The Soil and Roots Story
Introduction: A Different Kind of Episode
Well, hello there. Welcome to the Soil & Roots Podcast, where we journey together into deep discipleship. I’m Brian Fisher, and this is Episode 144.
We are knee-deep in Season Seven of the Soil & Roots podcast. This season is called Deep Calls to Deep, and we’re exploring, rather gently and slowly, how we become deep disciples. How do we become people who increasingly think, relate, act, and love like Jesus over time?
I hope you’re enjoying the season so far. Typically, in the middle of a season, we take a bit of a break every now and then and give you a few bonus episodes. Today is one of those times.
This is a different type of episode. I’m going off script — literally. This is one of the few occasions, maybe the only occasion, where we’re not working from a detailed framework. I have some notes, but what I really want to do today is share where Soil & Roots is, a little bit of our story, and where we’re going.
Most Soil & Roots episodes are evergreen. I try to write and provide material, along with Tim and Kyle, that you can listen to ten years from now, maybe even fifty years from now, and still find enriching. But I felt it was time, since so many of you have stayed with us, to tell more of the story of how we got here, how Soil & Roots came to be, what we’re doing this summer, and why this is such a pivotal time for the organization.
So this is a little like Friday morning story time in elementary school. I’m not working from a script. I usually write episodes carefully so I stay on target and, hopefully, still sound conversational. But today I’m going to share from the heart in a more raw way.
I’m going to break this down into four sections.
First, I’ll share some of the five-year personal history for Jessica and me, and how that relates to the Soil & Roots story.
Second, I’ll talk about the Soil & Roots story over the last five years — some of the underpinnings, and what we’ve discovered about Jesus, the world, and discipleship.
Third, I’ll share specifically what we’re doing this summer. This is a transitional time for us.
And fourth, I’ll talk about what Soil & Roots may look like as we head into the fall. I’m recording this in June of 2026, and I’m excited to share it with you.
The point underneath all of this is simple: What has God been doing through Soil & Roots, in Soil & Roots, and in me personally over these last five years? And how might that relate to you and your own spiritual journey?
So today, instead of giving you a teaching episode — though I don’t really like calling them that — I want to share some stories, as if you and I were sitting down over coffee somewhere and enjoying our time together.
Section One: How This All Began
I want to take you back to the beginning. I’m going to read a small portion from the introduction to my book, Soil & Roots, because it provides some of the context for how all of this began.
Several years ago, my wife Jessica and I were forced out of a dynamic Christian nonprofit ministry that I had co-founded. This was in 2020. No accusations or explanations were offered. We were stunned, confused, and dismayed.
The organization continued successfully doing the work for which it was intended. It just continued on without us.
It’s common in these kinds of awkward situations for relationships to become strained and disappear altogether. Most of our friendships, some of which were more than twenty years old, evaporated overnight. People we had known and loved just vanished.
It was like we had died.
We lost our careers, we lost our calling, and we lost our community. In the blink of an eye, I had gone from a successful leader, a seasoned executive, a sought-after speaker, and a thought leader to a disillusioned, devastated, exhausted nobody.
Inevitably, depression came — what Saint John of the Cross referred to as the dark night of the soul. I basically condemned myself to a prison of isolation.
What sort of Christian leader is removed from the organization he started? How could I have been so terribly disillusioned and self-deceived?
I withdrew into an inner sanctum of doubt and confusion, relentless self-introspection, and a growing sense of disenchantment with the Christian institutions, systems, communities, friendships, and beliefs that I had held so dear.
They had failed. Or I had failed them. I wasn’t too sure.
There were nights when I couldn’t sleep and days when that was all I could do. I lost weight. Jessica became concerned about my health and safety.
We kept going to church, but our church was growing so fast that few people really knew anyone there. It seemed the point of church was to go to a Sunday event, sing a few songs, hear an entertaining and slightly provocative sermon, give some money, and get out as fast as you came so the next service could start.
That church seemed far more concerned about bottoms in seats than anyone’s personal journey or struggle.
In fact, the traditional Christian rituals and relationships that I had relied on for so long now seemed empty and shallow — maybe even fake.
It wasn’t just that our world had been thrown into chaos. It was that my response to that chaos did not reflect the kind of character the Bible paints as a mature follower of Jesus.
I thought I had been walking with Jesus since I was six years old. Where were the abiding peace and contentment that are so often depicted as character traits of a long-term, mature follower of Christ?
Surely there was more to the Christian experience than a weekly service, a routine Bible study, and volunteerism. I had done all those things. I had done them my entire life. Where had that gotten us?
I was missing something on my journey with Jesus — something deeper, something more sustaining than the practices and rituals that had held me up so far.
