The Top Church and Main Episodes of 2025

Seminaries, Elbows Up, USAID, the Dual State and so much more.

The year 2025 was not boring by any stretch of the imagination, especially when it comes to the intersection of faith and culture. The second term of Donald Trump, the decline of mainline Protestant churches, the immigration crackdown, and other issues made for a lot of issues for me to chat with fascinating people. So, I wanted to share some of the top 15 episodes of the Church and Main podcast from this year.

Rob Myallis

Who would have thought that a conversation with a fellow pastor about our common alma mater would be the most downloaded episode of 2025? Rob Myallis is a Lutheran pastor who has an old-style blog called Lectionary Greek. He wrote an article in 2024 called “Where will our next pastor come from?” that also became fodder for the story that our alma mater, Luther Seminary, will sell its property and move to a new location somewhere in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. It was an important discussion that highlighted the changing nature of American Christianity and where it might be going in the 21st century.

Ryan Self

Inclusion is the watchword of the faith-based LGBTQ movement, but Ryan Self showed through personal experience how some churches can profess inclusion and yet fail to practice it.

David Harrison

Maybe you saw it: during the 50th Anniversary celebration of Saturday Night Live, Mike Meyers made an interesting gesture where he hoisted his elbows and mouthed the words, “elbows up.” This became a rallying cry in early 2025 as President Donald Trump started making noise of making Canada the 51st State. Meyers, who is Canadian, made this gesture to one of the biggest audiences possible, and it spread like wildfire across Canada, with Prime Minister Mark Carney making a commercial with Meyers. I talked to Anglican priest David Harrison about what the concept of “elbows up” meant to Canadian Christians and the importance of dialogue between Canadian and American Christians.

Alex Morse

The federal government has gone through a lot of changes in the last year and among those changes was the gutting of USAID. This was the year that the United States decided soft power was for suckers. I think we are still trying to figure out the damage done in the amount of lives lost through people not being fed, or treated by disease. In an emotional discussion, Alex Morse, Deputy Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at Church World Service joins the podcast to talk about the ramifications of potential changes to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on religious organizations and just how important USAID was to help the world’s poor.

Chris Gherz

What if I told you that the United States in 2025 is actually two nations? There is a nation that is rather normal looking, where you go and get coffee and chat with your friends, and then there is another one where people come and take you away and you aren’t seen by loved ones for hours or even days. This is happening now in many parts of America. It’s happening now in the Twin Cities where I live where people are getting coffee, and others are getting stopped by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE). Welcome to what is called the Dual State, a concept coined by Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jewish lawyer who saw it up close in Nazi Germany. I spoke with historian and professor Chris Gehrz about this and how he sees it here under the Trump Administration.

Aaron Zimmerman

I sometimes wonder if anger is a virus. It seems like anger spreads like a virus in our culture, especially when it comes to politics and culture. More and more we want to decide who we can cut out of our lives for not having the right sort of politics. Sometime during the summer, I listened to an old sermon based on Luke 9:51-56, where Samaritans don’t welcome Jesus and the disciples want to call down fire to teach them a lesson. Jesus rebukes them for that idea. The sermon became a lesson on anger, grace and politics and it was by Aaron Zimmerman, the rector of St. Albans Episcopal in Waco, TX and co-host of the podcast Same Old Song. In these times when we feel like we want to draw bight lines, Aaron reminded me and listeners that Jesus is calling to show grace, even in times that are as challenging as the ones we find ourselves in right now.

Gretchen Purser

It’s not every day you get to talk to a political operative and on Ash Wednesday of all days! I spoke with Gretchen Purser about her 20-year career working on campaigns for Republican politicians. She’s now a refugee from the party after Donald Trump’s takeover. We talked about her evangelical roots, the need for grace when talking to former Trump supporters and why Democrats need to better connect with working-class Americans.

Ben Crosby

I always look forward to having Ben Crosby on the podcast, mostly because he loves the mainline church but wants the mainline church to be the church again, a place that is more in love with Jesus than with political stances. In this episode, we talked about why the decline of the mainline church matters and that the reasons for its decline are not just cultural. Ben rests it all on the balance of faith, discipleship, and social action, something that many in the mainline are not good at doing right now.

Jonathan Hall

I’m part of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and one of our characteristics is having communion every Sunday. We are centered around the communion table. What does that mean in politically divisive times? What does that mean in a congregation with people of differing political ideologies? I talked to Jonathan Hall, the pastor of First Christian Church of North Hollywood in California, about this experience since he’s living it at his church.

Andrew Root

“All I really want is to be happy,” said Mary J Blige in her 1994 hit “Be Happy.” Our culture is one that wants to achieve happiness, but Andrew Root notes being happy is something that we encounter only in short stretches in our lives. Because of this we end up living lives of despair. This is where the church can come in, offering consolation, entering into the sadness, and seeing happiness as a gift and not an end goal. This was another one of those interviews taking place on an interesting day, Maundy Thursday, a day when Jesus would encounter pain and would also serve his friends before dying on the cross.

Brian Dijkema

Does the church have a ministry to the working class? I think there is a lot of talk about justice, but is it really engaged and involved in the lives of people who work in the trades or in factories? Brian looked at how the church succeeds and fails with working-class folk.

Cathie Caimano

Free-range is just for chickens and eggs anymore! Fr. Cathie Caimano is an Episcopal priest who is free-range, which is something more than a bivocational pastor. She is an advocate for flexible part-time ministry, which can benefit both pastors and small congregations.

Drew McIntrye

Methodist pastor Drew McIntyre has been on the podcast many times, and he returned in 2025 to talk about how Easter can frame how we talk about politics. Easter is a sign of hope instead of optimism, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus can make an impact on our modern broken politics.

Andrew Crowson

Back during the mid-aughts, the Emergent Church was kind of “it” thing in the church world. Mainline Protestant and Evangelical churches were all into this and then by the mid-teens, the movement fizzled. Andrew Crowson came on to talk about the history of the movement and if it’s coming back, maybe a bit wiser than it was 20 years ago.

Anthony Baker

I interviewed many people from the Episcopal/Anglican tradition, and several of them made this list. David Harrison, Aaron Zimmerman, Ben Crosby, Cathie Caimano and Andrew Crowson are all from that tradtion and so is the final person on this list, Anthony D. Baker . He wrote a great article on the uses and misuses of the Barmen Declaration by Progressive Christians. We talked about the context of Barmen and our current context to understand Barmen and our current political moment.

Those are the top 15 episodes for 2025. As we head into 2026, this will be the 5th anniversary of the podcast. I’m hoping to do podcasts on artificial intelligence and the church, immigration, preaching in the time of Donald Trump, and more. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening in 2025 and see you in 2026!