The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - Meet My Friends: Michael Gormley and Dave VanVickle

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

Jeff sits down with Mike “Gomer” Gormley and Dave VanVickle, hosts of Every Knee Shall Bow (https://media.ascensionpress.com/category/ascension-podcasts/everykneeshallbow/), a podcast about how Catholics can evangelize and share the faith. Mike and Dave are both very active in evangelization at their parishes and in their personal lives. We talk about the assumptions we make about other Catholics, tracks (pamphlets that preach the gospel), and what to say to people who don’t consider evangelization their “gift”. Snippet from the Show The big focus is community. Jesus Christ is very keen on community because it reflects a trinitarian lifestyle.

You're listening to The Jeff Kavens show, episode 115, Meet My Friends, Mike Gormley, Dave Van Vickle. Hey, I'm Jeff Kavins. How do you simplify your life? How do you study the Bible? All the way from motorcycle trips to raising kids, we're going to talk about the faith and life in general. It's the Jeff Kaven show. Hey, I want to welcome you to the show this week. So good for you and me to get together like this. And you get a chance to meet my friends. And in the past, we've had an opportunity to meet some really great people like Dr. Ted

Sri, Father Josh Johnson, and the amazing chef, John Falsh, the king of cuisine in the South. And it's good. I like to introduce my friends to people so that you get a... kind of a wider perspective on what's happening in the Catholic world today. And as you know, evangelization is one of my all-time favorite topics. I love talking about discipleship, and I love talking about topics like love, simplicity, suffering even. But part of being a modern day disciple, or is what I call an activated disciple, is evangelization, learning how to share your faith with others. And more so than ever, we are running into

a lot of young Catholics who are really becoming effective in sharing their faith, not only on podcasting, radio and TV, and talking about how to do it, but actually doing it in their lives. And I've got two people that I want to introduce to you, who are friends of mine, and they have an amazing podcast called Every Knee Shall Bow, and that includes your knees. And their name, Mike Gormley, and Dave Van Vickle. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks. Thanks. This is awesome. Thank you for having us. Yeah. I have had the chance to be on your show and really enjoyed it.

And I think that the more we can share our stories with one another, the more people get a fuller idea of what it means to be Catholic, to be a disciple, and to be an active evangelizer, if you will. And I love your show, every knee shall bow. How long have you been, first of all, let me get to know you guys a little bit as far as an introduction. Mike, you and I've known each other for a while. Mike Gormley, tell us a little bit about what you're doing, where you're at, and some of the things you're involved in. Yeah, so I am at my home parish since I was a teenager. I am doing adult faith formation and evangelization at St. Anthony O'Padoa in the Woodlands, Texas. And I've studied your Bible timeline since I was in high school.

Hope that doesn't age you. But my pastor has had the privilege to go on several of your pilgrimages to the Holy Land. waiting on that phone call for me, whatever. Hint, hint. But yeah, so. Note to producer. But so what do I do? I help adults grow in their faith through really trying to develop win programs for

people who don't have faith, don't know their faith, don't know if God knows and loves them, and then send programs. Programs to send Catholics out who are committed Catholics into becoming evangelists and learning how to love their families through the lens of the gospel and reach out to their neighbors and all that. And for me, the big focus is community. Jesus Christ is very keen on community because it reflects this Trinitarian lifestyle. So my goal and I work with Ascension Press to build this thing called radical communities where people can come together in their homes with their neighbors and really explore the gospel in a friendly but still powerful way. And yeah, so that's what I'm doing

right now. I'm trying to gather as many young people as I can in my home for a meal. and prayer and all that stuff in and through my parish work outside of my parish work. So that's what I'm doing. Yeah, and I'd like to talk a little bit more on that in just a little bit about radical communities because that's something that I read up on that. I looked at what you were doing. And I got to tell you, it is innovative, creative, and it's new and fresh. And I think that it really fits into the times that we're living in.

Let's open up, have my producer, Christina, open up the green room, bring Dave in here for a moment. Oh, he's still snacking on the food in the green. Dave, come on in here. That would be awesome. Where was the food? I was supposed to listen. Dave is good. Good to have you on the show.

