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Compelled By Stories (with Paul Hastings)
2 Playsin 1 day
If we tell people the fact that Jesus is real and can change your life, they can nod and say "That's great for you, but not for me." But when we tell a story of the amazing impact God has in extraordinary circumstances, it can become absolutely compelling! Simon and Gavin speak today with the host of Compelled, a story-driven podcast seeking to communicate incredible stories of lives transformed by the gospel.
Paul Hastings lives with his wife and four children near Austin, Texas, and attends Redemption Hill Church. As an entrepreneur, he's consulted extensively in the film, marketing and political arenas and is the Host of the Compelled Podcast. His work has been featured by Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, Christianity Today, World Magazine, American Family Association, and The Gospel Coalition. He is the author of the brand new book, Compelled, a collection of real-life stories about sin, surrender, and the Savior who changes everything.
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:11
Speaker
Well, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast from Solas. I'm Simon Wenham and I'm delighted to be joined by my co-host Gavin. Gavin, how are you? Gavin Matthews? I'm doing really well. How are you, Simon?
00:00:26
Speaker
Very well, thank you. And I'm also delighted ah to introduce to you a compelling guest that we have today, and that is Paul Hastings, who's coming to us from Austin, Texas.
00:00:37
Speaker
Thank you for being with us. How how are you doing today? Guys, thanks for letting me join y'all. It is hot, hot, hot here in Texas. So I'm glad to see you guys in a less hot environment.
00:00:48
Speaker
fan Fantastic. Well, thank you for being with us. It's actually been pretty warm here, but it's yes it's probably certainly cooler than than Texas.
Paul Hastings' Background
00:00:55
Speaker
And just ah say a little bit about you, and I hope I can sum this up right, you're a ah presenter of the Compelled podcast.
00:01:02
Speaker
You just celebrated your 100th episode, which is amazing. You're also co-author of Compelled, which is a new book showcasing incredible personal testimonies, and it's endorsed by none other than Andy Bannister, among other people as well.
00:01:17
Speaker
and So my first question, actually, we'd just love to hear a little bit about the the the Compelled book and podcast. What is it? And ah How long have you been doing the podcast? Can you tell us a little bit about how that
Transition to Podcasting and Compelled Podcast
00:01:29
Speaker
came about? so Sure. Yeah, glad to. So i'll I'll back up just a little bit. Straight out of my high school days, I got a job in Texas politics, and that's what I did as a career path. I did that for about 10 years.
00:01:42
Speaker
um And eventually I came to the realization that it was no longer healthy for me to continue in the political sphere. um Not because it's bad for everybody, but it's bad for me. I was just too emotionally invested in the outcome of campaigns and candidates. And I just wanted the destruction of our political opponents. And that's all i cared about.
00:02:03
Speaker
And my wife and I began praying. We began saying, Lord, is there something else that I should do to provide for our family? you know Because we still got you to pay the bills and feed our kids and things. And we began praying. And at some point, we just realized that, man, maybe maybe instead of me like finding all the terrible, wicked things that political opponents have done so that I could then publicize it and say, you know don't vote for this person, vote for my person, maybe we should start a podcast that finds the terrible, wicked things that people have done.
00:02:32
Speaker
but then celebrates how Jesus Christ has now transformed that person entirely. And so that's how we started the podcast Compelled. We started seven years ago, and it's ah now my full-time job.
00:02:46
Speaker
We find people with these amazing stories of here's what they used to do. Here's what their life used to be. And then here's the stark transformation. And there's always an incredible story there that goes along with that.
00:02:57
Speaker
We add sound effects and music and narration. I'll just tell you one quick example.
Gratia Burnham's Story of Forgiveness
00:03:02
Speaker
We have a story from her name is Gratia Burnham. She was a missionary in the Philippines back during 2001. She and her husband were faithfully serving the Lord, but she was kidnapped by terrorists and held in the jungles for a year for ransom.
00:03:17
Speaker
And she and her husband endured every imaginable atrocity. They saw beheadings. They saw gun battles. They had to eat, you know, just ah terrible moldy food.
00:03:29
Speaker
And they feared for their lives constantly. and for a whole year, they lived in the jungles. And Gratia began to hate her captors. She hated them with a just a ah vengeance because she was seeing people being killed. And it was just she was just so angry at these men who had just destroyed their lives.
00:03:46
Speaker
And ah through the course of her story, she tells how she came to the conviction that Jesus Christ was commanding her to forgive these men, even as they held them captive.
00:03:57
Speaker
And just an incredible testimony. And of course, she eventually was released. um It's ah an incredible story and and just ah an amazing story of of forgiveness. And so that's just one of the stories that we've done in the podcast.
