Sitting under preaching every Sunday is not the same as knowing the Scriptures well enough to recognize when you are being led somewhere the text never meant to take you. A sermon that never confronts your sin can feel like grace, until one day you realize that your discernment and your hunger for the Lord have drifted off course a few degrees at a time. The uncomfortable question is not whether false teaching exists, but whether you would recognize it if you heard it. Philip Anthony Mitchell, founder and lead pastor of 2819 Church in Atlanta, joins me for an urgent conversation about the state of the American church.

About Philip Anthony Mitchell

Philip Anthony Mitchell is the founder and lead pastor of 2819 Church in Atlanta, Georgia, a congregation named for the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19, and he is known for bold, Scripture-anchored gospel proclamation and an unflinching call to spiritual maturity. He has been married to Lena since 2004, and together they have four children. His debut book, Contend, draws on the letter of Jude to call believers to stand for biblical truth in the culture while fighting for faith in the hidden battles of the heart.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
  Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Dr. Les Parrott joins me for a conversation that refuses the comfort of our cultural vocabulary. As a clinical psychologist, Les insists that pain isn't the same thing as trauma, and that the difference lies in what an experience has done to your capacity to feel safe and function, not in how much it hurt. From there we press into love itself, because rescuing people from the consequences of their choices can feel like compassion while keeping them small.

About Dr. Les Parrott

Dr. Les Parrott is a clinical psychologist and, with his wife, Dr. Leslie Parrott, a #1 New York Times bestselling author and cofounder of the Center for Relationship Development at Seattle Pacific University. He created the Save Your Marriage Before It Starts (SYMBIS) Assessment, a premarital tool used by counselors around the world, and has given his career to helping people build healthy relationships. His newest book with Leslie, The One Year Positive Mental Health Devotional (Tyndale, October 2026), pairs biblical truth with psychological insight for anyone who has ever been kept awake by an anxious mind.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Somewhere along the way, the performance became the person, and now you can't tell where the effort to look faithful ends and actual faithfulness begins. You know the language of sin and repentance; you can name your type, and people call you disciplined, loyal, even authentic, yet underneath sits an exhaustion that trying harder has never touched. The mask you put on to stay approved and protected has been on so long that it now feels like your face. Chuck DeGroat returns with twenty-five years of sitting with pastors, leaders, and couples whose defenses have hardened into narcissism, which he insists runs on a spectrum that includes more of us than we'd admit.

About Chuck DeGroat

Chuck DeGroat is a professor of pastoral care and Christian spirituality at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, where he also serves as founding executive director of the clinical mental health counseling program. A licensed therapist, spiritual director, and former pastor in Orlando and San Francisco, he has spent more than two decades counseling pastors and leaders on the narcissistic spectrum and those wounded by them, work he wrote about in When Narcissism Comes to Church. His newest book is Who You're Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age.

Episode Links

• Show Notes
• Buy my book "Healing What You Can't Erase" here!
• Invite me to speak at your church or event.
• Connect with me @WINTODAYChris on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.