Dave Van Vickle. Tell us a little bit about your background. You are half of the great Every Knee Shall Bow podcast. Yeah, yeah. I'm the better half, maybe. Yeah, maybe. That's what I would say.

Yeah, I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm married and I have five children, and I hope to overpopulate the earth with disciples. But we're at five now, so we're working on it. And that's the great commandment from the book of Genesis, Poo-U-U-Ravu, be fruitful and multiply. That's right. So you're Poo-U-Ravooing. I hope to, yeah. The, yeah, I mean, I had a, you know, radical conversion to the Lord. I grew up Catholic, but conversion to the Lord at the age of 15 and kind of became obsessed with evangelization immediately after that. And now I'm extremely passionate about that. And I work professionally at a two. large Catholic parishes, well, large by Pittsburgh standards, in the Diocese of Pittsburgh as the director of evangelization. And I also do a lot of speaking on evangelization, but mostly actually

on spiritual warfare. So that's kind of what I speak on all around. So, yeah. Oh, that's great. And are you both graduates of Franciscan University? And I didn't, I didn't know it until a few weeks ago that, that you guys actually were with my daughter Carly over in Goming, Austria. That's so crazy. I wasn't in Gomming, but I knew Carly well. Yeah, and I didn't know her well. So when I walk into a room on the very first day of our study abroad program in Goming, I see a picture of her standing next to you and some woman.

And I was like, hey, who is this? Why are you standing with Jeff Kavis? Who's this woman? She's like, I'm Carly Kavins. Jeff is my dad. That's my mom. And I was like, of course. I'm going to leave right now.

I got to get out of here. Now the two of you have this great show, every knee shall bow. And I've got to say that that is a subject that I'm interested. It's primarily on evangelization, right? And learning to share Christ with other people. Of all the topics in the world that you could have centered your show on together, what brought you to evangelization? Yeah. So, well, first of all, it's the one thing that Gomer and I have been passionate about, you know, and we talk to each other about often and have, we already are having these in-depth conversations about evangelization. Dave, can I break in for just a second?

Did you just call him Gomer? Yeah, sorry. I'm never going to call him Michael ever for the rest of my life. Even if you... 30-second explanation. Gomer was actually, that nickname is after what you think, the harlot from the Bible. I don't know why people started calling him that. Well, I would think with a name like Gomer, you'd have a pile of trouble.

Oh, boo. Shazam, Shazam. Has that one ever been used before? No, no one. Okay, Dave, back to you. back to you since we brought you out of the green room right right so so when we you know we were talking about doing a something to promote evangelization because um you know there's just not a lot honestly there really isn't a lot and i think for gomer and i when we were younger i know when i was

evangelizing there were a few like protestant schools there were very few books that were catholic there was almost no catholic resources on how to practically evangelize and you know it was kind it was rough, you know, to get out there and to just be trying to share my faith without any kind of guidance. So we thought, let's do this. We should do this. Yeah. I think, you know, it works because we've made every mistake, you know. It works because we've made every mistake in the book, right? So we can share a lot of wisdom from the mistakes that we've made, I'd say. Mike, you're going to comment, or Gomer. Sorry. You know right. No. The idea behind the podcast for me, I had taught Catholic evangelization 101, a program that I came up with, and I ran it as a weekly

thing every Monday, and then I ran it as an all-day Saturday kind of event. And I noticed that they had two very distinct feels to it. And while I wouldn't say the day one, the in a day one was like a bankrupt thing, there was power in giving people homework and taking it week by week. And what we would do is we would check in as a class on Monday how their previous week went and you ended up seeing lives slowly and then dramatically changed the more they were investing in this relationship with their friends and bringing Christ into the middle and when we were talking about our show I said well I already have these topics kind of listed out and we can expand them into more but Dave like there's literally no one else I want to talk about this stuff with because you're he comes at it from such a different way like that spiritual warfare mindset and the way that he did it and i came from it from this nerdy kind of theoretical way which can be helpful and can be uh an excuse not to actually talk with real people and so when we did this it was like it has to be weekly and it has to center on practicals and the good folks at ascension uh shut down all of our initial episodes because i'm like

