A New Podcast, Not a New Season
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This podcast will be embedded within the Companion Study App for each study as they are created. This is the introduction to the series.
Last weekend I closed out season four of Lyric & Letter. And for a while after that, I assumed I knew what came next. Season five. New format, maybe, but the same show, picking back up where we left off.
I even started planning it that way.
Season 5, Episode…NOPE
But the longer I sat with it, the more something kept nagging at me. It didn't feel like the next chapter of the same book. It felt like I was trying to force a continuation onto something that had already finished saying what it needed to say.
Lyric & Letter was built around a simple idea. Take a worship song, trace the lyric back to Scripture, and see what the Bible actually says underneath it. I loved that show. I still do. But the longer I did it, the more something started shifting in me. Every episode, we'd wander. One verse would become five. Five would become fifteen. We'd end up somewhere in the Old Testament chasing a Hebrew word that had nothing to do with the song we started with. And I began to notice what I actually wanted, underneath all that wandering.
I didn't want to start with somebody else's lyric and eventually arrive at the Bible.
I wanted to start with the Bible.
That desire had been building for a while, honestly, longer than I probably let myself admit. It's the same desire that led me to build the Companion Study App in the first place, because I needed one place where the study itself, not a song, not a devotional, not somebody's Instagram graphic, came first. Genesis to Revelation, in order, slowly. Once that app existed, I think the podcast's old shape stopped fitting what I was actually doing with my time and my own Bible.
So when I sat down to plan season five, I kept hitting the same wall. I wasn't excited to keep tracing songs backward into Scripture anymore. I was excited about the thing the app already existed to do. And eventually I had to admit that what I wanted wasn't a new season of the old show.
It was a new show entirely.
Same heart. Different door in.
That's how Go Slow. Study Deep. Be Transformed., was born.
It's a Bible study podcast. No lyrics, no detours through worship music, just Scripture, starting at Genesis and moving toward Revelation, at the pace of actually seeing what's there instead of racing to the end. Episode zero, "Before We Begin," is up now. It's not a Bible study episode itself. It's the story of how I got here, the ones I told you a piece of above, along with the fuller version: the living room Bible study I started back in 2008, the years I spent as a filmmaker that changed how I read a scene, and why I don't think of myself as any kind of final authority on what the text says. I'm not. Scripture is.
Starting with this episode, these podcasts are also going to live inside the Companion Study App itself, embedded right in the opening screen for each section as I build them out. So if you're studying through the app already, you'll be able to listen right where you're sitting with the text.
You can find the podcast below or by clicking the picture in the post.
There's no release schedule for this podcast, and I'm not going to pretend there is one. Episodes will come out of what's already being studied at my own table, so they'll come when they come. But they will come.
Bring your Bible. Bring your questions. Let's begin again.
