In this conversation, Luke Mcinnes and Daniel Rogers explore the question on the point of life, emphasising love and relationships as central themes. They discuss the historical context of the church, particularly the impact of Emperor Constantine on Christianity, and how this has led to misconceptions about God and the church's role in society. Daniel shares his personal journey of faith, the challenges he faced, and how his understanding of God has evolved. They also touch on the future of Christianity, the cyclical nature of church growth and decline, and the importance of strong father figures in understanding God's love.

Takeaways

• The point of life is to love and to be loved.
• Love brings healing to ourselves and the world.
• The church has historically misrepresented its purpose since Constantine.
• Dark times often lead to significant revivals in faith.
• Christian nationalism can be detrimental to true faith.
• The church should not align itself with state power.
• Personal experiences shape our understanding of God.
• Misconceptions about God often stem from personal relationships.
• The future of Christianity may be challenging but hopeful.
• The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

Check out more of Daniel's content on his substack, his X profile, or his store where you can buy his books.

My guest today is Ryan Trainor. A man who can comfortably consider himself one of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs. As an ambitious young entrepreneur myself, I sent him a cold email around 12 years ago after reading his story of selling his education business to a subsidiary of Warren Buffet’s Washington Post before he had turned 40.

In the years that followed we worked together and he became one of my biggest mentors, but more importantly we became great friends and over the past few years we’ve gone on this journey to really seek to understand the meaning of life alongside each other.

Ryan spoke openly about his worldly success and the motivators that drove it, but how life always has a way of knocking you off your perch when you need it. That led to a major burnout and reconsideration of what mattered in life in 2022 and the couple of years since have been a journey of reconstructing previously held beliefs and seeking to be more conscious and present in his decisions for what’s next.

We delved into a discussion about how the world has suffered from too much abundance, how public discourse has been lost and how Ryan has sought knowledge from ancient texts to psychedelics and everything in between to guide his understanding of how we should contribute to the world around him.

My guest today is Kirsten Barton. Kirsten is based in South Carolina and her life story has been a remarkable journey - from the depths of addiction and suicide attempts, to a life fulfilled over the past 6 years since.

She opens up in our conversation, talking me through her childhood days of hating church, before dabbling in drugs as a teenager then spending the next decade hooked on drugs such as opiates, pills and meth. She spent 10 years in hell on earth, never spending more than a couple of days at a time sober, before a failed suicide attempt led her to begin the process of turning her life around.

That led her back into the Church that she’d once hated, where she began her mission on getting to know God with quite a few interesting adventures in the process.

My guest today is Zach Johnson - a warehouse supervisor from Pennsylvania.

About 6 weeks ago Zach put up his first post on the app formerly known as Twitter. The opening read as follows:

“My name is Zach, and my goal in creating this account is to provide a space for thoughtful dialog, debate and research regarding what the Bible calls the "last days," from a Fulfilled Eschatology perspective. I hold to "Covenant Eschatology," also called full preterism, which teaches that all things related to the end-time — the Second Coming, Final Judgment, and Resurrection— were fulfilled in the generation leading up to and consummating in the AD 70 judgment on Jerusalem and the Temple. "

Zach and I had a great chat covering his views on Genesis through to Revelation, explaining how he got there and what it means for his outlook on life.

What's the point anyway?

This podcast series aims to address this question - bringing on a range of guests from various backgrounds, all of whom have faced challenges along the way and have either arrived at, or are seeking to arrive, the answer to the question on the point of our existence.

Through the depths of the covid era in 2020-21 I became disillusioned with the world and started to really ask this question myself. A staunch atheist up until that point, I ended up exploring everything and eventually came to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. I’ve now spent 3 years dealing with this complete change in world view and I’ve met and spoken with so many fascinating people in the process. A hardcore materialist in my past life, I used to be interested in who was achieving so-called success, but nowadays I’m far more interested in people that have battled addiction, contemplated suicide, lost careers or family, and come
through the other side of it with far more curiosity in questioning things that actually matter. I’m not really your typical Christian or church-goer. In fact I really struggle with much of what modern Christianity projects itself as to the wider world. So far from creating a podcast that preaches to the choir, I wanted to create a platform where I can speak to a range of interesting people, Christians or not, who have pondered the question of what the point of life is and see if
we can’t learn something from each other.