode, Brian and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 142 by exploring one of the most difficult tensions in deep discipleship: how to affirm God’s goodness while honestly grieving the pain, injustice, and suffering of the world. Doc brings his own struggle into the conversation, naming the friction between experiencing God’s kindness in his own life and seeing deep suffering in the lives of others. This episode is not a philosophical defense of God’s goodness. It is a conversation about lament, authenticity, doubt, secure attachment, and the kind of community where people can bring their rawest questions without being rushed, corrected, or shamed. Brian and Doc explore why modern church culture often struggles with lament, why easy answers can fail the heart, and why the deeper question beneath “Is God good?” may be a cry for withness.

Is God good, and do our hearts actually experience Him that way? In Episode 142, Brian continues Season 7, The Good Life, by exploring one of the most powerful hidden ideas many followers of Jesus carry: the suspicion that God may not actually be good. We may consciously affirm God’s goodness, love, mercy, and faithfulness, yet our lived experience can tell another story. Drawing from the Soil & Roots distinction between beliefs and ideas, Brian explores how hidden assumptions about God are formed through suffering, disappointment, family systems, trauma, illness, and repeated experiences. The episode considers how distrust of God’s goodness often shows up through the Eight Indicators: control, anxiety, resentment toward reality, and difficulty receiving love.

What if your view of God shapes everything? In this Greenhouse episode, Brian and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 140 on what God is really like and why our deepest ideas of God matter so much. Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth — people who are increasingly attuned to God, others, themselves, and the world. The conversation begins with Richard Foster’s claim that the world does not need more talented or intelligent people as much as it needs deep people. But becoming deep is not always safe, comfortable, or tidy. The inward journey can involve pruning, tearing, fire, pain, and the slow process of being unmade and remade by God’s goodness. Brian and Doc then explore how our view of God becomes the root system beneath nearly every other view we hold. Our theology shapes our philosophy, our politics, our view of creation, our understanding of the sacred and secular, and even how we think about suffering, the church, and the Bible.

What is God really like? In Episode 140, Brian returns to one of the founding questions of Soil & Roots: what do we actually believe God is like? Not merely what do we say in our creeds, statements of faith, or Bible studies — but what do our hearts assume about Him? Drawing from A.W. Tozer’s claim that our real idea of God may be buried beneath “conventional religious notions,” this episode explores why deep discipleship requires more than correct doctrine or Bible knowledge. It requires the uncovering of our hidden, often unconscious ideas about God. Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth. Brian argues that the journey into depth depends on four necessary conditions: self-awareness, story-sharing, suffering in community, and spiritual habits. The first condition, self-awareness, begins with the painful but essential work of uncovering our true ideas about God. This episode walks through several common distorted images of God: God as the Great Taskmaster, God as the direct cause of suffering, God as a performance-based Father, and God as an angry judge waiting to condemn. These ideas may not match our stated beliefs, but they can quietly shape our emotions, behaviors, relationships, health, words, and spiritual lives.

What if your hidden ideas about God shape your life more than your stated beliefs? In this Greenhouse episode, Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 138 on ideas, beliefs, and the unconscious forces that shape our discipleship. Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth — people who naturally and unconsciously think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus. The conversation begins with Psalm 42 and the season’s theme: “Deep calls to deep.” Doc unpacks the water imagery of the psalm, reminding us that the journey into depth is not always gentle or peaceful. Sometimes God’s invitation into the Good Life comes through waves, breakers, chaos, suffering, and the painful process of being unmade and remade. Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc then return to the Soil & Roots language of ideas: the assumptions, conclusions, and experienced realities in which our hearts are rooted. These hidden ideas often operate beneath our stated beliefs. We may say we trust God, believe in His goodness, and affirm His love, while our actual lives reveal a different operating system.

What do you really believe about God? In Episode 138, Brian continues Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, by returning to one of the central ideas of Soil & Roots: our lives are not shaped primarily by what we say we believe, but by the ideas our hearts actually assume. Ideas are the unconscious assumptions, conclusions, and experienced realities in which our hearts are rooted. They sit beneath our belief systems and quietly shape how we relate to God, ourselves, others, and the world. We may intellectually believe that God is good, loving, safe, and trustworthy — while our hearts live as if He is distant, disappointed, unsafe, or unreliable. This matters because Season 7 is exploring the journey into depth. If the first step toward the Good Life is receiving God’s love with vulnerability, then our true ideas about God become essential. How can we surrender to love if our hearts do not trust the One offering it?

