The Arsenal Church

Welcome to the audio podcast of The Arsenal Church in Southtown San Antonio. We hope that these podcasts encourage you, speak life, and bring hope to you throughout your week. To learn more about The Arsenal Church visit www.thearsenal.church.

The Arsenal Church is a religion podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts The Arsenal Church, a religion show with 100 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  The Arsenal Church

  What You Practice Loving Is Who You Become | Unforced | Chad Belew

  Sep 29, 202631 min

  What if the thing your faith trained you to pay attention to is the thing that quietly made you who you are? Chad closes the Unforced series with two weeks in Costa Rica — a trauma retreat with 50 veterans, an ant hauling a pink flower petal across a path, and six tattooed men standing in a row staring up into a tree at a macaw. None of that is the point. What happened in his body while he watched is. The questions he's chasing: attention is love's raw material — you start to love what you look at, and you become what you love, so where has the church been training its attention all these years? Jesus pointed at creation like a sermon that never stopped preaching, so why did so few of us inherit any of that? Romans 7 says the law didn't only reveal sin, it *activated* our attention to it — what does a lifetime of scanning for sin do to a person? And "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," except fear doesn't produce wisdom, it produces hiding. What if that word was never "fear" at all? It lands where the series began: a mirror broken in the garden, "who told you that you were naked," and Paul's claim that unveiled faces get to behold — and be changed by what they behold. In this episode: - Costa Rica, a trauma retreat with 50 veterans, and being completely disconnected - The ant carrying a pink flower petal across the path - Butterflies pollinating a rainforest, and six tattooed guys watching a macaw - What his body did — stillness, smallness, a smile he didn't force - The series question turned back on the church: what have WE been practicing loving? - "Attention is love's raw material" - The hammock, the tree, and breathing together - "I can't find the verse where he tells me to monitor my neighbor's bedroom" - People trained to scan for threat became threat scanners - Romans 7:7 — the law activates attention to sin - Yirah — "the fear of the Lord" was awe, not fear - "You don't have to remember the practices. You have to see differently." - The mirror he broke on this stage 11 years ago, and the garden - The mask, and realizing it was the mask that got loved - 2 Corinthians 3:18 — unveiled faces, beholding, being transformed - Back to Matthew 11 and the unforced rhythms of grace - Newborns and the beat — the body already knows the rhythm - The number one way people experience awe is human kindness ???? References: 2 Corinthians 3:18 · Romans 7:7 · Genesis 1–3 · Matthew 11:28–30 (The Message) · Proverbs 9:10 · Matthew 6 (birds and lilies) Series: Unforced Speaker: Chad Belew Date: 9/27/2026 Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX — The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX ???? thearsenal.church ???? Download the Arsenal Church app ???? Questions or need prayer? hello@thearsenal.church ???? Give: thearsenal.church/give