let's talk about theory and it's like no we need to be utterly practical to to true equip the saints for the work of the mission. Well, that is something that, you know, I feel passionate about myself as well, and that is that, you know, when you look at any topic within Catholicism, whether it's the Blessed Virgin Mary, the sacraments, church history, the papacy, mass, you know, there's really a lot of really good material out there. And there's a lot of good books and recordings and things like that. But sooner or later, we've, you know, we've got to find a way of bringing this to the masses and learning how to communicate all of this beautiful

stuff to people other than ourselves constantly. And I think that's what you guys are all about is bringing it to the world. In fact, Dave, I know you used to even write your own tracks. Explain what a track is because there are people who don't even know what a track is. Tell us about that. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I remember being passionate about evangelization and thinking, okay, I'm just going to, I don't know what to do. I'm just going to go walk out, you know, and hand out something that would kind of, you know, explain the gospel and attract is exactly that. It's like a small pamphlet or something that kind of like preaches the basic gospel message

or maybe a specific aspect of, you know, what you're trying to get across or something. And I remember, you know, in the days when, I mean, you know, this is aging us even, but like even when like computer ink was like at a premium, you know, like printing out my own tracks on my dad's computer and going to, you know, into Dallas and passing them out, like at gas stations or, or, you know, just on the sidewalk and things like that. And I, I would love to find one because I'm sure it's just horrendous. But, but, yeah, that's what I used to do. Well, back in, back in my Protestant days, I was a pastor for 12 years. We did some interesting things. Of course, that was in the day of the Protestant tracks called Chick-Tracks.

Right. And Chick-Tracks were actually anti-Catholic. You know, they had actual tracks. They were just the worst. When I do prison ministry, they still have them. And so a lot of they're making a resurgence now. That's a big resurgence. They are. Are they really? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well, you know, I would try to be

creative and you guys can certainly steal this little ideas from me. But I guess you can't because times have changed. Back when I was in my 20s and really excited about evangelization, which I am still, they had what they would call pay phones. I don't have time to explain it, Google it. But they had they had pay phones where you

would you get change back. If it was a 20 cents to call, you put a quarter and you get a nickel back. Well, I used to make little pieces of paper that said looking for change and it gave our church name and address and put in, I know it's cheesy. No, that's awesome. We actually had people who called us and said, I found this piece of paper in the, you know, in the, in the coin return on the pay phone. And so I'd try to find creative ways of getting the message out. So that's interesting that you created your own tracks and you had passed them out to people. I want to take a break. And when we come back, I want to go deeper, Mike, into what you're doing in your parish as well as the show, of course. But I think what you're doing there is great in terms of

evangelization. And Dave, a little bit more about what you're doing and how this show is really addressing the idea of evangelization. I'm talking with Mike Gormley and Dave Van Vickle. They are the hosts of the very popular show. Every knee shall bow, which includes yours and mine and ultimately the entire worlds. You're listening to the Jeff Kaven show. Every one of us is made in the image of God. We are unique, worthy of love, and called to greatness. In this world, though, we can be distracted from that truth and begin to doubt God's love is real. You see, we live in a world that tells us we are not smart, attractive, thin, or rich enough. It is easy to focus on the ways we fall short of worldly perfection

and forget that we are already made perfect. We are already enough. I'm Danielle Bean, author of You Are Enough, what women of the Bible teach you about your mission and worth. You Are Enough dives into the stories of women in the Bible so that you can fully see God's plan for your life. To order, visit ascensionpress.com or Amazon. Welcome back.

We're talking today about my friends, and that's Mike Gormley and Dave Van Vickle. They're the hosts of Every Knee Shall Bow. That's one of Ascension Press's a great podcast. and they do some other work, too, in podcasting. And they're both involved in Pittsburgh and Houston in their own ministry at their own parish and just doing a great job. Welcome back, guys.

Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Good to be back. I noticed that during the break, you guys were in the green room, and there's nothing left in there. It's a green room. It is the only podcast that does have a green room that I know of, where our guys are. actually do get treated well, you know, during the breaks. Anyway, hey, we're talking with

Mike Gormley and Dave Van Vickle. Mike, you and down in Houston, Texas, you have a really unusual way of evangelizing that I'd like our listeners to hear about. Well, just at the parish, one of the things that we realized early on is that there is a profound hunger and thirst for solid Catholic content that many adults never received. So within our children's programs and our youth ministry programs, they were so strong and vital, but there was nothing for adults. So a bunch of people who were excited about their face

started launching all of these different adult faith formation Bible studies. We do pretty much every single thing Ascension Press has ever produced, ever. But one of the things that I started to notice was there was a profound I like to use focus as a model of win, build, send. There was a profound amount of investment in build. And you can understand why, right? These are the people who are there and they're demanding, right?

They want to know more. They're the ones who are already invested. And so when I was hired, it was already in the midst of all these wonderful programs that were going on. And what I began to realize was there was a total lack of win and send, right? The people who are committed Christians who were mature in their faith in Christ, they weren't stepping out of the classroom and that made me very nervous

and then at the same time we weren't getting people on the parish we were getting them through relationships but there was nothing kind of formal or built into our parish structure that really welcomed people who were searching and seeking and that's a universal problem

isn't it? Absolutely I mean I run into parishes that not only they have no way of bringing outsiders in but the people inside don't know how to get in through RCAA or anything else. They really don't, you know, they don't know. It comes, Easter vigil shows up, and they have 1,800 families in the church, and three people are coming in, and the rest of the people don't even know how they came in,

really. And that's a problem. Yeah, so we try to look at it from a broad range approach. So one of the things that I began doing at my parish was I offered a series called the Start Here series, and the kind of underlying premise was, we presume no knowledge. and this was to reach to me what I'm most passionate about is a once a month to once a year

Catholic people who come to anything once a month to once a year I lose sleep over these people right so I flower children right and so my whole hope is all right I know that they are people who have never studied the Bible I've discovered don't want to do a Bible study

because they don't want to be exposed in their ignorance to their peers so we do these series where it's like presume no knowledge of the Bible literally day one is get a bible bring it to class and we'll talk about the cover and the spine and the table of contents and that's it and you had people bring their home bibles they had the big family bible with their name you know that they got a you know like that they got of their marriage or whatever with their gold embossed you know name on there you had people bringing children's bibles most of them brought protestant bibles they had no idea and so we just spend that time so no one felt like oh i'm ignorant i'm going to look like an idiot or whatever And so I realized when that was successful, we needed to replicate this for prayer, for morality, for all the big areas, you know. Don't assume a lot. Yeah.

And most people assume that the people in the pews know and they want to be there. When, in fact, the assumption every priest should make is those hearing my homily, many are seeking, many are searching, but most are ignorant. And a lot of them are apathetic. So we try to do what we can. So we have a lot of programs to nourish a developed faith. and so we're starting to build those things so we started another program called inclusion which separated disciples who are Protestant who are baptized in their Protestant faith but who would consider literally on the handout what they kind of like try to understand it's like do you consider

yourself a follower of Jesus a born again you know disciple of our Lord and you think following Christ might lead you into the Catholic Church then come to this if you're not a practicing Protestant but you were baptized when you were nine or 10 inclusion is not right for you so inclusion is like an in-depth study of the differences between Catholics and Protestants, right? And so doing these things, you're enabling onboarding in a really exciting way. Well, what you're saying is so true, you know, just to pause on that thought for a moment, when you talk about, we assume so much of what people know, and Catholicism is highly saturated with meta-language.

and from an outsider's perspective, they don't know even what we're talking about. I remember teaching in Minnesota a few years ago, and we had a good group of people there, and I was talking about the Magisterium, and I gave a little talk, you know, on the Magisterium. It was part of my talk, I think it was an hour long, and later that night, when I got home, I got a phone call from someone, and they said, I loved your talk, I got a lot out of it, but can you tell me, what is a Magisterium? and I said, well, mom, and I began to explain. And I remember back at Steubenville when Scott Hahn and I had a holy hour every morning

for about a year, and we would pray together in the chapel there at Steubenville at Franciscan University. And one morning he mentioned something about a monstrance, and I had been pretty new coming back to the church, and he mentioned a monstrance, and the only thing I could equate it to was Monstrance Inc or something, you know. And I didn't know what he was talking about. And I was afraid that he was going to ask me. And that's a fear a lot of people have.