Impact of Storytelling
00:04:10
Speaker
We then launched our book, and the book is just a compilation of seven of our favorite stories from the podcast ah retold in a literature format. That's wonderful.
00:04:21
Speaker
yeah Your stuff is, yeah you're like a curator of a museum of wonderful stories, aren't you? And you collect them and display them. it's great What is it, though, about stories that's so powerful? I mean, you could lay out some of these ideas as sort of raw concepts, couldn't you?
00:04:34
Speaker
God changes lives, and it would be true and yes and amen, but it wouldn't kind of grip the heart. and move you to tears and change your life in the way that a narrative does. What is it about stories that is just so, well, use the right word, so compelling?
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. No, I think Jesus actually exemplifies this really well. So Jesus does a lot of tea. I've been reading through the Gospels lately. I'm reading through the book of Luke right now.
00:05:00
Speaker
And jesus the story of Jesus that grabs us is it's a story. Luke, Matthew, John and Mark, they all write down the story of Jesus. Now, Jesus has teaching.
00:05:12
Speaker
But his teaching is so much more rich because we understand the context of who he is. And then he dies for us, right? And that's told in a story format. But even Jesus, in his teaching itself, he uses stories, right? He teaches new parables. He was using language that people could relate with.
00:05:28
Speaker
When we try to find a story for our podcast, we're often looking for something like, A, that will capture the imagination, blow people's minds. ah Just another example, in Genesis, the whole Bible starts with a story. It literally starts with In the beginning, right? like That's how I start a story when I'm going to tell my kids in the beginning, you know, like yeah you know once upon a time right in the beginning. And it tells us the story. and And so that's really the format of so much of the Bible. And I think our brains are hardwired to relate with each other through the story of something else that someone's experienced.
00:06:02
Speaker
Brilliant. Thank you. And I suppose one thing that's interesting is you're you're not just telling stories, you also make it an immersive
Creating Immersive Episodes
00:06:09
Speaker
podcast. And without making us look too bad here at Solas, can you just explain a little bit about how you do that in your podcast?
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, let me be really clear. So on our podcast, it's not me telling a story and just, you know, one, you know, here's this person and what, in fact, we bring in the guests. So each person tells their story. So we'll bring in somebody who's got an amazing testimony, just one that comes across my mind right now.
00:06:37
Speaker
um We had a young lady who lived as a transgender man 13 years. And so her name is Laura. So Laura came, I sat down with her. She spoke with me for about two hours and told her testimony of growing up in the church, hating the church and also hating her female body, eventually having every surgery to remove every female organ from her body and convincing herself that she was a man and living as a transgender man for 13 years. She tells us this story.
00:07:07
Speaker
my team and i go back and of course there's a transformation how she eventually does come to find the lord he then convicts her the holy spirit convicts her two years later that she should not live as a woman she actually should not live as a man she should live as a woman who god originally designed her to be so laura tells her story and then my team and i we take that two hour interview and then we reduce it down to about 45 minutes to really just kind of remove all the stutters and the ums and really get to the heart of the story.
00:07:38
Speaker
We then add sound effects and music and narration to kind of bring that story to life and kind of expedite the process for people to really grasp what is her journey like.
00:07:50
Speaker
And we do that every every two weeks. We produce a new episode and it takes us maybe about 60 to 80 hours to create one story. It's really interesting. You've done 100 of these, haven't you?
Celebrating 100 Episodes of Compelled
00:08:03
Speaker
100 episodes, is that right?
00:08:04
Speaker
we've We've done 100 episodes. Now, when we first started, we weren't doing it full-time. We were only doing about 10 episodes a year. um But as time has gone on, we've been able to work on it more aggressively. And now I started full-time on the show about three years ago. But yeah, we did we just crossed episode 100 just a couple weeks ago.
00:08:22
Speaker
you're enjoying today's podcast, would you carefully consider supporting the ministry of Solas?
Supporting Solas' Evangelism
00:08:27
Speaker
We do all kinds of work in evangelism and evangelism training and creating resources all over the UK, working with all kinds of churches to share the gospel. If you'd be willing to support us for as little as £4 a month, we will send you two copies of our book, Have You Ever Wondered?
00:08:41
Speaker
One for you to read and one for you to give away to someone who isn't yet a Christian. Hop over to our website, solas-cpc.org, and look for the donate button at the bottom of the page. Thank you so much for considering supporting the ministry.
00:08:58
Speaker
And now, back to the programme. ah You were telling us how many hours you put into just really curating the material. What was interesting when you mentioned the interactive element, I came across a Victorian explorer called ah John McGregor. He was also an evangelist.
