Crosswalk Talk: Celebrity Christian Interviews

Beth Caulfield had a full scholarship to seminary, a clear sense of where her life was going, and kids who were nearly grown. Then she found out she was pregnant at 45. What followed was not just shock, it was pressure from people inside the church and church leadership to terminate the pregnancy, shame about having those feelings at all, and a deep sense of isolation in a situation she could not talk about openly. Her...

Matt Sieger spent years researching the 1978 San Francisco Giants, a team that nobody remembers winning anything but everybody in the city that year remembers. They increased their attendance by one million fans in a single season. They had nine to ten born-again Christians on a 25-man roster. They started thanking God in post-game interviews. And then the Dodgers overtook them in mid-August, the wins stopped, and the ...

Chris Darlington has been tased on the job. He has also sat alone in a room with a guitar, written a song, and felt something that made him cry for 30 minutes straight, and he says the Holy Spirit that day had the taser beat. That song was Let Them In, and it changed the direction of his artistry. He is a deputy school resource officer in Virginia, Patsy Cline's hometown, and he is trying to become the first active-dut...

Josh Baldwin started his second album with no label, no money, and a Kickstarter campaign that barely cleared the goal. He thought Made for More was too much for a Sunday morning. He thought churches would pass on it. He was in the car one morning dropping his kids off at school when he heard them singing the demo — I know who I am because I know who you are — and understood for the first time what that son...

Matt Neff, CEO of Sight and Sound Theaters, was watching basketball with his boys the night the NBA suspended its season. He knew immediately what was coming. The next day, Pennsylvania closed large venues. Sight and Sound, which had its biggest pre-booking year on record and two brand new productions ready to open, went dark. At the end of that year they had their largest financial loss in history, and had reached thr...

Alister McGrath has been talking to people about faith for twenty years. For most of that time, the questions he got were adversarial — how can an intelligent person be a Christian, the kind of challenges popularized by Richard Dawkins and the new atheists. The questions have shifted. Now people are asking how Christianity changes lives, how it gives stability and meaning, why something that has lasted 2,000 year...

Jen Lilley did not audition for the role of Gloria Stewart in Jimmy. She did not even know the film was being made. She was in a two-year season of pruning so severe she describes going from a full tree to dry wood, and she was in her prayer closet asking God what was happening when a producer called her co-host Billy Hallowell asking if he knew any actresses who felt fancy but were also completely a real mom. Billy ga...

Michael W. Smith was just planning to show up on the red carpet to support his son Tyler, who scored Daniel in the Fiery Furnace. Then he heard the music coming from upstairs in his studio — an epic battle scene — and ran up the stairs to find out what it was. That was eight months ago. He is now executive producer of the film.

Standing firm, the Forrest Frank phenomenon, and a move of God spre...

Bob Beltz was part of a small Wilberforce fan club long before anyone made a movie about him. As associate producer of Amazing Grace, he helped bring to the screen the story of William Wilberforce — the British parliamentarian who put a bill on the floor of Parliament every single year from 1787, watched it fail every single year, nearly had a nervous breakdown at the 10-year mark, and finally saw it pass in 1807...

Nazareth grew up in Kuwait as a Coptic Christian, moved to America with dreams of becoming rich and famous, and was on track to get there. NBC had a sitcom in development for him. His manager told him he was going to be the biggest star in the country. Then he went to church with a friend, walked forward, gave his life to Christ, and called his manager Monday morning to quit. After 250 F-words from his manager, he was ...

Natalie Layne grew up with worship leader parents, was playing keys in church by age 12, and gave her life to Jesus at 13. She never had the dramatic testimony — no alley moment, no rock bottom, no radical rescue story. For a long time she thought that made her story less powerful. Her new EP Still Running to You, releasing September 9, is her answer to that lie.

Steadfast faith, the gift of being ke...

John Cooper, lead singer of Skillet, wrote Scream during one of the hardest seasons of his life — betrayal, slander, and the kind of disorientation that comes when the rug is pulled out from under everything you trusted. The song is raw, reaching, and ends with a cry to God: come pull me out from under the noise and thunder. The new EP is called After the Storm, and he says the title is aptly chosen because he is...

Mena Massoud grew up doing church plays and Stations of the Cross as a Coptic Christian, the son of Egyptian parents who moved to Canada when he was three and a half. He went to the University of Toronto for neuroscience, auditioned for theater school on a leap of faith, got one of the thirty spots, and eventually landed Aladdin after a six-month silence from Disney followed by a call to fly to London and screen test w...

Kristin Jordan was trying to get her three-year-old son to sleep when he started talking about the monster under his bed. Instead of dismissing the fear, the Holy Spirit gave her a thought — what if the monster is more afraid of you than you are of him? That became the seed of Shilo and the Not So Scary Girl Above His Bed, a children's book about a lovable character who is afraid but takes one brave step anyway, ...

Sujo John arrived in America from India in February 2001 with $60 in his wallet and two bags full of dreams. By September he was on the 81st floor of the North Tower, his pregnant wife was on the 71st floor of the South Tower, and the morning of September 11 he sent an email to a friend at 7:32AM saying something is happening to me — I've been chasing stuff in America and I need to chase after God. Sixteen minute...

Patrick Hill was a fullback at the University of Miami, had stints with the Titans, Broncos, and Texans, and when football doors stopped opening he asked God to lead him somewhere else. That somewhere else turned out to be a nursing program at UCLA, and eventually a career as an inpatient psychiatric nurse and orthopedic nurse practitioner. The transition made more sense than people might expect — a fullback's wh...

Darlene Zschech was singing commercial jingles to pay the bills, her husband's business was struggling, they had two small children, and the dream of full-time ministry felt impossibly far away. She sat down at her piano, opened her Bible, and prayed. Twenty minutes later she had Shout to the Lord, and she was so unsure of it that when she finally played it for her worship pastor, she made him turn around and face the ...

DOE, Grammy-winning singer and founding member of Forever Jones, has been leading worship her whole life. But her third solo album Shiloh, releasing August 28, is different from anything she has made before. Her mother is singing on it. Three of her siblings are in the videos. And the central conviction running through every song is one she has carried since long before she had a child of her own — someone had to...

Nick Skytland, Vice President of AI Research at GLOO, has been tracking how pastors use AI for a year through a joint research initiative with Barna. The headline finding will surprise people: 87% of pastors are using AI in some form. Only 13% say they do not use it at all. But how they are using it — and where the cautions lie — is where the conversation gets important.

Brainstorming, biblical...