No, you're going to ask me to open up to Jose. I don't know what to do. And I don't want to look like a fool. So I went home after our prayer hour, our prayer, holy hour, all kinds of names for it. And I looked up in the dictionary, monstrance, went, oh, my gosh, is, okay, to demonstrate. It's, all right. But that kind of illustrates what you're talking about, and that is that we've got a hefty message for people and a great message for people, but it is laden, heavily laden with

meta-language. It is. That's why I think the number one thing any Catholic needs to do at a parish is rebrand R-C-I-A. Do not call it R-C-I-A. Most people can't remember those four initials. They can't even remember. They can't even remember. Is it CIR? What was it? Dave, have you run into that yourself? Oh yeah. We run into it all the time. We run a similar format at our parish has like kind of like focus windbiddle and send we call it charygma catechesis and conquer and we're we're like obsessed with the transitions so like we we want to make sure that there's bridges you know from people like responding to the corigma responding to the corigma responding to the corigma responding to the carigma and then like kind of graduating in a sense into catechesis and bopping around

in curriculum and catechises and during those times we literally like run class like how to be a Catholic, you know, like that kind of thing, where we go over terminology. So like, you know, at our parish, we'll have every single month there will be some kind of class on how to begin a prayer life, what it means to be a Catholic, or how to be a Catholic, and there'll be a class on how to share your faith. So that, and we continually offer that so that everyone in the parish eventually would have a chance. That is so good. That is so good. So refreshing and needed. What kind response are you getting? Yeah, so I'm actually new to these two parishes, and it's already going really well, so those classes are always pretty full. But at the parish I was at for seven years before this,

you know, we had, I always brag about, we had 400 people who had been trained to give their five-minute testimony, their five-minute witness. And so we created like a culture of corigma, we call it, and every single meeting, every single thing that, you know, we did started out with someone's testimony or a preaching of the corigma. And it usually was from a peer group. Well, you know, you guys are familiar, and we've talked past. In fact, I was on your show a while ago talking about the activated disciple and the corigma.

And I'm a firm believer in that there's seven points to the corigma, obviously. You know, God loves you as a plan for your life and so forth. But I'm, and you know my cheesy phrase. Go ahead, tell me. What's my cheesy phrase? You got a. Brew some curig ma. Exactly.

Brew your own. Brew your own cup of curigma. That's exactly right. But it's really true, isn't it? That we all don't share the faith the same as everybody else. We do have the same message, but we do have to brew our own in a sense of how am I going to convey this incredible story and this plan that God has for people's lives and introduce them to the fact that, hey, sin is real. and it's really messed up our lives, and there's a solution to this. Comment on that for just a moment.

I'm curious because your show is focused on evangelization, and this whole idea of ordinary, everyday Catholics learning to share their faith. Is this something that you're seeing more of? Yeah, the desire. The desire is definitely there. I think there's still a lot of fear in stepping out and initiating those conversations on an airplane or in the coffee shop or whatever. But the kind of method behind it is a three-story evangelization, right?

I want to get to know your story. I'm going to ask you questions about you. I'm going to share my story so that you can get to know how Christ changed my life. And in sharing my story, I'm going to tell you God's story. So it's like the message is always the same of who God is. My story is my own. This is my story, my way, the path that I discovered Christ. And you have your own story and your own path and your own way to the capital T,

capital W, the way. And so it is beautiful in training people how to do something that's so individual, so personal, but also at the same time has that universal content, which is the ever ancient, ever new gospel, right? Yeah. Dave? Yeah, well, one of the activities I always like to lead people through is, you know, we have the corigma in five steps and trying to put your testimony in five steps and lining it up with the corigma. I think it can be really powerful. to do that because, you know, I mean, a lot of times evangelization takes like the form of just like throwing up on a person, right? And you definitely don't want to do that. Right. Like you want to, I know. It's kind of like, I think my opinion is the hardest part about evangelization is patience

