← Live Free with Josh Howerton
Live Free with Josh Howerton
Why This Christian Podcast Is Reaching Millions (And What’s Coming Next) | Live Free with Josh Howerton
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A
Welcome to Live Free with Pastor Josh Howerton. We're so glad you're here. Lake Pointe Church is a movement for all people to know Jesus, live free, and make a difference with their lives. And this weekly podcast is all about helping you do just that. Each episode is a deep dive into the word of God, tackling life, culture, and faith with truth and clarity so you can be equipped to live free in Christ. Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And follow us on all our social platforms to stay connected to everything happening with Live Free. Now let's dive into today's episode.
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Let's kick this pig.
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C
Let's do it.
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B
Hello. Welcome to episode 56.
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C
Let's go.
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B
Right.
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C
Yes.
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B
Okay, special bonus episode. Here's what we're going to do in the next few minutes. This is a state of the podcast address. So we want to take time at the end of the year. I'm talking to you right now. Yeah, that's great. We're going to take some time. Thank you.
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C
Thank you.
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B
Yeah, you're welcome. We're going to take some time into the year and update listeners in the next. This is going to be brief on some. Honestly, pretty incredible, like some data on how the pod's going. We want you guys to stay up to speed on what you all honestly are doing, and then we want to talk about some new things that are coming, and we want to solicit some feedback. Yeah. So, Carlos Arazo, please kick this pig.
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C
By the way, bro, you just finished preaching and it took you one minute to get from.
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B
Is that true?
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C
Literally, our team timed it so you're fast. You're fast.
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Yeah, I will just say we are. I'm staring at thousands of people walking through the halls of Lake Point because, yes, one minute ago, I got off stage for Christmas service.
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Man. Last episode. Let's go. This is basically the equivalent of. Have you seen that meme that basically says. And with that, the 2025 live free season comes to an end. Good night. So this is. This is.
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This is that.
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This is that. Hey, man, I'm about to share some numbers with you. And before I do, I just have a couple things that people are asking if somebody's wondering, why are these numbers important? You've said this before, Pastor Josh. I just want to make this clear. We're pastors, not podcasters. And so today, 83% of podcast consumers spend 9 hours and 24 minutes listening to their favorite shows every week. And so we want to go where people are At. That's right. And so these numbers are not just stream view subscribers followers. These are real people with real struggles, with real hunger for a real God. And so, man, crazy year.
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By the way, I have not heard this data.
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This is.
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All right, let's hear it. So they know what's going on, man.
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This year we've had 7.5 million live free views in place across all platforms.
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B
You kidding me?
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Year to date, seven.
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I've never heard that before.
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Million.
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7.5 million.
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3.5 million total live free YouTube views. So just on YouTube, 3.5. There was a 375% increase on YouTube subscribers. We basically gained 481,000 new subscribers.
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Stupid. Okay.
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One hundred and eighty two countries listen to Live Free. Really shout out to the international family. All right, 4 million streams on Apple and Spotify audio and only 4 million top four on religion and spirituality on Apple podcasts.
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Hey, we cracked three once.
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C
That's right.
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We did.
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For like a minute. Yeah, it was great.
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Is dang. Tara Lee Cobble.
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C
Oh, my goodness.
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She won't let us pass her.
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She just gave us a minute and.
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Then she's like, enough for like 30 seconds.
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We passed her twice and like, top 160 on all categories of all podcasts on Apple, man. Ready for socials? Yeah, social media, man. It grew a little bit this year. We added 1.4 million followers on Facebook this year.
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B
Jeez.
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600,000 followers on Instagram in like, basically a span of seven to eight months.
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Oh my gosh. Okay.
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258,000 followers on Tik Tok. So ready for a total social media view count? This is. This includes Facebook reels, TikTok YouTube shorts, IG reels, all the things.
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This is everything.
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867 million views.
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Oh, my gosh, man.
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Shout out to the social media team at Lake Point and Jason Howerton and everybody else helping out.
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It's insane.
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We have.
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Let me just. Can I just interrupt? So, like, the reason that is a little overwhelming. We literally started this as like a test drive.
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C
Literally a. A year ago.
