The New Red Door of the Church
Five years ago, about $1,500 worth of microphones in an Atlanta basement. This week, an episode count of 300, downloads past 400,000, and listeners in 184 countries.
That math by itself is striking. It is the math of For People with Bishop Rob Wright, the podcast Bishop Wright launched at the start of the pandemic with Easton Davis, his Canon for Communications and Digital Evangelism in the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta. But the 300th episode, a conversation between the two of them about where the show has been and where it is going, is worth listening to for reasons that have very little to do with download counts.
What is striking is what they have decided the work is.
In the episode, Bishop Wright and Easton Davis talk about a bishop’s job as fundamentally communicative. They talk about the weekly Friday meditation as ministry. They talk about Jesus as someone whose invitation does not depend on shame, fear, or litmus tests. They talk about people who are “church hurt,” bruised by a Christianity that told them they were not enough, and what it might mean for a podcast to find them. Bishop Wright, who used to be a Navy search and rescue diver, calls the work exactly that:
“We’re trying to search out for ears and hearts who need some good news.”
And Easton names something a lot of church leaders are still working out:
“Your website matters, your social media matters, the look of your brand matters in inviting people in… The new doors are digital. People are finding us online and in digital spaces before they’re stepping foot in our buildings.”
That is the line that gives this post its title. So many Episcopal churches have red front doors, a centuries-old visual cue that says this is a sanctuary, you can come in. Easton argues that the digital threshold is now the first red door. The website. The video. The podcast episode someone listens to while walking. The post a friend forwards. By the time anyone steps into a sanctuary on a Sunday morning, they have already crossed several thresholds online. What they found there mattered.
Bishop Wright takes the question further. To church leaders nervous that all this talk of websites, reach, and brand sounds suspiciously like marketing, he gently points back to the woman at the well, who met Jesus and went and told the town. He invokes the parable of the sower:
“Our job is to sow as many seeds as we can and let the Holy Spirit do the rest.”
This is, in other words, an argument that good communication is not vanity when the message is good news. And later in the episode, he gets to one of those lines you find yourself repeating for days:
“If there’s an 11th commandment, it would be something like don’t make Jesus boring.”
I have had a front-row seat to a lot of this. For several years now, I have worked alongside Easton, first as a website and communications partner for the Diocese of Atlanta, and now through Beloved Media, which supports a growing number of Episcopal organizations taking this kind of communication seriously. Watching Bishop Wright and Easton over time, what stands out is not the cleverness of the strategy. It is the consistency of the conviction. Every Friday, another meditation. Every week, another conversation. Five years in, the same care, the same theological warmth, the same refusal to make Jesus boring.
That is what 300 episodes actually represent. Not a marketing achievement. A pastoral one.