Podcast
The Common Good Podcast
Hosted by Brian From · EN
The idea of “the common good” has a rich history within the Christian church. It’s the notion that, as we pursue Jesus in our lives and in the lives of others, we are fulfilling God’s purposes for His creation. This pursuit can be messy. It means rolling up our sleeves and creating space for hard conversations about real issues that impact our lives. Things like parenting, marriage, finances, politics, art, and culture. On The Common Good, Brian From creates space to have these conversations, to sit with the big questions that we all have, to sometimes disagree, but to always look for the chance to create common good, by following after Jesus. Brian welcome listeners to join them in these conversations, to bring their own questions, hopes, and struggles, and to ultimately share in a journey to see God’s design for all of us fulfilled.
154episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Wildfires, the ESPYs & Finishing the Race Well
Yesterday00:55:47Tap to summarizeCanadian wildfire smoke is blanketing Chicago and stretching all the way to New York, and Brian From turns the haze into a parable: the decisions we make set off domino effects that ripple far beyond us, affecting people we love and people we'll never meet. Then a personal update — his son's summer baseball team won their league championship in what turned out to be the last game before he heads to college, and his daughter returns tomorrow from five weeks of intensive Arabic study in Washington DC before a nine-month Fulbright scholarship in the fall. Life is moving. Last night's ESPYs honored a Michigan missionary who pitched in Major League Baseball — a story about what happens when fame and faith intersect in unexpected ways. A meditation on contentment drawn from Philippians 4 and a Gospel Coalition piece on the abundant life. And a closing sermon preview from Brian's role as campus pastor at Compass Church's Hinsdale location, centered on one of the most obscure and haunting figures in the New Testament: Demas. He's mentioned twice as part of Paul's team — and then disappears, described in 2 Timothy 4 as having "loved the present world" and deserted Paul entirely. Brian's challenge: the goal of the Christian life is not to start well. It's to finish well. Don't be Demas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Summer Activities & Bible Translation with Melissa Paredes of Wycliffe
Yesterday00:09:36Tap to summarizeIt's a hundred degrees outside and your kids are asking what's next — Melissa Paredes, Senior Director of Content Marketing at Wycliffe Bible Translators, has an answer that's actually good for them. She joins Brian From to talk about Kate and Mac, a free series of printable, downloadable resources Wycliffe has been producing for twelve years: kids travel the world with a 14-year-old missionary kid named Kate and her pet macaw Mac, learning about different languages, cultures, and how much God loves people regardless of where they live or what language they speak. Activities include decoding exercises that simulate what it's like to encounter scripture in a new language, games, crafts, recipes, and devotionals — all available monthly at wycliffe.org/kids. Melissa also shares her own story: a missionary kid who moved overseas at 12 and lived there through 18, she credits those cross-cultural years with shaping everything about her worldview. For parents of teens and young adults, Wycliffe's Purpose 7-9 resource — including an interactive quiz, devotional, and discussion guide — is available at wycliffe.org/purpose.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Preaching, Apathy & the Heart of Ministry with Mike Bullmore
Yesterday00:09:29Tap to summarizeWhat does it mean for the gospel to be functionally central — not just theologically true in the abstract, but actually animating the way a pastor preaches, thinks, and lives? Mike Bullmore, author of The Heart of Preaching: The Functional Centrality of the Gospel in the Life and Work of the Preacher, joins Brian From to answer that question. A veteran pastor who planted Crossway Community Church 28 years ago and now preaches at Park Community Church in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, Mike makes a simple but convicting diagnosis: the moment a preacher reserves gospel proclamation only for evangelistic sermons and then shifts to discipleship content for believers, he's already gone off course. The gospel isn't just the entry point — it's the flywheel that keeps everything else moving. He also speaks directly to the pastor who has quietly grown apathetic, lost the awe, and is grinding through sermons on fumes — with a word from Psalm 103 about God's compassion and a surprisingly practical prescription involving the Gospel of Mark and the book of Leviticus. Find The Heart of Preaching at Amazon or crossway.org.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Faith, Community & Small Class Sizes at St. Peter Lutheran School with Julie Messina
