The Mark Pizza Challenge (Part 1)

Summary

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The Wake-Up Call: “The Mark Pizza Challenge (Part 1)”

Host: John David Walt (J.D. Walt)
Guest: David Walt (J.D.'s father), Sam (music)
Date: July 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, J.D. Walt returns from a break to launch a new summer miniseries centered on the Gospel of Mark—what he fondly dubs “the Gospel of the Holy Spirit.” He shares the inspiring origins and fruit of the “Mark Pizza Challenge,” a creative approach he once used to cultivate a deep hunger for scripture among teenagers, leading to a season of profound spiritual awakening. The episode beautifully blends personal testimony, scripture-based encouragement, musical worship, and gentle humor between father and son.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

J.D.’s Return and Series Preview

• [00:06] J.D. expresses gratitude for Dan Wilt, who recently hosted a series on ministry and the Holy Spirit, and welcomes listeners back.
• Announces a short summer series exploring the Gospel of Mark, with expectations for special guests and a deep dive into the shortest gospel, “which I call the Gospel of the Holy Spirit.”

  “We won’t be able to get all the way through it… but I’m going to have some special guests.”
  — J.D. Walt [00:26]

Scriptural Grounding & Consecration

• [01:41] J.D. opens with consecration and prayer, setting a tone of attentiveness to Jesus.

  “Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you.”
  — J.D. Walt [01:48]

• Reads Acts 10:36-38, highlighting how God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit and power, setting the stage for the Mark series.

The Mark Pizza Challenge: An Origin Story

• [04:37] J.D. shares how, as a young and untrained youth pastor, he needed a way to animate students’ engagement with the Bible.

• Chose Mark for its brevity and accessibility, “16 glorious chapters, 678 verses and 11,304 words.”

• Designed the “Mark Pizza Challenge”: read one chapter of Mark per day for 16 days straight. Miss a day? Start over from chapter one. Unlimited restarts. Completing the challenge meant a spot at a pizza party.

  “I wasn’t trying to lower the bar, but to change the game.”
  — J.D. Walt [05:20] “We needed to shift from external prodding to internal hunger.”
  — J.D. Walt [05:30]

• Stories of Transformation:

  • [06:40] One student read by flashlight in a sleeping bag at camp, refusing to break the streak.
  • Another invited his non-churchgoing family; many students read Mark multiple times due to restarts.
  • Mark’s stories became the communal language of the group; “we would talk about Mark’s Jesus stories as though they had happened that very morning.”
  • A student cited Mark 5 as reason to pray for a peer’s healing—who was miraculously healed.
  • The challenge led to all-night prayer meetings, pre-dawn prayer breakfasts, and a sense of real movement in the church.

  “These teenagers had grown up in a church seized by the inertia of religious motion and machinations and they weren’t having it. They wanted the movement.”
  — J.D. Walt [08:45]

• The challenge moved participants from “comfy confines of a more committed devotional life” to “actually following Jesus.” The Word led them to the Word (Jesus), to the Spirit, and to awakening in their congregation.

Reflection and Prayer

• [10:10] Leads in prayer, echoing Acts 10’s anointing and asking for Holy Spirit power to “do good and heal and bless and love.”

  “When you show up with nothing, and you discover that’s all Jesus needs and he’s bringing everything, that’s when the real something starts to happen.”
  — J.D. Walt [11:24]

Journal & Community Challenges

• [11:50] J.D. prompts listeners to reflect:
  • When is the last time you had fun reading the Bible?
  • Are you ready for “fun” again?
  • Consider joining a new Mark Pizza Challenge this summer.

  “We won’t finish the whole Gospel of Mark in this summer series. Probably won’t even get close. But you can definitely. You’ll have 16 plus days to do it and just start praying about if you want to jump in.”
  — J.D. Walt [12:46]

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Singing with Dad

Returning the Walt Family to the Microphone

• [14:10] David Walt greets the audience warmly, delighted by listeners’ cards and letters.

  “You just make us feel awful good; you make us feel to where we want to get singing more.”
  — David Walt [14:54]

• J.D. shares a story about a handcrafted prayer square sent by a listener, emphasizing community and tactile reminders to pray.

Song: “Spirit of the Living God”

• [16:04] J.D., David Walt, and Sam lead the classic hymn from the Seedbed hymnal, “Our Great Redeemer’s Praise.”

