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PODCAST

theeffect Podcasts

Audio podcasts delivered at theeffect church in San Clemente, CA. theeffect is a community of imperfect people working together to find the emotional recovery and spiritual transformation that is theeffect of God’s love by unlearning limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions, and engaging a first century Jesus in a non-religious and transforming way. See more at theeffect.org.

religion & spirituality

All Episodes

00:46:55

Keeping Awe Alive

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/06/15

Dave Brisbin 6.15.25Past week brought a series of headlines each pre-empting each other’s news cycle. Against a backdrop of wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the disruption of a new US administration intent on radical change, protests and riots broke out in LA, then aerial offensives between Israel and Iran, political assassinations in Minnesota, more protests nationwide. Huge issues we can’t ignore, that demand a response, a personal way forward. In the midst of it, I receive an email about a

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00:45:51

Graduating Tribe

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/06/07

Dave Brisbin 6.8.25A man asks me about Jesus’ saying that if we believe in him and his works, we’ll do the same and greater works than he. He’s troubled by the verse because he’s not doing the works that Jesus did, let alone greater ones, so does that mean he doesn’t really believe? I ask him what works of Jesus he’s looking to do. Well, it has to be the healings and miracles, right? And therein lies the rub. The church hasn’t known what to do with this verse for the same reason, usually limiting

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00:44:45

Hidden in Each Other

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/06/01

Dave Brisbin 6.1.25What is the most important goal of your spiritual formation? You might instinctively say love. Learning to love, practicing love. Good answer, but until we carefully define it, love may not help direct us. Rather than a feeling or behavior, love is simply identification with the beloved. When we identify—see ourselves in the other, a fellow imperfect human, an extension of us—whatever we do for them, we do for ourselves. To experience that identification is love. And vice

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00:45:58

Identity Shift

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/05/24

Dave Brisbin 5.25.25If I asked you who you are, how would you answer? Almost everyone I’ve asked, including myself, has answered with a mix of the roles they fill, the accomplishments they’ve accumulated, and the attributes they exhibit. Roles, accomplishments, and attributes describe the human container we inhabit in this life, the whole with which our egoic consciousness identifies. We think we are our roles, accomplishments, and attributes until we step out of our containers to find a deeper

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00:43:46

The Life in Death

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/05/18

Dave Brisbin 5.18.25Two events converged in my mind last week. My wife and I picked up the ashes of a friend we’d been helping take care of for the past few years…and our faith community turned eighteen years old. Nothing like an anniversary to open the memory faucet, and maybe because of our friend’s death, the serious illnesses of many others, and my own advancing age, my memories were not focused on timelines, but the long parade of people who have meant so much. Those who have stayed, moved

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00:47:59

Restoring Mom

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/05/11

Dave Brisbin 5.11.25Our English words patriarchal and paternal descend from the Latin word pater, father. We know about patriarchy—society organized around male domination, often to the point of excluding women—but paternalism is restricting the freedom and autonomy of others under the guise of protecting their own welfare. The US started out patriarchal but not paternal. We didn’t allow women to vote until 1920 but also didn’t collect income tax until 1913, generally leaving people to fend for

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00:46:07

Already Free

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/05/04

Dave Brisbin 5.4.25The most damaging attitude toward life and spirituality is…wait for it…passivity. Passive people feel their actions are insufficient or that they have no real choice at all, which makes them victims—defined by choicelessness. Victims are always waiting, never in the present, looking toward some other moment when circumstances may change or someone, God, saves them from their circumstances. People with victim mentalities are passive-aggressive in their interactions with others,

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00:46:32

Between Freedoms

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/04/27

Dave Brisbin 4.27.25We’re back in count again. We just finished counting forty days of Lent, and now we’re counting again. The count of Lent signifies a time of preparation for Easter, and the count now is also preparation for a second liberation on the fiftieth day after Easter—Pentecost. Our liturgical calendar is overlaid on that of the Jews, who for 3,500 years have counted seven weeks of seven, forty-nine days plus one, from the second day of Pesach/Passover to Shavu’ot/Weeks. Originally a

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00:23:01

Meaning of Resurrection

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/04/20

Dave Brisbin 4.20.25Cross and resurrection form the crux of Christian tradition, but whatever these events were historically, if we merely revere them from a distance of two millennia, we are missing the point of the gospels. These events realigned every detail of the lives of Jesus’ closest friends and followers, but as long as they remain historical events and theological concepts, they won’t realign ours. If the resurrection is to have the power now that it had then, we need to know where to

