GoodLion Identity
Who we are as a podcast network.
The name GoodLion comes from a classic line in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The child Susan is nervous about meeting Aslan the Lion (an analogy for Christ), and so she asks one of the woodland creatures: “Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” Mr. Beaver replies: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
Our philosophy of ministry has tried to reflect this reality. The world is full of many challenges, hardships, and evils. Our God fully throws himself into this darkness to work towards bringing the light. Jesus is willing to go to the hard places. Jesus isn’t afraid of our tough questions or doubts. Jesus is more than willing to confront the lies we believe with His truth.
He’s not safe, but He’s good!
We want to strive to create content that is willing to ask the tough questions, avoid easy answers, think deeply, and work hard to point people to our King.
Collaborative Community
A major goal of the GoodLion Podcast network is to create a sense of community. So often podcasting feels like a solo operation. We want to make a path for content creators to be able to do ministry together, finding like minded podcasts they can collaborate with, cross-promote, and create an environment of encouragement amongst creatives.
Evangelistic / Jesus Centered
We want to preach and proclaim Jesus through our content, because we truly believe Him to not only be the most compelling and amazing person in history, but the literal savior of the world and source of all truth! Jesus is our master, teacher, friend, and king.
Because of this stance, we want to make sure we are always pointing people back to Jesus. Currently in Christian culture deconstruction has become popular, and we see why, many Christians have grown up with the baggage of poor theology, doubts and questions that were never addressed, as well as personal experiences of abuse in the church and failures of leaders.
It’s important to not only address these these things, but to have the courage to help others remove some of these negative influences. That’s where deconstruction comes in, but we believe all deconstruction needs to be paired with healthy reconstruction that is centered around pointing people back to Jesus.
We want to help draw unbelievers to Christ, and help Christians who’ve lost their way find the path back to the Cross and the Way of Jesus.
Theologically Generous
The core team that runs GoodLion comes from the Calvary Global Network. CGN may have it’s own theological baseline (click to read more about our theology), but the team at both CGN and GoodLion desire to be theologically generous and work together with those who may have differences with us. We want to foster a community of openness, where the goal isn’t to prove any theological view on 2ndary issues as absolute, but to be a space where people can hear multiple perspectives that show honor to one another.
We believe the church is bigger than any one particular evangelical movement, denomination or church. Valuing God’s work and wisdom through the worldwide body of Christ, CGN seeks to partner with churches and leaders from diverse theological and ministry convictions.
We are committed to create an environment that recognizes there are many different theological perspectives represented under the banner of orthodoxy, and foster an atmosphere of respect and teamwork for the Kingdom despite differences.
GoodLion founder Aaron Salvato explains it this way: “A prime example: most of our leadership team would not identify themselves as “Calvinist.” I’m more of what prof Gerry Breshears would call a “Calminain” myself. However, we have a few podcasters on our network who would identify as Calvinists. How we serve together is with grace and charity. If I am speaking about Calvinism on my show, even something I disagree with about it, I’m going to do so with grace. I’m not going to paint with a broad brush or speak about Calvinists negatively. The podcasters on the other side of the issue show me the same grace. We support one another and minister together in friendship. I’m hoping to foster more podcast episodes where people with different theological leanings come together to politely and lovingly talk through the differences and find common ground. I think the church needs more of that.”
A Great example of this on our network is Phil Metzger’s show Crossing Cultures.
Theologically Conservative / Historic Orthodox
Essentially what we mean by this is
- We believe Scripture to be true in all it affirms.
For deeper analysis of this view, see here for a good example. - We believe that God and the Biblical authors had specific intentions for what they wrote and it’s important to do our best to learn and honor that intention.
- We believe context, church history, and the metanarrative of Scripture to be extremely important when it comes to forming theological views.
- Exegesis > Eisegesis
- We believe all of Scripture is one story pointing to Jesus, and that all Scripture is important to understanding and living out our faith.
- We believe that Jesus is the Word of God and the only way to salvation.