00:09:13
Speaker
and He used to give talks that were concerning considered immersive in the same kind of way with interactivity. So he used to give lectures and then he would talk about being in the wild and you'd hear a howl of a wolf in the background and sort of sound effects. And and it was supposed to be very, very cutting edge for its time and very entertaining. But he also did it for a practical reason because he was trying to make his talks engaging.
00:09:34
Speaker
And also he was an evangelist himself. So it was quite interesting when you mentioned that. That's who came to mind for me. and And also with you saying that, it did make me think, if I asked for a sound effect during our podcast, what what what our sound engineer would come up. So maybe we can hear one. that ah I suppose with all these different guests, could you say something about how you get, and so how did you find the guests in the first place? or yeah These good stories.
Variety and Impact of Guest Stories
00:10:00
Speaker
Great question. One of my favorite parts about doing compelled is we just get to, I get this chance to find this wide variety of what God is doing all across the globe.
00:10:11
Speaker
um And so like one guest will have a missionary. The next guest will be someone who struggled with suicide. The next guest will be someone who was addicted to drugs. And we're just getting to see all these different segments of the human experience.
00:10:23
Speaker
But Jesus Christ can change anybody. He's not bad. It's like, oh, you know, this one person has this one sin. Well, that's too far gone. God's never going to change that. but No, we have found people from every single possible thing you could imagine.
00:10:37
Speaker
ah Right now, actually, I've been corresponding via letters with a man. I think he's 92 years old. And he is one of the last surviving kamikaze pilots from Imperial Japan, World War two And he never flew his mission ah because the war ended before he could fly the mission. But right now we're trying to secure that testimony before he dies.
00:11:00
Speaker
And so it's just like, wow like I've had the chance to meet these people that have like literally ah right now we're we're corresponding with another guy right now. He's one of the last. I think there's only four remaining men who walked on the moon.
00:11:13
Speaker
And he's a believer. He's a Christian, a born again believer, lives in South Carolina. He's like 85. I've talked with him on the phone. We haven't been able to do the interview yet, but I'm hoping to be able to travel to go see him and collect that interview. Because again, the Lord is working not only on the earth, he's working on the moon too. I mean, it's so amazing. So yeah it's one of our joys. And the way we find these stories is sometimes people will listen to our show and then they'll email us and they'll say, hey, ah my uncle has this incredible story. you'll You'd never you know guess what this is. And just the other day, we received an email from somebody to people ah yeah a guy just ah ah a week ago, and he was um working IT, the IT. the internet technology department of his local school ah when a shooting happened about 100 feet away and he rushed around the corner and there was a student dying on the floor and also another student wrestling this the shooter. And so like he was there able to kind of like share this mode of comfort with this kid as he was dying.
00:12:13
Speaker
And that was really was kind of a wake up call to his faith as well. So, again, these are stories that many of them just kind of plop into our lap. And so it's actually the the biggest challenge that we have is just deciding which stories to tell because we have so many to choose from. so yeah.
Responses to Compelled Stories
00:12:29
Speaker
So you've 100 there and seven are going in the book. You've got maybe seven different stories that you've sort of pulled from those 100 episodes and the book's coming out soon. What kind of responses have you had? Because these stories aren't just interesting.
00:12:43
Speaker
Stories themselves are supposed to form us and change us and shape us. oh Do you get responses back of people that have heard these stories and it's inspired them to believe differently or live differently or God's spoken to people through these stories that you put in? What kind of responses have you had to all this work?
00:13:00
Speaker
Absolutely. In fact, one of the stories that's in our book, it's the last story in our book. it's about a guy named Jeff Parker. And so he lived a double life. So he was a Christian and he was a Christian, but he also had this vast amount of sin that his wife did not know about. He was using pornography and he was also a gambling addict. addict And to fund his gambling addiction, he was actually stealing from the Christian company that he was the vice president at.
00:13:28
Speaker
And so he stole over $100,000 U.S., which I don't know what that is in British money, but it's a lot of money. it's a lot of money He stole over $100,000 to feed his gambling addiction. And again, he was stealing from the Christian company that he's the vice president.
00:13:43
Speaker
So he lives this double life, right? And he was never caught. Instead, the Holy Spirit convicted him after seven years of living this double life that he could no longer live these two lives.
00:13:55
Speaker
And so Jeff eventually does confess. He comes to his boss. He tells the truth. And it was this crazy moment of the boss deciding whether or not he was going to press charges and send Jeff to prison.
00:14:06
Speaker
Now, this is a very powerful story, just super convicting. We have it in the podcast form, but it's also in the book. And we've heard from people now who've encountered this story and then reached out to us. and They've reached out to Jeff, the the person who tells the story.
