The church's work is not done, and the Holy Spirit is never done with us.
The Unfinished Church is a podcast about the church still on its way: going on to perfection, as the Wesleyan tradition puts it, not as a claim of arrival but as a prayer and a posture. Each season, Host Bishop Gregory Vaughn Palmer sits down with leaders, scholars, and practitioners from across the church for honest conversations about what it looks like to follow the Spirit to the edges, where the church is most visibly unfinished and most urgently needed.
This series traces a single question: what does it mean to be a church that is still becoming? Palmer's guests bring that question to life from radically different vantage points. A historian who reads the Methodist past as spiritual formation. The president of the only historically Black seminary in the UMC. A theologian who leads a seminary from the margins inward, having planted a Hispanic church in Eastern Durham and started a course of study for ministers in El Salvador. A bishop building full communion across denominational lines while opening a sanctuary to every Abrahamic faith in her city. A layperson doing justice work in prisons and insisting the church cannot export its calling. A pastor who found the unfinished church in a congregation of fewer than fifty people and never looked back.
Together they challenge the metrics the church has used to measure itself and ask a harder question: not how do we finish the church, but how do we change what we think finishing looks like?
This is a show for people who love the church enough to tell the truth about it and hopeful enough to keep working. Whether you lead a congregation, serve a denomination, or simply feel called to be bound to others in the human family, you are welcome here.
The Unfinished Church is produced by Wesleyan Impact Partners and Texas Methodist Foundation. New episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.
This podcast is hosted by
The Unfinished Church
The church's work is not done, and the Holy Spirit is never done with us.
The Unfinished Church is a podcast about the church still on its way: going on to perfection, as the Wesleyan tradition puts it, not as a claim of arrival but as a prayer and a posture. Each season, Host Bishop Gregory Vaughn Palmer sits down with leaders, scholars, and practitioners from across the church for honest conversations about what it looks like to follow the Spirit to the edges, where the church is most visibly unfinished and most urgently needed.
This series traces a single question: what does it mean to be a church that is still becoming? Palmer's guests bring that question to life from radically different vantage points. A historian who reads the Methodist past as spiritual formation. The president of the only historically Black seminary in the UMC. A theologian who leads a seminary from the margins inward, having planted a Hispanic church in Eastern Durham and started a course of study for ministers in El Salvador. A bishop building full communion across denominational lines while opening a sanctuary to every Abrahamic faith in her city. A layperson doing justice work in prisons and insisting the church cannot export its calling. A pastor who found the unfinished church in a congregation of fewer than fifty people and never looked back.
Together they challenge the metrics the church has used to measure itself and ask a harder question: not how do we finish the church, but how do we change what we think finishing looks like?
This is a show for people who love the church enough to tell the truth about it and hopeful enough to keep working. Whether you lead a congregation, serve a denomination, or simply feel called to be bound to others in the human family, you are welcome here.
The Unfinished Church is produced by Wesleyan Impact Partners and Texas Methodist Foundation. New episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.
This podcast is hosted by