and like relying on the fact that it's okay if you're just sharing one part of your story with the corigma because God is going to work out, you know, a lot of times he's just looking for somebody to step in and get hit and then he's going to pull you back out so you don't mess it up right and so yeah i love that i love that point where you're saying david is that you're not responsible for the entire thing you know you're part of a team and that team uh that that other team member who's going to witness to uh the person you're talking to might come tomorrow at a ball game you know and you don't know that this is a this is a marvelous tapestry that god is bringing together because he's more concerned about that soul than any of us on this on this show right now you know and he has a plan

for their for their life and he's looking for our cooperation but let me ask you guys this because this is one of the the the pushbacks that I hear when it comes to evangelizing which by the way years ago if I said in Catholic circles evangelizing they'd say oh you're Protestant it's van evangelization you know and so we kind of lost all those silly little arguments. Now we can say whatever we want. It's evangelizing, evangelization, is that when we evangelize, oftentimes we'll ask people to also evangelize or share their faith or witness, whatever you want to call it, but we'll hear this from people. That's not my gift. What do you guys say about that? My big thing is you might not feel gifted in sharing,

because there is a gift or a charism of evangelism. But I tell people, but it is your duty. It is your responsibility. And God has called you to it, and he's equipped you for it, right? You might not have a powerful charism to go stand and fill stadiums. That's not what God has called you to. But to remain silent about Jesus Christ, you don't want to follow. You don't want to have what Jesus Christ said will happen.

If you don't preach men, if you don't preach me before men, if you don't witness me in front of others, I'm not going to witness you in front of my father on your judgment day, right? Like, it's this notion of this is a call that God has equipped us for, but it's a duty rooted in our baptism and confirmation, right? It's, and if you truly believe, why wouldn't you want to share this message with others? I think, what do you think, Dave? I think a lot of, a lot of times that response comes from a deep-seated idea of what they think evangelization is. And I think, I think a big problem is that, you know, you have to remember, we have to really, really remember. And I think this is a big problem for, like, well-known professional Catholics,

is that are we preaching the gospel, am I preaching the gospel of Dave Am Vickle, or am I preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ? And if I'm preaching the gospel of David Mvichol, then I can say to you, I don't know. I don't think I'm called to do that because I don't have very much confidence in the gospel of David Vichol. But if we can say to people, we're calling you to do anything like that. We're calling you to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's a requirement. I think you get a better response in that. sense, and it doesn't matter if you're gifted in it, because all you're doing is telling a story, a great story, and doing a lot of listening. I guess that's, that's, you know, usually my take on it. And when we share the Lord with people, whether it's at a coffee shop, a ballgame, Walmart, or a family reunion, or a neighborhood picnic, whatever it might be. Bathroom. Yeah, exactly. I've got some stories there, too. But wherever we share it, I think, you know, you bring up a good point, and that is that we are, our assumption of what it means to share Christ

is usually highly theological. It is verses, it is Latin, it is biblical concepts, and so forth, and let's face it, the average Catholic out there is not equipped then to share that, but if it's a relationship of one person sharing the good relationship they have with the Lord and what the Lord has done for them, then anybody can do it. So most of my sharing with people in the area of evangelization is actually not scriptural. It's not in the sense of, you know, Romans chapter 3 and verse, you know, says this, but it is telling them that during my times of uncertainty, if I'm meeting somebody who's really struggling and to say that in my times of uncertainty,

I can tell you that my relationship with Jesus Christ has meant all the difference in the world. that's a witness right there because, you know, Peter said, always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within you, and that answer is Jesus Christ, and that is witnessing, and yeah, we have time to get down into verses, and maybe even if you have a question about doctrines in the Catholic Church, whatever it might be, but the initial witness is he's changed my life, and that brings me to a point that Monsignor Pope, who I think is an excellent teacher on the carigma brings out. And he says that, you know, biblically speaking, when the charismatic message

was given in the New Testament, it was on the heels of a sign, a wonder, a miracle. And so right away, people are going to say, well, man, I don't have a sign, a wonder, or a miracle. And he brings out the point that your changed life is the miracle. Your relationship with the Lord is the miracle, which in response, people will say, well, I've never left the church like you, Jeff. I've never been on drugs. I've never been an alcoholic, you know, I've, I've never done this or that. Now's the time to start. Now's the time to start. Yeah. Well, let's say, I've never, I've never had a

story like that. In other words, they equate that with, I don't have anything to share. But I do in that I actually am experiencing what the world is looking for, which is, purpose, direction, peace to my life. And that's what we've got to get into our heads is that if you're a Christian

and you have been changed by Christ, that's the starting point that he has changed my life. And nobody can take that away from you. Nobody can take it away. And don't you think, I mean, like, this idea is, this is frustrating to me, right?