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A year ago we were like, let's do one sermon series where we do a little deeper dive podcast and maybe a few hundred Lake Pointers will listen to it. And honestly, we have been like, completely stunned. And here in a second we're gonna. We won. We wanna get some feedback from listeners because there's some things we wanna like, hone in the next season and we've got some new things coming we wanna talk about. So you keep going. If you got any more couple More wins.
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I increase in church online attendance this year. So obviously, we're always inviting people to take a next step, and one of those is to join church online and then do more. We've had over 10,000 people download the show notes, aka our discipleship guide. The last 10 to 15 episodes, we've had an average of 200,000 views and streams per episode. Again, an increasing amount of number. And, man, honestly, like, again, these are real people. So we. We just literally received hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of emails and messages of people sharing their story. Man, this is how Liffrey has blessed my life. It's fun to see social media grow. We are passionate about seeing people grow.
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B
That's right.
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And their faith grow. And so you've said this before. We are not in the viewership business. We are in the discipleship business. And so we've. We've literally not only had people share their story, but we've had many people come in person from all over the place. Quick story here we had Molly from Chicago, Lake Point. This is what she said. Lake Point appeared on my YouTube feed a while back, and then she tuned into the live free podcast, and this is what she said. I began to reconnect with God and gain a deeper understanding of his character that sparked. Reignited my faith in a powerful way. She literally just flew to Lake Point a while back and got baptized with us.
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Dude.
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Over 15% of the firsttime guests in our church this year came from the podcast or social media or YouTube, I believe. And by the way, we're. We're literally just getting started to kind of organize ourselves so that we can, you know, measure it better. And then again, just men, a bunch of men finding their band of brothers joining a life group.
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That's right.
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And then gathering together to continue to deepen their faith together, man. So praise the Lord.
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Wow, that's. Honestly, that's stupid. Like, that's. That is legit. That is stupid what you just said. Here's what we like to do. So, for real, I want your help. And this isn't something that we, like, we just say and we don't do. Like, we actually are going to comb comments on this thing. So here's why I would ask, if you're a listener, if you could head over to YouTube and in the comments, here's the question that'd be legit helpful for us. Why? I keep asking people this. Why is it working so well? Like, you know, as a leader, I'm always like, when you have success, autopsy the success. Because if you don't know why it's working, you won't know how to fix it when it breaks. So, honestly, for listeners, we need your help. Why, in your opinion, is the podcast working and growing like it is? What do you, like, what is it like? Guys, keep doing this. This is what I love about it. If you could put that in the comments on YouTube in particular, we're going to take some time around this time of the year, you know, kind of between Christmas, New Year's and all this stuff. And we want to do an autopsy and get your feedback. So, again, please, if you could head over to YouTube, drop in the comments, you know, why do you think it's working? I'm really curious.
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Can I ask you a question?
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Please do.
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C
Josh, you've mentioned behind the scenes, you've talked about the philosophy around the podcast and kind of how you see social media. Would you share a little bit about, like, what that is and how that's evolved?
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Yeah, let me get. Let me give a little. A little bit of, like, the pastoral and theological philosophy behind pod. And then I want to finish, because this is a much shorter episode. We just. We want to make this like a. This is for our podcast fam. This is like a, you know, State of the Union address. So I want to finish by talking about some very important new things that are coming. Okay, but wait, what was your question? Oh, the philosophy. Philosophy. Okay, so here's the philosophy. And this. This kind of shapes why we do what we do and what. What we may do in the future. So from a discipleship perspective, a lot of times what you've heard me talk about is we'll think air war, ground war. On discipleship. Ground war is applying the gospel to people, men, women and families. That's applying the gospel down here. Air war is applying the gospel out there to the culture, to culture, politics, society, stuff out there. I'm a. You know, I say this all the time. I'm like, I'm a military history guy. So if just like in an actual hot conflict, if one army has ground superiority and they can win all the ground war, but they have no air war, then every time they win battles on the ground and take ground, then the enemy just sends in their air force with air superiority and they take back all the ground that you took on the ground with their air war. So, honestly, what I started realizing in, like, 2020 is what I felt like churches in general were good at. Ground war, discipleship. Hey, man, let's apply the Bible to your family and to yourself. And not very good at air war. Let's help you think about cultural issue. Cultural, political, societal issues. And as a result, what I felt like kept happening is Christians would get discipled in church, then they'd walk out the door, and then they get all these cultural voices that were doing essentially reverse discipleship. They were like, undoing what we were doing. So really what the podcast has given me the ability to do as a pastor is like, I refuse to let my pulpit get hijacked by the issue of the week and let CNN headlines steer what I'm going to preach in church. Like, what we do at Lake Point, if you're, you know, unfamiliar with this thing, is we pretty much exclusively, we preach through books of the Bible, verse by verse, and it's a lot of ground war. But there's constantly these issues that people got questions about. They're like, man, how do I think about this? What's the Bible say about the pod has given us an ability to do air war discipleship for our people. In addition to just like going deeper into the word and going maybe a little layer down now, there's a bunch of stuff that, you know, maybe you and I have talked. Is there anything that I left out there that you're like, dude, you should say that?