00:14:22
Speaker
ah One lady reached out and said that she herself is actually headed to prison next month. ah because she herself is guilty of a similar crime. Her uncle or aunt heard the podcast episode, sent it to her.
00:14:34
Speaker
They had already sentenced her, but she hadn't yet gone to prison because that's how the prison system works in America. So she was still kind of selling affairs. And so she contacted Jeff just to say, this story has given me hope for heading to prison. Of course, Jeff was like, hey, it's not just about having hope. It's about where's your hope found? It's in the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:14:52
Speaker
um We heard from another person who um encountered a different story in our book. um And it was about just, well, this person though, he was convicted about the double life he had been living um about sexual sin. And so he just contacted us just to say that for the first time, I think in his entire adult life, he had confessed his pornography addiction and he was now pursuing treatment.
00:15:16
Speaker
And so it was just really cool to just see like, wow, that that's an amazing impact. I'll give you one other example. ah This was a little little less crazy, but just a couple days ago, we heard from a pastor in England.
00:15:26
Speaker
He and I think two other local pastors had gotten together to purchase 100 copies of the book to begin distributing out to their church, um just because they were saying that this book is full of great testimonies that exemplify that Jesus is able to save anybody. He's powerful.
00:15:44
Speaker
The book is a great evangelistic tool also. Like, i think it's great for Christians to be encouraged by, but also if you have ah a non-Christian in your life and they just need to know, hey, Jesus is real. He changed his lives. No other explanation for how he could change someone. world Hand this book to them and it will, i I hope that it will change their minds about who Jesus is.
00:16:04
Speaker
Thank you. And actually, one thing that struck me about Jeff's story was him grappling with the concept of cheap grace as opposed to costly grace, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and actually understanding actually that this was ah Jesus had died for us. And it was not not just something you can just flippantly carry on doing what he was doing, but actually was really challenged that actually he needed to do something about it And I thought that was a lovely piece within it.
00:16:28
Speaker
I suppose someone might say that it's wonderful to hear these stories. We we know it's really powerful when we hear God totally transforming lives. But of course, actually, for many people, and they would say, actually, I haven't had a sort of dramatic change in my own life, at least not in that kind of way.
00:16:44
Speaker
and How would you encourage believers who perhaps say would say, you know, I haven't been to to prison or I you know haven't struggled with this? um How would you encourage them in relation to your book and and your ministry?
Universal Transformation through Faith
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, great question. And that's something that I thought about myself, too, because don't have this crazy story of being a drug dealer or you know you know, an assassin. or I don't have that experience myself.
00:17:07
Speaker
But I have thought about, man, I'm so grateful, though, that the Lord has given me this grace of not having gone through those difficult experiences. And really, i would love for my children to have the same testimony that I have, right? Growing up in the church, knowing who the Lord is at an early age and faithfully following him throughout my life.
00:17:26
Speaker
At the same time, I also have to remember that actually all of us who are Christians, we actually do have a crazy story because all of us were actually headed to a destination of eternal hell in a lake of fire.
00:17:41
Speaker
All of us were headed there, right? That was going to be crazy. And yet the son of God dies for us so that we don't have to have that eternal destination. And it can be easy for us to sort of gloss over and just sort of like know that academically, but not like really imprint that in our hearts. And so that's something I remember that actually that's the craziest story already. We all have the craziest testimony that the son of God died for us. That's crazy.
00:18:07
Speaker
So that's what I would say to folks. Don't be discouraged if you don't have this crazy story here on earth. Be grateful. But also, it's great to know like you know. I was encouraged as a kid growing up, reading the stories about like the hiding place with Corrie ten Boom or the cross and the switchblade or Brother Andrew and smuggling Bibles across the border.
00:18:26
Speaker
These stories were ones that shaped and formed my faith. And our hope and desire is that these other stories that we're discovering today, modern day tales, that these would shape and inform a new generation of Christians even now.
Stories as a Tool for Sharing the Gospel
00:18:39
Speaker
That's wonderful. ah What we say to people who say maybe they're struggling to share the gospel and they feel that one of the things they're lacking in their communication is narrative? You know, that sometimes, certainly in the West, we've been taught to unpack proposition, proposition upon logical proposition, and it's brilliant theology, it's systematic theology, but it doesn't always engage the heart.
00:18:58
Speaker
And I know some preachers are struggling with this, and certainly we struggle with this in our personal evangelism. What would you say to people who want to communicate better and and how we can start to use the sorts of stories that you're creat ah curating to communicate the truth about Jesus a bit more like he did.
