Spiritual Misfits Podcast · Meeting Ground

Embodied Human Wisdom in AI Times (Mikenzie Ling)

·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

The episode’s sharpest claim is that local grounding and global responsibility are the same thing.

Mackenzie Ling returns to Spiritual Misfits after a conversation earlier in the year. She says a faith crisis was never part of the plan, but it came anyway. Purity culture played a major role in that unraveling, and she names the harm directly. She also rejects eternal conscious torment, saying there is zero evidence for it in the Bible. From there, the talk turns toward honesty and kindness. Will and Mackenzie keep asking what it would mean to decolonize church structures instead of just preserving them. She treats that work as deeper, not flashier. A big thread is mutuality. She wants people to show up fully as themselves, and to arrive ready to be changed by the encounter. That matters, she says, because diversity without mutuality becomes another form of power imbalance. She describes how she used to look at other cultures and religions with fascination. Back then, she did not think she could learn from them. Now she sees that posture as fear-based. The conversation keeps coming back to the church's need to recognize Indigenous theology as something it can actually learn from, not just observe. It also insists that difference should not become a silo. People should not have to stop being themselves in order to meet one another. The episode lands on a simple idea that is still hard to live: honest, humble encounter can change everyone without erasing anyone.

As heard by us

A candid, spacious talk about faith unlearning, mutuality, and decolonizing church without losing tenderness.

Mackenzie Ling and Will Small use the conversation to follow what happens when faith stops feeling inherited and turns into a harder, more honest search.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a faith conversation that makes room for doubt, humility, and change.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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