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Yeah. How do you see, we've talked about social media being the eagus.
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Yeah. Social media is the modern day. The modern day areopagus. So Acts 17, if you're watching on YouTube, we have thousands of people walking into our Christmas services and I'm waving at them. Acts 17, Paul goes into the Areopagus. Mars Hill. That's where they quote, quote, unquote, spent all their time debating and telling new ideas. Social media, whether pastors like it or not, it's the modern day areopagus. That's where people debate ideas. And what the Bible commands pastors and churches to do is quote, unquote, we destroy arguments and every take, every thought captive, every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. So we, we don't just disciple people. We destroy evil, godless ideologies. This is really helpful, I will say. It dawned on me about three months into doing this podcast that the podcast is like the 2025 version of Sunday night church from when I was growing up as a kid. Hey, guys. From when I was growing up as a kid. So, you know, when I was a kid, I would go to big church on Sunday morning, then I'd come back on Sunday night. And that was like, when the pastor, he'd go A little deeper. It was a little more conversational.
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More intimate.
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Yeah, more intimate. You know, you could ask a couple questions. Here's what the Greek word is.
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A little more raw.
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Yeah, yeah. And I realized, like, oh, that's what this is. It's a way to get another 90 minutes of Bible teaching into people. Here's the last thing I'll say. And this kind of leads into the new things that are coming for the pod that we're really excited to roll out. The big thing that I'm excited about is, you know, Carlos said it. Our big thing is, hey, man. It's called live free, not learn free. So we're not in the view count business. We're in the disciple business. So what we want to do at Lake Point is. Is like, it's a. I'm going to get a little nerdy here is vertically aligned discipleship. So what we noticed was starting to happen is people would listen to the sermon, then they'd walk out the door, they'd listen to the podcast, and then just organically, there's like all these groups, especially of men who are just. They're like randomly finding each other, picking, like, coffee shops and diners and going, hey, man, let's meet 7am One day before work. Let's talk about what God is teaching us in the Word through sermon and podcast, and let's confess in. Talk about what we're gonna do about it. And it's vertically aligning sermon, then Bible study via podcast, then their discipleship group. We really wanna lean into that more and more in the coming year, which leads us to some exciting things we got coming up.
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I'm excited. So I hear we got a. We're working on a new app.
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Okay. That's right. So let me just. So that's Little pad drop there. So here's we got. It's live now, right?
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It's live now. That's right.
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All right. So, ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to announce we have now. That's right. That's it. That was the. There's your. There's your drum roll. We just. It literally just went live. A completely redesigned Lake Point app that is designed to facilitate vertically aligned discipleship for people that are in our ecosphere. So here's what this does. And by the way, how can they download it?
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They can text the word app to 20411 and you should get a link.
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That's great. So text app to the number 2041. They'll get a link to the app. So. And what the app's designed to do is in the next year you're going to see this. We wanna lean real heavy into catalyzing discipleship via the podcast. Because, man, I love people learning about the Bible, but we become good men and women of God by like actually getting finding bands of brothers. So what the app's designed to do is like, it's all just right there. So every sermon you'll be able to click on in the app and immediately everything pops up. There's the sermon, there's the corresponding podcast was a deeper dive into that sermon. What's new is starting in the new year in that same spot, there'll be an aligned Bible reading plan, one chapter per day for Live Free Nation that goes along with the sermon and the podcast. And then obviously we also have the disciple guide, the show notes. So what you'll be able to do is go, okay, man, if you attend Lake Point, that's awesome. If not in person, you can click on that, you can find the sermon and it's all right there. Sermon podcast, one chapter per day, Bible reading plan for that week and then the disciple guide. So you'll be able to grab like, you know, your disciple group your guys and go, hey man, let's meet. Let's all hit the sermon. Hit the pod chapter a day. Let's walk in, talk about what the Lord's doing in our life. And then we want to scale and catalyze life on life. Discipleship.