  “As you sing it, just open your hands up, like as a posture of receiving. We don’t grasp for the Holy Spirit, we open up and receive.”
  — J.D. Walt [17:13]

• The hymn is sung twice, inviting listeners to prayerful openness.

Post-Song Reflections

• Discuss importance of simply welcoming the Holy Spirit.

  “We need the Holy Spirit... That’s the secret to the Christian’s life: the Holy Spirit.”
  — J.D. Walt [19:38] “It’s not complicated… Didn’t say it was easy, but it’s not complicated.”
  — David Walt [19:46]

• J.D. recounts how his father once taught youth about the Holy Spirit in Florida, pledging to revisit that teaching in the future.

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Memorable Quotes

• “We needed to shift from external prodding to internal hunger, from oughts and shoulds to musts.”
  — J.D. Walt [05:30]
• “When you show up with nothing, and you discover that’s all Jesus needs and he’s bringing everything, that’s when the real something starts to happen.”
  — J.D. Walt [11:24]
• “These teenagers had grown up in a church seized by the inertia of religious motions and machinations and they weren’t having it. They wanted the movement.”
  — J.D. Walt [08:45]
• “It’s not complicated. Didn’t say it was easy, but it’s not complicated.”
  — David Walt [19:46]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:06 — J.D. returns, introduces series and shares gratitude
• 01:41 — Consecration prayer and scripture reading (Acts 10:36-38)
• 04:37 — Origin and rules of the Mark Pizza Challenge
• 06:40 — Testimonies and spiritual impact among youth
• 10:10 — Corporate prayer for anointing and following Jesus
• 11:50 — Journal prompts and new challenge invitation
• 14:10 — Singing segment: Walt family, listener connection, “Spirit of the Living God”
• 19:46 — Simple invitation to life in the Holy Spirit

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Summary & Takeaway

This episode is a vibrant invitation to rediscover joy and hunger in reading the Bible and to follow Jesus in community. J.D. Walt’s recollections of the Mark Pizza Challenge provide an inspiring blueprint for group engagement with scripture, sparking not only personal devotion but collective awakening. The warm interplay with his father, the gospel-rooted worship, and the gentle, practical encouragement make this episode especially rich for listeners seeking renewal, simplicity, and spiritual movement.

Challenge for listeners:
Are you ready for the Mark Pizza Challenge? Dive into Mark’s gospel—one chapter a day, 16 days in a row—and see what the Holy Spirit might do.

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(End of summary—excludes advertisements, intro/outro, and non-content segments.)

Transcript

[David Walt]

Foreign.

[John David Walt]