- We believe that Jesus’ Kingdom is already but not yet, and that followers of Christ are called to live out the Kingdom in the present while we wait for Jesus to finally redeem and restore things in the future.
- We want to avoid promoting the views of any podcast guests that differ from the core beliefs of Christianity. We are totally open to interviewing those kinds of guests, but we want to try our best to advocate for what we believe to be true during the discussion so both sides are represented.
We Focus On The Lamb,
Rather Than Elephants or Donkeys
Our goal is not to point people to any earthly political party as the solution to the world’s problems, but to point them to Jesus. Political partisanship on both sides is sadly commonplace in the church, and it’s badly damaging the witness of Jesus to the unsaved, as well as stumbling many young Christians to question their faith because of the failure of political leaders.
We believe a lot of modern evangelicalism has been super-charged with earthly partisan politics, which creates an environment that trains Christians to become self righteous, judging anyone harshly who’s not in the “right party” and also becoming blind to hypocrisy and evils on the side they’ve chosen.
This isn’t the way of Jesus. Yes Jesus has political views, but they aren’t left or right, they are above.
We want to create content that doesn’t preach to the left or right choir, but content that courageously critiques all sides of earthly politics equally and without bias. We are not out to make political conservatives or liberals, but Christ followers. We echo the statement of John Mark Comer: “If I’m truly following Jesus, I’m probably going to tick off people on both the right and the left.”
We believe Jesus to be our true leader and King, and no matter what country we live in now, we as followers of Christ are first and foremost citizens of Heaven. Our position is we are sent as missionaries to the countries we currently live in, and we should work to spread the Gospel and do as best we can to bless the country we are in. But ultimately, our allegiance is to Christ alone, not a president, king, flag, or nation.
Knowing this we work hard to help folks of all different kinds of political backgrounds and persuasions to submit to the authority of King Jesus, and invite them to allow the Holy Spirit to shape how they approach their own personal political thoughts and actions in our current world.
We place a high value on Truth + Love.
Social media has built a model that drives traffic through outrage and anger. We believe that this method can be effective, but it’s not the Way of Jesus!
We don’t want to create any content that is rude, condescending, or “trolling” to those who disagree with us. Instead we want to work hard to impart truth while loving those we believe are in the bondage of lies. We want to be generous, charitable, and willing to be “quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.”
We encourage you to not make content just for people who agree with you. Make content that would draw in those who disagree to consider what you might have to say.
What about hot-button issues like abortion and LGBTQ+?
Sadly, in our polarizing times, these two issues get a lot of attention, with many Christians putting an over-emphasis on them as the most important issues. Nevertheless, we feel like it's important to identify where we land so there's no confusion.
Abortion
We believe the ending of an innocent unborn life is deeply morally wrong, in the same way ending anyone's life for being inconvenient to us would be wrong. We also acknowledge that the fact that so many in our culture disagree with that principle is tragic. We believe Christians need to come together to seek wholistic solutions to make a difference in this area, our deepest desire is to see the hearts and minds of people changed. We appreciate greatly ministries that focus on helping women in crisis come to new understanding about the value of unborn life.
We greatly appreciate the work of our friend Ryan Lynn, founder of the Speak Life Collective, who has great material on this that balances compassion and conviction.
LGBTQ+ Issues
We hold to the historic Christian sexual ethic that any sexual activity outside of a one man, one woman marriage would be considered sin and outside of God's design and heart for humans. That being said, we also acknowledge how this position has often been held by the Church in a posture of truth, but not love, which has caused great damage. We affirm that to practice any form of sexual immorality (gay or straight) is sin. We also acknowledge that someone who experiences sexual temptation in any form is not sinning. A distinction should be made. There are many Christians who identify differently who are committed to a life of self-control and obedience to Christ concerning their sexuality. We have deep compassion for the struggles of this community, and we know it's God's kindness that leads to repentance for all people. When it comes to this issue, we want to bend over backwards to present truth in love.
Great resources on this topic that help shape the content on this network concerning this issue are Preston Sprinkle and the Center for Faith, Sexuality, & Gender as well as the works of Christopher Yuan.
