Welcome to Everything Just Changed!

Imagine what it would be like to live in a village surrounded by land mines. As you go about normal activities, the threat of danger lurks underneath everything--animals trigger a detonation regularly, occasionally a fellow villager tragically loses a limb. Survival means learning where to go, how to move, and what to avoid. There’s a low-grade anxiety attendant to daily life even when the fighting is gone. Remnants of a war lurk underneath your feet.

Thousands of people live in such conditions--in Angola and Myanmar, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the West Bank. And while citizens of western nations don’t have literal landmines underneath our feet, we can feel as if we are living in the midst of a cultural minefield. A misplaced joke results in getting fired from a job, an honest difference of opinion strains family relationships, and our hyper-vigilance leaves us exhausted. How do we make sense of this? An earlier explanation centered around culture wars. 

The “sides” in these culture wars are generally described as secularism on the left, and religious conservatism on the right, locked in a zero-sum battle. But this binary doesn’t explain how most Americans feel about their lives, especially now. A 2018 study found that 67% of Americans are an “exhausted majority” -- a group of people who often hold divergent points of view, are fed up with polarization, feel overlooked in public discourse, and believe in finding common ground to work together. But, what if there was another way to live in the midst of a cultural minefield?

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March, Brad Edwards and Bryce Hales launched the Everything Just Changed podcast to help those caught in the exhausted middle faithfully navigate life in a post-Christian and post-pandemic world. In the process, we’ve stumbled across a paradigm that we believe can chart the way forward: a radical reorientation of life around King and Kingdom that we call “covenantalism.” Imagine a life without landmines, not because your political party won or even all the injustices in the world are righted, but because you can follow the path through the minefield. 

Join us for season 2 of Everything Just Changed where we’ll explore the role of individualism in western society and help give you a map out of the minefield.