Nation. I'm back. And have I ever missed you? I have. I have had a good breather, I guess you'd call it. And I want to thank Dan Wilt for the yeoman's work that he did on all the things everyday, ministry and the power of the Holy Spirit. It was fantastic. It was thorough, it was deep, it was rich, it was real. Dan Wilt, wow. Thank you, Dan. We've heard so much feedback from so many of you. I've thought about taking the rest of the year off, but I can't do that. I'm back and I'm going to be leading a short series here through the rest of the summer. I think I'm decided I'm going to land some in my work on the Gospel of Mark. I call it the Gospel of the Holy Spirit. Of course, we won't be able to get all the way through it because it's one of my longest books on the shortest gospel, interestingly enough. And I'm going to have some special guests I think drop in a couple of weeks too. I'm looking forward to sharing those with you. Dad's coming over today and we're going to be singing. A lot of you have been asking about that, so let's just dive right in. Enough preliminaries. We're here to meet with Jesus, not J.D. okay? And Jesus is here. He is ready to meet with us as we open the word of God and ask him to teach us. So today is July 9th in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm John David Walt and this is your wake up call. Let's begin with consecration. Wake up, sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. And we're praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, today's entry we're starting up in Mark. I'm actually giving you a couple of preliminary days. I mean, we're diving right in. But I wanted to kind of tell you the story, my own little bit of a story with how the Gospel of Mark's becomes so important to me. So our text today, get this, it comes from Acts, chapter 10, verses 36 to 38. Hear now the word of the Lord. You know, the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of All you know what has happened throughout the province of Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached. How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil because God was with him. It's the Word of the Lord. Our entry today is entitled the Mark Pizza Challenge Part one. We'll do part one today and part two tomorrow and we'll jump right into Mark one one. Maybe on Saturday. We'll see. But now consider this. It is the shortest gospel. That's what I was thinking there. I was a 2L, a second year law student heading into the summer months as a highly under qualified bush league youth pastor in charge of leading a big league youth ministry. I didn't know what to do to engage those young people. But I knew one thing for certain. It had to start with the Word of God. In an effort to find the best intersection of youth on summer break and the Word of God, I chose the shortest gospel. The Gospel of Mark with all its 16 glorious chapters, 678 verses and 11,304 words. I wasn't trying to lower the bar, but to change the game. I wanted to shift the approach from I ought to read my Bible every now and then to I must dig into the Word of God every day. We needed to shift from external prodding to internal hunger, from oughts and shoulds to musts, and now from ticking a box to winning a game. And so began the Mark Pizza Challenge. To win the challenge and be included in the pizza party to end all pizza parties, all you had to do was read the gospel of Mark one chapter a day, 16 days in a row. If you missed a day it meant starting back over with chapter one. We allowed unlimited restarts and students and adults had the entire summer to get it done. Stories abounded. The students went all in. It wasn't about the pizza as much as it became about completing the challenge and doing it together. One kid recounted a story of being at camp and forgetting to read, remembering after lights out and before midnight and getting out their flashlight in their zipped up sleeping bag and getting it done to keep the streak alive. Can you see him there with the flashlight and the Bible in the sleeping bag? Another kid invited his whole non church going family to to join the challenge. The whole thing took on epic proportions as momentum built. Some kids wound up reading it a dozen times after the misses and restarts were all tallied. When together we would talk about Mark's Jesus stories as though they had happened that very morning. I will forever remember one of the kids citing the fifth chapter of Mark as a warrant to to pray for another of our students who needed physical healing. We went for it. We didn't know any better. And this student was miraculously healed. Like those first disciples, we were astonished. Through this simple living way of reading together we became intrigued by the seemingly secret power of Jesus prayer life. This seamless sort of intimate conversation between he and his father inspired us to follow. I will always remember the wonderful sight of too many sleeping bags to count stretched across the front of the sanctuary for the spontaneously called all night prayer meeting. Inspired by Mark's gospel. This led to the weekly pre dawn prayer breakfasts that soon began to awaken the high school. As you are imagining by now, the pizza celebration feast transformed into the veritable banqueting table of the kingdom of heaven. The challenge led us beyond the comfy confines of a more committed devotional life. We were actually following Jesus. These teenagers had grown up in a church seized by the inertia of religious motions and machinations and they weren't having it. They wanted the movement. The word of God was leading them into the world of God sized possibilities. The Word of God. The scriptures led us to the word of God Jesus and Jesus led us to the Spirit of God. And the Spirit of God through this band of students began to sow the seeds of awakening into the whole church that continues to grow and bear fruit to this day. Let's pray our Father how we marvel at these words from the Bible about how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil because God was with him. And now Lord Jesus, we open our whole lives to you to do the same thing through us. Anoint us with the Holy Spirit and power so we can do good and heal and bless and love. It will be for your glory, for others gain and for our good and in Jesus name. Amen. Man, I love that story, don't you? So pure hearted it was so I knew nothing about anything and I was in charge of leading a youth ministry. No training, no education for it. I'd been in church but sad to say that kind of got in the way of a lot of things back then. But it was faith. You see when you, when you show up with nothing and you discover that that's all Jesus needs and he's bringing everything, that's when the real something starts to happen. I want that so much. I know you want it too, guys. That's why we're meeting together every day, day in and day out here on the wake up call. We're on a transformational journey of love from Jesus to a person through a person to a person through a person. And we keep on going until every person has been met. All right, I got a couple of journal prompts for us. I know you got your journals ready. I know you wrote all over that workbook with Dan Wilt. I've seen some great pictures of some of that. Here's the questions we got for today. So when is the last time you had fun reading the Bible? The bark pizza challenge was fun. I want you to tell me that story. And I wonder, are you ready to have fun again? And I wonder if you might be ready for the Mark pizza challenge. I think we're going to crank that up here and invite anybody and everybody who wants to see if they can go 16 days in a row. We won't finish the whole Gospel of Mark in this summer series. Probably won't even get close. But you know what? You can definitely. We'll. You'll have 16 plus days to do it and just start praying about if you want to jump in. We'll figure the pizza out later. Well, I think now's a good minute to make the handoff for singing with dad. My dad is here and y', all, he is loved being a part of this. And so many of you wrote him. He's gotten over 500 cards by now. And you know what? A lot of y' all wrote me, too. And I want to thank you for that. You've encouraged me in these days of rest and renewal, and it's meant a lot. It's meant a lot. So I'm so glad to be back. And dad and I are going to lead the singing now. Okay, friends and neighbors, the long awaited break is over and we are back and ready to sing. Look who's here. Say hi to everybody.