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That's right. And so because we want people to do that as well. Like for if you know this, we have a new live free episode every single Monday. But if you download the app, you will have early access to the live free podcast episode by Sunday. And so if you want it a little early, you will also get that on the app exclusively. That's right.
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There you go, man.
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That's going to be great.
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That's big news. That's a big news, guys.
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This is that, man.
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Oh, man.
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Daily Bible reading plan is going to be fun.
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It is going to be fun as well.
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The whole church reading, the whole, the same thing.
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It is going to be fun. We got some ideas that we may roll out if the pod keeps growing like it is. We got some things in the hopper, but you'll see, man, it's going to be a lot of fun.
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2026 going to be a lot of fun.
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I will say this, this is a little thing that I just. I wonder. I'm just going to say something. I wonder. It's like Rush, there's a guy from my. There's Rush. There's a guy from my. My Rudy group just walked by. Nice. I. There's something happening in the church in America right now. What I've always said is what we want to see is reformation and revival for a resurgence of the church in our day. I feel like we're starting to see some rumblings. What I wonder if could happen is if we could start to see Live Free. With the astronomical growth we're seeing and some ideas we got in the back of our heads, I wonder if we might end up being able to leverage the podcast as like a staging grounds for Christians strategy for cultural engagement in our nation. And it just becomes the staging grounds for the resurgence of the church. Who knows?
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We'll see.
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Let's go, man.
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Come on, man.
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I like it.
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That's it. Carlos, for Live Free Nation listeners, in addition to heading over to YouTube and legit, we need your feedback. Why do you think it's working? That's what we want to know. What do you love about it? Why do you think it's working? So we can double down. In addition to giving us that feedback, if people are listening and going, what can I do to help? I believe in what y' all are doing. What can I do to help? What's the answer to that question?
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I would say. Well, we would say get involved. First of all, reach out if you can, email us at Arthur, is it. What is it? Podcastakepoint Church. Reach out. And we'd love to get to know you. Also text the word. Is it? Connect to 20411 again, let us know. Hey, I came from the pod. I'm. I'm interested in helping out. And then we'd love to get you plugged in, man. We. We literally are getting people from, like, all. All over the world. I'm not even kidding.
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It's insane.
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I'm not even kidding. And so, man, this year has been amazing.
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Yeah. And what. You know, I'll. I'll tag on to what you just said. I know people. You may think it's small. It's not small. Like the stories we get a lot of. And I hope everybody receives this the right way. We want everybody to listen to pod. Apparently, you know, our data tells us we're uniquely connecting with dudes. And very frankly, the church is. Has not historically been awesome at reaching, discipling, and activating young men. And that's like the lion's share of the people that are listening. So I will say, man, the story we hear a lot is somebody shared the podcast with me or, you know, you guys talked about the Charlie Kirk Memorial. You talked about. I didn't know what to think about immigration stuff or Christian nationalism or whatever the thing is. Or, I don't know, all the stuff we've done, whatever it is.
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Quite a few.
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And then people, they send it to a buddy that's interested in, like, the issue, and he's like, oh, dang, that was actually legit helpful. Then they get hooked. That's how the thing is growing so much. So I will say when people. I know it sounds numb. It's not. Whatever. When people, like, subscribe, share the content. That's how the thing went from, you know, like, I think, the first episode, like a couple hundred church members, and then now it's like, you know, 7 million downloads or whatever. That's how it happened, is people being like, we need the church hearing this and sharing it. And that's the wildfire effect. Carlos, I love you and I love our listeners. I have to go preach my seventh Christmas service right now.
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Go do it, man.
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Live free, brother.
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Live free, brother.
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Thanks for tuning in to Live Free with Pastor Josh Howerton. We pray today's episode helped you take a step forward in life, culture, and faith as you live free in Christ. If it encouraged you, be sure to rate, review, and share the podcast. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss another episode. Join us for Lake Pointe Church Online every weekend and find more resources at Lakepoint Church. Livefree. We'll see you next time.