This is, what more drama could you add to the idea that the God of the universe, the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover is deeply head over heels in love with you. It doesn't add much to the story to say that you were like an international drug lord or something like that. Just being a normal person and knowing that the God of the universe loves you is a dramatic story. We don't have to add much to it. It's beautiful. But that's what happens when people think they're sharing the gospel of so-and-so instead of Jesus, right?

like I have to be I have to have the sensational in order to draw their attention it's like well he already did the sensational thing right he already did it yeah it would be like me saying you know i've got a story to i used to be a packer fan but then the lord got a hold of me you know no you don't i'm kidding all my friends in wisconsin you know i love you that was cheesy i know but the we the story you have is your own story nobody can take it away i can say to someone Jesus has changed my life, he's given me a peace in my life that I've never known before, and I'm learning how to live in a way I never knew before, and someone can, they're not going to say, oh, that's not true. It's not true. It's my story. It's what Jesus has done in my life.

And then they can get around to, well, what is he done? Tell me what your relationship is like with him. And that's when you begin to weave in, you know, doctrine and theology and so forth, if you can at your level. But that, that's the reason I tell people, to start brewing their own cup, you know, get used to sharing your story, your elevator pitch as to what Christ has meant in your life. We're almost out of time, but I want to know where can people get a hold of you, and we'll be certain to put it in the show notes if they want to get a hold of you. And again, the names of your podcast so that they can listen and enjoy the good things you guys are doing. Yeah, so you can find me at layevangelist.com. That's my main, like,

kind of speaking and website. I also have links to different audio stuff that I do. My other podcast is called Catching Foxes, but the one that I think your audience would appreciate the most is, of course, every knee shall bow. I also do a parish podcast,

it's just for our parishioners called Beyond the Bulletin. It's good fun if you want to steal ideas. Overachieve much. I know. I want to be a podcaster. That's all I want to do. It's like David's, one of David's mighty men, his hand has clung to the microphone. Yeah, and you can see my schedule for speaking at the sinners guide.com, the sinners guide.com. This is my only podcast, is every knee shall bow. I'm completely and utterly devoted to that one single podcast. I'm like Michael. I was a man of many hearts.

But please, yeah, come out and see me. I'd love to see you at some events. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on the show today. And my friends, these are my friends. And I introduce them to you today. Mike Gormley and Dave Van Vickle. They are the hosts of Every Knee Shall Bow, and I recommend the show to you, and you're going to learn more about evangelization. Hey, I really do appreciate the email you send me. And my email address, once again,

is The Jeff Kaven Show at ascensionpress.com. We read all the email, we take it into consideration for show ideas and things that we need to address. love to be friends with you on Instagram. Again, I'm just Jeff Kavens on Instagram. You know what's so funny about that? I've got to tell you is that when social media first started,

I started with Facebook and Twitter and things rose real quickly, and I didn't even know about Instagram. And when it finally came about, it was just for pictures. And I have just got on board, I'm of shame to say recently, but I am doing more and more work on Instagram, so I'll see you there. And again, thank you, so much for joining us. I want you to know I love you, and I pray for you every day, and I know I'm with you in the car a lot and maybe in the backyard with some iced tea, but know that you're on

my mind, and I'm thinking about you and praying for you, and I appreciate your prayers for me. And I'd like to conclude this show by praying for you once again, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, I lift up my friend to you right now, and we've been together many of us for many, many episodes and some just joining, but I lift up my friend to you right now and ask you to bless their life, give them wisdom and direction, and bring them close to you and reveal yourself to them in your word, in the beauty of the church. And I pray, Lord, for their safety, and I pray, Lord, for their discretion and prudence as they live and become activated disciples. We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Name of the

Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Look forward to seeing you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.