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Arsenal Church

  The Prayer You Were Never Allowed to Pray | Unforced (Week 3) | Chad Belew

  Aug 23, 202644 min

  A third of the Psalms are lament. Church gave grief one sentence. Week three of Unforced opens with a confession: Chad is not good with grief. Not his, not yours. He traces where that comes from — personality, a nervous system trained over deployments in Iraq, and mostly how he was raised, including and maybe especially in church. Nobody taught him to grieve. He was taught to get past it. They're in a better place. God needed another angel. Everything happens for a reason. Sentences you reach for like a light switch in a dark room, because the dark is uncomfortable and the switch is right there. There's a name for it: spiritual bypassing, coined by psychologist John Welwood in the 1980s — using spiritual language to step around pain instead of through it. It sounds holy. It's a trap door out of the room before the grief finishes its sentence. And bypassed grief doesn't resolve. It waits. Then the turn: the book we built that curriculum on never did this. Roughly a third of the Psalms — the prayer book Jesus grew up singing — are lament. And Psalm 88 ends in the dark. Almost every lament Psalm turns; somewhere near the end there's a "but." Psalm 88 has no but. Its last line is "darkness is my closest friend." Someone looked at that prayer and said: that goes in the book. Which means there's a page in Scripture for the day your sentence doesn't get better. From there it widens. Job's friends, who did the best pastoral care in the Old Testament for exactly seven days of silence — then opened their mouths, and were told at the end that they had not spoken rightly. Dacher Keltner finding small moments of awe inside the grief of losing his brother, and the research that puts death on the list of things that most reliably produce awe, right next to the night sky. Brené Brown and Stanford's James Gross on why you cannot selectively numb — suppression doesn't reduce the pain, it reliably reduces the joy. And Walter Brueggemann's claim that only grief permits newness: the prophets wept in public first, because a system runs on nobody feeling anything, and public grief is the crack in it. Chad is careful with the guardrail — he is not saying your pain has a purpose. The claim is narrower: the door grief opens and the door awe opens are the same door, which means the faith that taught you to slam one shut closed the other too. It lands on the first page of the Bible, where there is darkness over the deep and the first thing God does is speak into it. In this episode: - A confession: "I'm not good with grief" - The sentences we were handed — "they're in a better place" - Hope is a discipline, not a feeling (a clip from Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen) - "You're not out of hope. You're out of practice." - You cannot train imagination on a numbed heart - The grief nobody threw you a funeral for - Spiritual bypassing — naming what we were taught instead - A third of the Psalms are lament - Psalm 88 — the prayer with no "but" - Job's friends: seven days of silence, then they spoke - Keltner, his brother, and awe found inside grief - Guardrail: your pain does not have a purpose - You cannot selectively numb - Empire wants to colonize your imagination - "Only grief permits newness" - Genesis 1 — God speaks into the darkness - The practice: write the prayer you were never allowed to pray ???? References: Psalm 88 · Job 2:13 and Job 24 · Genesis 1:1–3 · John 11 (Lazarus) · John Welwood on spiritual bypassing · David Gushee on Job · Dacher Keltner on awe · Brené Brown · James Gross on emotional suppression · Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination · Rob Bell, How to Be Here Series: Unforced Speaker: Chad Belew Date: 8/23/2026 Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX — The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX ???? thearsenal.church ???? Download the Arsenal Church app ???? Questions or need prayer? hello@thearsenal.church ???? Give: thearsenal.church/give

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Arsenal Church

  The Bush Was Already Burning | Unforced (Week 2) | Chad Belew

  Aug 16, 202641 min

  What if God isn't showing up — and you're just finally waking up? Week two of Unforced starts with a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral, who came home from a walk with his dog covered in burrs and, instead of grumbling and brushing them off like every human before him, put one under a microscope. That's where Velcro came from. The burr was always sticky. Nature was never hiding anything. Somebody finally looked. From there Chad runs the invisible-gorilla experiment as the frame — you don't see the world, you see what you're looking for — and asks the question the rest of the morning sits on: what is your filter doing to God? That lands in Genesis 28, a story he says he's never preached in eleven years here. Jacob, on the run after conning his brother, sleeps on a rock and dreams of a stairway. Notice what the dream is not: nothing descends, nothing arrives. The stairway is already resting on the earth, the traffic is already running, and Jacob has camped in the middle of the interchange without knowing it. "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it." Nothing changed about that patch of desert — Jacob woke up. Which makes the modern vocabulary of "bringing the presence" to a city sound strange: the whole point of the story where Bethel gets named is that the presence was already in Luz. Nobody brings God to San Antonio. He isn't missing. The only thing a church has ever brought to a city is its attention — or its lack of it. The back half turns noticing from a mood into a skill: Moses and a bush that was already burning, and the woman in Mark 5 whose one touch Jesus felt inside a crushing crowd — the person every other filter deleted, handed back the name nobody had spoken over her in twelve years. Then the research. Dacher Keltner's awe walks, where fifteen minutes a week and one instruction changed how people saw their ordinary days, and their selfies started holding less self and more world. Simone Weil went further: attention, in its purest form, simply is prayer — "the rarest and purest form of generosity." The question isn't whether your attention is being trained. It is. The question is what you're practicing, and whether you picked it. In this episode: - Biomimicry, and how a dog covered in burrs became Velcro - Why last week's practice has no scoreboard — "nothing happens even if you miss it" - The invisible gorilla: you don't see the world, you see what you're looking for - Jacob at Bethel — the stairway was already there, the traffic already running - Maqom and HaMaqom: "he is the place of the world, and the world is not his place" - Nobody brings God to San Antonio — a city named for the finder of lost things - Moses and the bush that was already burning - Mark 5: the one touch Jesus felt in a crushing crowd, and the word "daughter" - Attention as what turns an "it" into a "thou" - Dacher Keltner's awe walks — and the selfies with less self in them - Simone Weil: attention as generosity, and as prayer - The practice: one 15-minute awe walk this week, phone at home References: Genesis 28 (Jacob at Bethel) · Exodus 3 (the burning bush, The Message) · Mark 5 (the woman in the crowd) · Leviticus 15 · Dacher Keltner on awe · Simone Weil on attention · Martin Buber, I and Thou · Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood Series: Unforced Speaker: Chad Belew Date: 8/16/2026 Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX — The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX thearsenal.church Download the Arsenal Church app Questions or need prayer? hello@thearsenal.church Give: thearsenal.church/give

