Ragamuffin Barbell

How do we teach a person to overhead squat?  How do we teach a person to pray?  The two processes can often look very similar.  In this episode, Koach Kris and Pastor Tim sit down with Logan White, youth minister extraordinaire to talk about discipleship – how we come alongside another person to help them grow in their faith, or in their fitness.    

Where do we develop the fortitude to get us through life’s unexpected difficulties?  In today’s episode, CrossFit Games competitor Kelli Holmes joins Kris and Tim to talk about how her faith and the lessons forged in the gym helped her through a failed drug test, how she eventually proved her innocence, and weathering the inner storm such challenges bring.

A newbie wanders into your CrossFit gym, watches for a while, decides they want the life they see, and signs up.  Are they now a CrossFitter?  Yes.  Are they any fitter?  Not yet.  But as they move forward, over time they will be.  Their outer reality will match the identity that is now theirs.  It happens the same way in the spiritual life.  Today Kris and Tim approach the contours of growth – what it is, how it happens, and the process of becoming who we now are.

Dave Hippensteel is one of CrossFit’s most accomplished athletes, having competed seven times as a master in the CrossFit Games, and winning three (count them!) gold medals.  As both a competitive athlete and a medical professional, Dave has a deep appreciation for the human body.  In today’s episode, he joins Tim and Kris to talk about his journey in faith and athletics, and how God designed our bodies to respond to exercise.

Matt Lodin coaches the coaches.  As one of the senior-most trainers (CFL4) in the CrossFit organization, he spends his weekends training Level 1 and Level 2 CrossFit instructors, and his weekdays running the on-site box at CrossFit’s San Diego headquarters.  At this point he has done just about everything in CrossFit that one can do, and seen about all there is to see.  Through all this, where has he most seen God show up?  In the community aspect of fitness.  Hear his insights as Matt sits down with Pastor Tim and Koach Kris to talk about faith and fitness.

Is there a point at which good care of our bodies crosses over and becomes a bad thing?  Ragamuffin Barbell says “yes.”  In this episode, Tim Morey and Kris Germain speak of their own understanding and experience of the idolatry that can pop up around body image, athletic performance, and being enslaved to our workouts.

It is one of those counterintuitive truths in training: rest is essential to growth.  In other words, if you work out too much and don’t take time to recover, your body will actually get weaker, not stronger.  The same is true of the other dimensions of our lives – without adequate time given to rest and recovery, the quality of our spiritual lives are diminished.  On this episode, Kris and Tim talk about recovery both" in and out of the gym.

Dave Pabalate wears a couple of different hats.  He is the owner of CrossFit Loomis, and the Worship Pastor at Rock Harbor Covenant Church.  Turns out those two worlds overlap a lot – in ways that are bringing both spiritual and physical health to Sacramento.  In this episode Dave sits down with Kris and Tim to talk about what happens when life in the box and life in the church intersect, and how he is learning to trust God in the midst of life’s ups and downs.

Jared Cave had a heart attack at age 31.  As a campus minister with a wife and a baby daughter, his brush with death motivated him to rethink what life and ministry needed to look like.  In this episode, Jared sits down with Kris and Tim to talk about the physical, emotional, and spiritual practices that keep us moving toward long-term health and longevity.

One of the earliest heresies the church faced was Gnosticism – the belief that only spirit was important, and that what we did in the body didn’t matter.  Twenty centuries later, we still struggle to understand how our bodily life relates to our spiritual life.  In this episode, Pastor Tim Morey and Koach Kris Germain talk about how physical exercise helps us understand what it is to worship with our bodies as well as our spirits.

Goals.  We all make them, especially as a new year rolls around.  On today’s episode, Kris and Tim talk about do’s and don’t’s they’ve learned in goal setting, and about their own physical, spiritual, family, and vocational goals as they head into 2019.

Testing 1, 2, testing . . .

How can what we are experiencing in the gym translate into a richer life with God?  This week Kris and Tim talk through the second of their three lenses for looking at the spiritual side of fitness: physical exercise as a spiritual discipline (aka, a means by which we grow in our relationship with God).  Along the way they talk about their hits and misses on 2018’s annual goals, eating dinner while squatting, anagrams, and the Sasquatch.

How is fitness spiritual? In this episode Pastor Tim Morey and Koach Kris Germain approach this question through the lens of stewardship. Everything we ever do in this life, we do through the use of our bodies. Determining to intentionally care for the gift of our physical well being can be one way we “honor God with our bodies.”

This week Koach Kris and Pastor Tim sit down with Jeremy Brandt – actor, airline pilot, and all-around tall handsome dude.  The topic: how, in the midst of all the busy, do we make sure we’re doing what’s most important?  How do we use time in a way that honors God?  This too is spiritual.

Can helping people find greater physical health be part of our service to God?  And can it open the door for spiritual health as well?  Today Tim and Kris discuss the ways that our work in the gym can be a means of bringing God’s work of grace into people’s lives.

What if you decided to start a CrossFit box, and accidentally discovered it was a ministry too?  This week Tim and Kris sit down with Betsy Chou and Britt Faris, two women who are making ordinary moms into Wonder Women.

An often underrated component to the secret sauce we find both in the CrossFit box and in the spiritual life is encouragement.  A word of sincere, honest, and well-aimed encouragement can give a person strength to keep going when they think their strength is gone.  In today’s conversation, Koach Kris Germain and Pastor Tim Morey reflect on what it looks like to reach for the sauce in the gym and in life.

Leadership can happen from a safe distance, or it can happen in ways that are personal and dirt-under-the-fingernails close.  In this episode Koach Kris Germain and Dr. Tim Morey reflect on the ways their leadership has been informed by the Incarnation, and the ways they are learning the importance of generosity, hospitality, and proximity as leadership practices.

So there’s this guy named Eric Chang.  He’s obsessed with making the people around him better.  He does this as he coaches at CrossFit Reason, and he utilizes his box’s resources to make a difference in as many lives as possible.  In today’s episode, Eric sits down with Tim and Kris and shares his story, which leads to some good conversation around what it means to live into the purposes God has for us.