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00:50:49

Threat of Clarity

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/04/13

Dave Brisbin 4.13.25Very few of us live in the real world. Like avatars in a gamescape, we live in a world created by our own thought patterns, which are in turn created by our core beliefs—deeply held, fundamental assumptions about ourselves, others, and the world. Hiding in our unconscious, core beliefs are as unquestioned as the air we breathe, acting as filters through which everything in life is perceived, without our knowing they even exist. Initial reactions to earliest experiences, core

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00:50:16

Doing Our Forty

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/04/06

Dave Brisbin 4.6.25Just when you think the world can’t get any crazier, each week we get a whole new view of crazy. And the more the world pounds on our door through news and social media, the more our grip on spiritual reality can loosen. The silence and solitude of contemplative practice, the wordless knowing of God’s presence can feel impotent, incapable of meeting the screaming needs of life’s issues. The world always has its thumb on the scale, so we naturally tilt that way, but a fulfilled

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00:51:46

Burning Bushes

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/03/30

Dave Brisbin 3.30.25Burning bush is our cultural meme, idiom for a peak experience, a vision of God or from God. But for all its power, one burning bush is not enough. Standing on holy ground in front of the original burning bush, Moses argued with God, doubted God’s word right there, and for the rest of his life, oscillated between boldness and doubt. Just like any human. But how in the world is a burning bush not enough for permanent transformation? How could that not change us without a

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00:54:48

Showing Our Work

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/03/25

Dave Brisbin 3.23.25Remember taking math tests in school? Remember how you had to show your work? Remember how you hated that? Wasn’t enough to get the answer, you had to show how you got to the answer. Yes, a right answer, or at least a functional one, is important. But showing your work signaled that you grasped underlying principles that would give you repeatable results, a platform on which to build. Mathematics understands that the how is at least as important as the what. That any answer is

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00:47:42

Marching and More Alive

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/03/16

Dave Brisbin 3.16.25Mid-century dancer Martha Graham said that no artist is ever satisfied with their work at any time. That there is a strange, “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest” that keeps them marching and more alive than others. This is a blueprint for excellence and recipe for disaster depending on whether a balance can be maintained. We’ve been applying this blueprint to our spiritual lives, and balance is no less critical there. The power in Graham’s statement lies in the paradox of

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00:42:42

The Gift of Doubt

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/03/09

Dave Brisbin 3.9.25 Years ago, at the lowest point in my life, a friend invited me to her church, marking a return to Christianity after fifteen years away. First thing, I booked a lunch with the pastor, and halfway through, across my untouched plate, he said he saw “divine dissatisfaction” in me. Strange phrase. I didn’t see anything divine in my dissatisfaction or speed-questions, but then, there I was. Asking a pastor. Years later, I looked it up. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know he was quoting a

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00:44:31

Empowered

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/02/28

Dave Brisbin 3.2.25Jesus doesn’t save anyone passively, in spite of themselves, beyond their willingness to actively engage a way of experiencing transformed life he calls Kingdom. If we’re waiting for a savior, no one is coming. If we’re waiting for anything, we’re not in Kingdom. Waiting is passive, not yet; Kingdom is always in motion, herenow. Jesus saves by empowering us to act in ways we may have thought not possible or not allowed. He shows us the process of fundamental change, challenging

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00:48:58

The Purpose of Life

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/02/22

Dave Brisbin 2.23.25Do people really change? Seems maddingly rare, especially the older we get—the way is narrow and gate constricted—but it does happen. Why are some of us able to make fundamental, personal change, beat the odds that imprison the rest of us? Joseph Campbell introduced the monomyth, the hero’s journey, the one plotline we use over and over in all forms: stories, poems, songs, movies. This universal story of transformation follows the three-part structure of a classic rite of

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00:54:30

Balancing Act

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/02/16

Dave Brisbin 2.16.25 Life is big, loud, in your face. Like an over-the-top extravert, life can suck all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or attention for anything else. And against life’s overwhelming physical realities—whether personal or political, socio-economic or relational—the spiritual can seem like a whisper we’re not even sure we heard…naïve, even irrelevant to our most pressing needs. I understand why spiritual leaders often change lanes into the socio-political, big

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00:48:51

All We Know

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/02/09

Dave Brisbin 2.9.25Quote from a movie priest: There comes a time in man’s search for meaning that you realize there are no answers. When you come to that horrible, unavoidable conclusion, you either accept it or you kill yourself. Or you simply stop searching... I remember how obsessively important it was to get answers to the big theological and existential questions about religious doctrine, miracles, healings, prayer, heaven, hell, death, afterlife. At a certain point, in the midst of all the

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00:49:45

The Real Enemy

theeffect Podcasts ·

2025/02/02

Dave Brisbin 2.2.25Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat? What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I’m hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote… How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read

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503 results

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