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Arsenal Church

  Nobody Argues Their Way Into a New Life | Unforced (Week 1) | Chad Belew

  Aug 9, 202641 min

  What if the life you're trying to earn is one you've already been given? Chad opens Unforced — an eight-week series on the rhythms of grace — by going back to where the summer left off. Four people stood on this stage and told their stories, and across four very different lives one word kept surfacing. It wasn't a churchy one. It was safe. From there he opens Matthew 11 in Eugene Peterson's translation: "Come to me… get away with me and you'll recover your life… learn the unforced rhythms of grace." He takes apart what a yoke actually was, why "rooted and grounded" in Ephesians is a Greek perfect passive — already done, and done to you — and what the Eastern church meant by theosis: becoming like Christ isn't the prize at the finish line, it's the life right now. He's blunt about the risk of a series like this. If any week of it starts to feel like a scoreboard, a new way to fail, come tell him — because then it was built wrong. The practices ahead are deliberately small, and the smallness is the theology: if you can't fail it, it can't become a scoreboard. Nobody argued their way into a new life. They practiced their way there, in a room where it was finally safe to stop hiding. In this episode: - A month of listening to your stories - The one word that showed up in all four: "safe" - Matthew 11 — "I'll show you how to take a real rest" - What a yoke actually was, and how that changes the invitation - Practices, not performance - "If this sounds like a new way to fail, come tell me" - Already rooted, already grounded — the Greek perfect passive - Theosis — becoming like Christ is the life, not the prize - Jesus and the Sabbath - Why the series is called Unforced ???? References: Matthew 11:28–30 (The Message) · Ephesians 3:17–19 · the Sabbath grain-field accounts Series: Unforced Speaker: Chad Belew Date: 8/9/2026 Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX — The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX ???? thearsenal.church ???? Download the Arsenal Church app ???? Questions or need prayer? hello@thearsenal.church ???? Give: thearsenal.church/give

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Arsenal Church

  I Had to Believe Shalom for Myself, Too | Arsenal Stories (Week 4) | Taryn Tipton

  Aug 2, 202629 min

  What if the faith that formed you also handed you the things you'd spend years unlearning? Arsenal Stories continues — the series where we stop knowing people as a category and actually hear what they've lived. Taryn Tipton shares her faith journey: growing up in a small town where church, school, and family were so intertwined that "every part of my life was connected and colored by church." It was mostly good. And the same people who taught her about Jesus also taught her that a woman couldn't preach, that being gay is a sin, and quietly excluded people she loved. The beautiful and the harmful, all wrapped together. Underneath it, she was scared all the time — scared she'd gotten salvation wrong, scared of the rapture, wondering if she needed to get baptized again just to be safe. She traces what came next: discovering Shalom and a faith bigger than staying out of hell, deconstruction, a mustard-seed tattoo, a one-way flight to Spain, and finding God in a smoky temple in Bali, a Catholic mass, the NICU after her daughter was born, and crying with her foster son's mom. It lands on the line she had to grow into: if she could believe in Shalom for the world, she had to believe it for herself too. In this episode: - Finding the Arsenal — Daniel, Grace, and their foster son Alistair - Why she'd never told this story before - When every part of life was church — the beautiful and the harmful, wrapped together - Being scared of the rapture, and never sure salvation "took" - Shalom: a faith bigger than staying out of hell - Deconstruction, and a mustard seed tattoo - A one-way flight to Spain - Seeing God in Bali, a Catholic mass, the NICU, and her foster son's mom - "If I believed in Shalom for the world, I had to believe it for myself, too" - Ephesians 4: "Live a life worthy of the calling you have received" ???? References: Ephesians 4:1 · Matthew 17:20 (the mustard seed) · the idea of Shalom Series: Stories Speaker: Taryn Tipton Date: 8/2/2026 Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX — The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX ???? thearsenal.church ???? Download the Arsenal Church app ???? Questions or need prayer? hello@thearsenal.church ???? Give: thearsenal.church/give

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The Arsenal Church. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.