[David Walt]

Hi, everybody. Y' all get comfortable because we singing to you.

[John David Walt]

No, no, no, no. They're singing with us, dad.

[David Walt]

Okay, with us.

[John David Walt]

This is not a performance. This is a choir.

[David Walt]

We're going to kind of follow y' all then.

[John David Walt]

Amen. Now, I wanted to share. Dad, do you know, you remember how many letters and cards you've gotten from our wake up call friends?

[David Walt]

Oh, hundreds of them.

[John David Walt]

Hundreds. Hundreds. It's just he's over 500. Anything you want to say to the people out there?

[David Walt]

Well, it makes us so Feel so very important. And we're not. But you're just making us feel awful. Good. You make us feel to where we want to get singing more.

[John David Walt]

That's good.

[David Walt]

More and more.

[John David Walt]

Well, just today we got a card from Ina Rae Weeks, who's out in North Carolina, and look what she sent. This is like a little prayer square. And they stitch these together and they're hoping that these go probably to women because men's hands are going to be dirty. But I bet they go to anybody. They take them, she said in the letter, and they put them across the altar and they pray, pray over them. And then they give them to people. I mean, they're just. It's just good to have the kind of tactile thing in your hand. It's a reminder to pray. It's a reminder. It's a great way to bless somebody else and give them these. So, Anna Ray Weeks, we appreciate you sending that to us. And we're going to sing a great chorus. It's in. It's in our hymnal. Let's. Let's tell them what we're singing today, dad.

[David Walt]

Spirit of the Living God.

[John David Walt]

And it's number 299. In what book are we singing from?

[David Walt]

Here we are singing from Our Great Redeemer's Praise.

[John David Walt]

Our Great Redeemer's Praise. That's our seedbed hymnal. And if you, if you don't have a copy, you need one, and we will be glad to get one in the mail to you. You can look at the links in the. In the email and in all the show notes on the podcast platforms. So, you know, dad, we're, we're going to. Summertime. I always think of the summer as the season of the whole of learning about the Holy Spirit, because the day of Pentecost comes, you know, in May mostly, sometimes June. And it's a chance to just learn more about the Holy Spirit. And, and this summer, we're working through some of Mark's gospel and we're. We're studying Jesus to learn about the Spirit God. So we're going to sing this hymn today. We'll sing it through twice and just encourage you as you sing it, just to open your hands up, like as a posture of receiving. Right. Receiving. We don't grasp. For the Holy Spirit, we open up and receive. So I'll try to pitch this.

[Sam]

Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me Spirit of the living God Fall afresh on me and melt me, mold me, fill me. Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me.

[John David Walt]

Let's sing it again prayerfully.

[Sam]

Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me Build me mo. Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me Amen.

[David Walt]

Amen.

[John David Walt]

That's what we need, isn't it?

[David Walt]

That's exactly what we need.

[John David Walt]

We need the Holy Spirit. I remember a time, dad, when you taught. You took a bunch of. You went on a trip with a youth group, and y' all went to Florida, and you taught them. You were their teacher, and you taught them about the Holy Spirit. I remember helping you write that lesson. Oh, we're going. We got to figure out how to bring it back.

[David Walt]

We need to get it. Yeah, we need to find it.

[John David Walt]

We need to get it back out because it was very, very good and plain and simple, and. And that's what we need. We need the Holy Spirit, and we have to open ourselves up and welcome Him. But he does everything else. He'll melt us. He'll mold us. He'll fill us. He'll use us. That's the secret to the Christian's life, is the Holy Spirit.

[David Walt]

It's not complicated.

[John David Walt]

It's not complicated. That's one of Dad's favorite things to say. It's not complicated. Didn't say. Didn't say it was easy, but it's not complicated. All right, well, it's time for. Send you all out onto the fields today. So get your seeds. You're gonna do some sowing today. And for The Awakening, I'm J.D. walt.

[David Walt]

And I'm David. Walt.

[John David Walt]

We'll see you on the field.

[David Walt]

Amen.

[John David Walt]

Glad you're back, dad.

[David Walt]

Thank you. Glad to be back,

[Sam]

Sam.