00:19:15
Speaker
bit less like we want to do sometimes. absent Absolutely. a couple things I'd say to that. First off, you know, in America, and I don't know how it is in the UK, but in America, when someone tells you like, hey, this is my political opinion, or this is what I believe, ah whatever, well, we might get into an argument or a fight or, you know, a sharp disagreement, right? Because ah people are very, at at least in America, we're very opinionated about what we believe politically. That's one of the reasons I had to leave the political arena.
00:19:43
Speaker
But when someone tells you a very difficult story about something that they personally experience, it doesn't matter who your audience is, what their political persuasion, what their religious um affiliation is, they're going to be very sympathetic. That's the American experience. People will be very sympathetic and they will listen very politely.
00:20:01
Speaker
And it will kind of shape and change hearts. They'll think about They'll ponder that. Like, wow i hadn't you know thought about that particular angle of things before. And so stories can be very powerful that way, just because people will actually have an ah more open mind to just listening and let it soak in.
00:20:17
Speaker
It may not cause them to become a Christian right then. I would not expect that really, but it may be the seed that God then uses and waters later on. We've heard some great stories. In fact, we we just had this encounter not too long ago.
00:20:31
Speaker
a different set of testimony books was published by my publisher, 10 of those. and Someone somehow encountered one of these books at a thrift store. um so It was a book of testimonies that was just laying in a thrift store. Someone else had received it, thrown it away, whatever. ands It's at the thrift store.
00:20:48
Speaker
And somebody else walked into the store as a non-Christian, found the book, thought the stories were interesting, read it, and later did become a Christian. And later on, then they wrote an email to the publisher and just said, hey, i just want you to know I found this random book.
00:21:03
Speaker
It would have been thrown away by somebody else. It was in the thrift store. And I read this thing. And that is why I now follow Jesus Christ today. So I would just say, I believe stories can affect people, whether you hear them or you read them, and they can they can have an eternal impact.
00:21:18
Speaker
That's great. And so the Compelled book is published when? Next month? When when does it actually hit
Compelled Book Launch Details
00:21:23
Speaker
the shops? Yes. Yes. Hit shops on July 7th. It'll be in America, the UK, online, obviously Canada as well.
00:21:31
Speaker
um It's just seven of our favorite stories. It's endorsed by Andy Bannister and by Lee Strobel and by Marvin Alasky are just a few that endorsed it. um Let me just i'll throw this plug out right there. So I don't make any money on the book sales. I don't make any money at all. There's no royalty coming back to me. I wasn't paid to write the book either.
00:21:50
Speaker
um This was truly a labor of love. My wife and I just wanted to find a way to take some of these stories from the podcast and write it into a literature format and and really make it sort of an an evangelistic tool.
00:22:02
Speaker
And so I believe right now you'd have to kind of check your your country, but at least on the 10 of those dot com websites, you can buy a hundred copies for, I think, one pound. is that called a quid?
00:22:15
Speaker
You can buy a hundred copies for a quid each in the UK. In America, it's a little bit more. it's like 250 each. um And so, but yeah, you can buy a whole case of a hundred of those. So we're encouraging churches and pastors to consider doing that and using them as an evangelist resource for their church.
00:22:31
Speaker
If you just want to buy one copy to read for yourself, um if you use the promo code compelled, you can get two copies for the price of one. We'll put a link to that in the show notes so that people can click through from the show to our friends at 10 of those.
00:22:45
Speaker
And the podcast, where can people go online to hear all the stories and the immersive podcast that you've so wonderfully described?
Final Thoughts on Storytelling
00:22:52
Speaker
Yes, there's 100 episodes they can choose from right now where if you just search for Compelled on your podcast app that you're listening to right now, or you can check out compelledpodcast.com.
00:23:02
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Paul. It's wonderful to have you with us. I thought perhaps a nice way to finish is actually the point you make at the end of your book. And i fact found it very striking. you You say that actually, if you're focused on working hard to sort of write your own story, your advice was this, it was to cease striving and hear God's declaration. And then you quote Isaiah 55, 9, which is, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
00:23:30
Speaker
And I thought it was a really nice finish that you sort of, you remind us that actually our stories in one sense aren't our own stories. They're actually part of God's sort of bigger story of redemption for all of us. So I thought it was a very nice way that you finished where you encourage people to lift their eyes, to God, trust in him, and and also find that story that he is creating for us, which is you say, it's far better than anything we could ever dare hope for. So thank you so much again for being with us.
00:23:58
Speaker
um And thank you all for listening. ah Do tune in again for another inspiring guest in a couple of weeks on the Pet Talk podcast from Solas. And it's bye from me. And thank you so much for listening.