Yesterday00:10:32Tap to summarizeBack to school season is just around the corner, and Brian From sits down with Julie Messina, principal of St. Peter Lutheran School in Schaumburg, Illinois — a school that has been educating families for 189 years and sits on 30 acres in the middle of the suburbs. Julie talks about what makes a private Lutheran school distinctive: daily prayer, weekly chapel, classroom buddy programs pairing older and younger students, and class sizes averaging around ten students per teacher. She pushes back on the assumption that private Christian schools offer less than public schools — St. Peter has Lego club, chess club, cross country, volleyball, basketball, cheer and dance — and shares what alumni consistently say when they come back: "High school was a breeze. You prepared us so well." Brian also highlights the school voucher program available through AM1160 at elevensixtyhope.com for families concerned about tuition, and Julie points to the Kirsch Flat scholarship fund — supported by an annual golf outing — for additional financial assistance. Visit stpeterlcms.org to schedule a tour or learn more.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →AI, Translation & The Chosen with Wendy Lord
2d ago00:10:02Tap to summarizeThe Chosen is being translated into 600 languages — and Wendy Lord, Vice President of Localization at Come and See Foundation, is overseeing the effort. She joins Brian From to talk about what that actually looks like on the ground: a theologian in India working through the Assamese translation who says the show is bringing fresh life to his own faith, a woman in Spain whose small group ministered to her for twelve years until she watched The Chosen and said "I finally get it." Then the conversation turns to AI — and Wendy makes a careful, specific case for it. In majority languages like Spanish and French, human voice actors and dubbing teams do the work. But in lower-resourced minority languages where those resources don't exist, AI is filling the gap in remarkable ways: accelerating Bible translation four to sixteen times faster than just a few years ago, and even applying the voices of The Chosen's original cast to single-person recordings so that pre-literate and illiterate communities who can't read subtitles can now hear the story of Jesus in their heart language. Wendy also shares what's coming next — Moses, the book of Acts, and a pipeline of new projects expanding far beyond the original seven seasons. Find The Chosen in the free Chosen mobile app, now available in 125 languages.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Lukewarm Churches, Renting Barbecue Friends & the Dark Night of the Soul
3d ago00:59:11Tap to summarizeIn Russia, you can now rent a barbecue companion for $15 to $65 a day — jokes and anecdotes included, no lasting friendship expected. Brian From opens with that story as a window into something both funny and genuinely heartbreaking about the loneliness epidemic. Then a personal story: getting pulled over late at night with his son in the car, expired plates, and the surprisingly rich spiritual parallel — what happens when those lights come on behind you, and do you repent or make excuses? Former congressman Ben Sass is walking his terminal cancer diagnosis publicly and with remarkable faith, and Brian reflects on what it means to display your theology when the stakes are as high as they get. A pointed look at the lukewarm church of Laodicea in Revelation 3 — hot or cold, not somewhere in between — and what it means for a congregation to be spiritually comfortable, wealthy, and quietly dying. A meditation on what faith looks like when God feels silent, drawing on the stories of the bleeding woman and Jairus's daughter in Mark 5, and the startling private letters of Mother Teresa, who spent decades feeling God's complete absence while continuing to serve the poorest of the poor. The paradox of faith, Brian concludes, is that it often shines brightest not in clarity but in darkness — and what feels like absence will in time reveal itself as a deeper presence.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Lindsey Graham, Ecclesiastes & What if You're Missing Your Life While You're Waiting for It?