Why do we resist the very love that could heal us? In this Greenhouse episode, Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 136 on receiving God’s love, vulnerability, and the Good Life. Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, is exploring how we become people of depth — people increasingly formed by the love of God from the inside out. The conversation begins by revisiting the Good Life, the with-God life, Christian mysticism, and the surprising reality that many people who identify as Christians do not experience deep, daily, relational intimacy with God. If Jesus invites us into abiding peace, secure attachment, love that surpasses knowledge, and a conversational life with the Father, why does that life feel so rare? Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc then move into four obstacles to receiving God’s love with vulnerability: our need for control, our avoidance of pain, our sense of shame and unworthiness, and our mistrust of God’s character. These are not merely intellectual disagreements. They are often unconscious ideas rooted in our stories, wounds, relationships, fears, and experiences.

Why is receiving God’s love so hard? In Episode 136, Brian continues Season 7, Deep Calls to Deep, by exploring one of the central questions of the journey into depth: if God is constantly inviting us into the Good Life, why do so few of us actually experience it? This episode suggests that the doorway into the with-God life is not more striving, better behavior, or additional information. It is vulnerability. Drawing from David Benner, Dallas Willard, the six core ideas, and the Soil & Roots framework of unconscious formation, Brian argues that genuine transformation begins when we allow ourselves to be loved unconditionally by God. But receiving God’s love is not as easy as it sounds. Brian names four obstacles that often keep us guarded: our need for control, our avoidance of pain, our sense of unworthiness, and our mistrust of God’s character. These obstacles are not merely intellectual doubts. They are rooted in the deeper ideas of our hearts — our unconscious assumptions about power, anthropology, value, and identity.

What is the Good Life with God? In this first Greenhouse episode of Season 7, Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc continue the conversation from Episode 134, Rediscovering the Good Life. Season 7 is called Deep Calls to Deep, and it asks the central Soil & Roots question: how do we actually become people of depth? This episode begins by clarifying what the Good Life is — and what it is not. The Good Life is not ease, prosperity, success, comfort, or a pain-free existence. It is not “your best life now” in the shallow sense. Instead, the Good Life is the with-God life: a daily, relational, embodied experience of God’s presence, love, delight, and nearness, even when life is difficult. Brian, Handsome Kyle, and Doc wrestle with whether this kind of life is actually meant to be normal for people who follow Jesus, or whether it is only for “super-Christians” and famous mystics. They explore Dallas Willard, Christian mysticism, John 17:3, Ephesians 3, the love that surpasses knowledge, and what it means to know God in a deeply experiential way.

What kind of life did Jesus actually invite us into? Episode 134 launches Season 7 of Soil & Roots, Deep Calls to Deep, by asking a simple but unsettling question: how do we become people of depth? Before exploring the path, Brian begins with the destination — the Good Life, or what Dallas Willard called the with-God life. The with-God life is not merely being saved, learning more theology, attending church, or trying harder to behave. It is a daily, embodied, relational reality with God. It is a life marked by deep security, inner freedom, conversational intimacy with God, and love that flows from the inside out. Brian explores why many followers of Jesus quietly assume this kind of life is unrealistic, reserved for spiritual elites, or simply not meant for them. Drawing from Scripture, Christian mysticism, Dallas Willard, David Benner, and everyday experience, he reframes discipleship not as more effort or better techniques, but as the risky and transformative work of receiving God’s love.

Explore deep discipleship, the Great Omission, and the transforming love that surpasses knowledge and reshapes the heart.

In this special bonus episode, Brian invites his two young adult sons, Caleb and Zachary, onto the show to discuss spiritual formation in different generations.

Brian, Doc, and Handsome Kyle engage in a lively, honest conversation about what it means to live a relaxed life, just like Jesus. Instead of the performance-driven, always-busy version of Christianity so many of us grew up with, they reflect on Jesus’ calm, centered presence—rooted in His secure attachment to the Father. From raccoons clinging […]