4d ago01:07:32Tap to summarizeSenator Lindsey Graham died over the weekend from what appears to be a tear in his aorta — and Brian From opens not with politics but with perspective. Graham was on the phone with President Trump Saturday night, had just returned from NATO and a meeting with Zelensky, and was at the very center of world events right up until his final moments. Brian uses that as a launching point into the book of Ecclesiastes: meaningless, meaningless, all of it meaningless. Not as a cynical verdict on life, but as a wake-up call to invest in what actually lasts. Then a surprising and personal segment — Brian shares that he's been serving as campus pastor of the Hinsdale location of Compass Church for the past nine months, working through a series on scripture memory and the importance of the local church. A Gospel Coalition piece on Nashville as one of America's hardest mission fields not because of hostility but because of comfort and consumer Christianity. A call to make evangelism a natural part of everyday life rather than a program. And a closing piece from Relevant Magazine that lands like a gut punch for anyone in a waiting season: what if you're missing your life while you're waiting for it? Life doesn't begin when you get married, land the dream job, or reach the next milestone. As Elizabeth Elliot said, the secret is Christ in me — not me in a different set of circumstances.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →When the Good You Do Goes Unnoticed
1w ago00:58:05Tap to summarizeHow do Christians engage politically without losing their witness, their humility, or their neighbors? A rich meditation on one of the most quietly devastating experiences in the Christian life — doing the right thing and getting punished for it, or doing good work that simply goes unseen. Brian walks through the biblical pattern from Joseph to Paul: faithfulness often precedes obscurity, and obscurity often precedes the thing God was building all along. A burnout study showing that the most burned-out workers aren't the ones working the longest hours but the ones whose work feels most meaningless — a finding with real implications for how Christians think about calling and vocation. A new Barna study on what churchgoers say they most want from a sermon: not inspiration, not entertainment, but practical application they can actually use on Monday morning. Social media's new frontier — AI-generated influencers with millions of followers who don't exist — and what it means to build your sense of identity on an audience's approval. And a closing word from Proverbs 3 on trusting God with your reputation: commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established — even when no one is watching.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Live Action Moana & the Odyssey Controversy with Adam Holtz of Plugged In
1w ago00:09:55Tap to summarizeThe average movie length people say they want is now 88 minutes — which makes the upcoming Odyssey at 172 minutes a particularly interesting bet. Adam Holtz from Plugged In joins Brian From to break down what's happening in summer movies. First, live action Moana: a beat-for-beat remake of the original that is neither stunningly good nor stunningly bad, but probably exists because the animated film is the most streamed movie across all platforms over the last five years — 80 billion minutes of viewing. Then the bigger story: The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's blockbuster epic, is already a flashpoint before it even opens. The latest trailer has been ratioed online with ten times as many dislikes as likes, driven largely by casting choices that have race-swapped and gender-swapped major characters including Helen of Troy and Achilles. Meanwhile mainstream media reviews from early screenings are effusive. The gap between those two reactions tells a story about who controls the narrative — and whether it's representative of the actual audience. Adam and Brian also reflect on the broader pattern: franchises and sequels keep bombing while low-budget originals like Backrooms clean up. Maybe audiences are simply exhausted by retreads. Full reviews at pluggedin.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Marriage Resources & Hope Restored with Kim Trobee
1w ago00:10:24Tap to summarizeKim Trobee, longtime Focus on the Family spokesperson and senior manager for their marriage ministry, spent six days in Washington DC for America's 250th birthday celebration — and came back with a surprising report: hundreds of thousands of people on the National Mall, no fights, no division, just genuine gratitude and camaraderie. She talks with Brian From about what it felt like to be there, the immigrant families who were the most visibly moved by the celebration, and the significance of Focus on the Family having a booth in the Faith and Family Pavilion on the national mall — something that wouldn't have been possible under previous administrations. Then the conversation shifts to marriage: Kim and her husband Gary have been married 36 years, and she's passionate about helping couples not just survive but thrive. Focus on the Family offers free marriage getaway weekends at four resort locations around the country, and their Hope Restored intensive program — designed for marriages in genuine crisis — has an 80% success rate two years out. Whether you're dating, newlywed, blended, or on the verge of divorce, focusonthefamily.com has resources for every season.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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