I was still sure I was a Christian. I just wasn’t sure if I was a disciple — someone who was supposed to be intimately resting in Jesus’ supposedly easy yoke.
Not finding any other path out of this ever-increasing darkness and depression, I finally agreed to speak with a counselor. Frankly, I wasn’t thrilled about it. Though I respected the counseling profession, I thought it was for people who rarely opened their Bibles, or came from abusive homes, or had serious marriage problems. None of those described me.
But around the same time, I came across a book called Renovation of the Heart by philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard. I had never heard of him. But I figured if anyone’s heart needed renovating, it seemed to be mine.
So began a very slow, painful, sometimes halting, yet comprehensive journey of exploration and, to some degree, healing. It was a journey with both a counselor and with what had always been a very close friend of mine: books.
I started reading Willard and then ventured into dozens of other texts, ranging from ancient church history, anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, spiritual disciplines, trauma recovery, the history of Western thought, theology, and cultural studies.
And throughout it all, several questions drove me.
What was the “more” I was missing in my life with Jesus?
And frankly, I wanted to know what happened to our community.
Why were we deeply loved and highly valued when we were useful, popular, and powerful, but rejected and abandoned as soon as our usefulness dried up?
If being in Christian community implies a steadfast commitment to each other through times of trial, despite faults or weaknesses, why had our community failed? Why had we failed?
And frankly, I wanted to know if I was the only one going through this kind of journey.
Was there anyone else out there struggling with betrayal, abandonment, deep questions, fresh doubts, and the sense that there was far more to the Christian life than a prayer of salvation, Bible studies, worship services, and mission trips?
Was anyone else questioning whether the way Christianity is currently manifested in many institutions actually resembles what the first Christians modeled and experienced?
Was anyone else curious about whether our ideas regarding discipleship really match what Jesus meant when He used the term?
As a way of working through these kinds of questions, I started a small podcast called Soil & Roots. It was, and continues to be, a place to explore our stories, the story of Jesus, the modern-day church, and the state of our culture.
As you and I began delving into deep and provocative themes and ideas related to discipleship, a few people started raising their hands, asking their own questions, and sharing their reflections. Eventually, I started the ministry Soil & Roots.
The Year That Was Supposed to Be Simple
I wrote the book, I think, beginning in 2021 and finishing it in 2022. And you would like to be able to say that all’s well that ends well — that five years later life has miraculously turned around, and there’s been reformation and renewal all over the place.
Well, here’s what happened.
When I finished the book in 2022, I was continuing to do other work. After we were forced out of that nonprofit in 2020, I ended up consulting for a few years. That was fine. I never really set out to be a consultant, but it paid the bills, and it was good work. I simply enjoy working with people long-term rather than in short-term engagements.
But in 2023, Jessica and I really felt as if the Lord was calling us to take a leap of faith.
We sensed that Soil & Roots, and this quest to help resolve the Great Omission — to understand why so much of modern Christianity is, frankly, shallow, and why we are not seeing deep disciples emerge in different places — was something the Lord wanted us to focus on.
We believed He was inviting us to take a year off and do nothing but Soil & Roots. More me than Jess, but still something we were doing together.
I would step away from consulting and spend a year living off retirement while working on Soil & Roots.
We both felt pretty strongly about it. So in September of 2023, I closed my consulting practice, and we charged ahead.
We basically went off income, which was very difficult. I have had a job since I was twelve. I enjoy making money and earning a living. So this was a big deal.
And truthfully, we sort of assumed that somewhere during that year, God would show up and validate the leap.
The organization I was removed from in 2020 started in a similar way. It began as a part-time volunteer effort, and a few years in, God provided several million dollars for the nonprofit to become a national organization. It took off and grew. It was a great story of God’s faithfulness and the growth of a really meaningful ministry.
So when Soil & Roots became full-time volunteerism for me, I assumed this would become another romantic story of God showing up in a big way and providing the funds we needed for it eventually to become full-time work.
And He did bring people. Tim and Kyle both have a deep desire to work with Soil & Roots on a much more robust basis. There are also several others — probably eight or nine people today — who have raised their hands and said, “We don’t just want to be part of this. We want to come work for it.”
That was my impression going in.
That was September of 2023.
Then, in October, a month later, I got sick.
And I got really sick.
Then I Got Sick
I’ve shared a little bit about the illness before, but in October of 2023, I started having very bizarre, episodic symptoms across various parts of my body. At first, they happened once a week or so. Then twice a week.
By Christmas, I was a mess. I spent Christmas of 2023 in bed, basically incapable of doing anything. My wife and sons were opening gifts and calling family, and I was lying in bed wondering what in the world was wrong with me.
By January, I was basically homebound. I think I left the house maybe half a dozen times in the first six months of 2024.
I won’t describe all the symptoms because I don’t want to trigger any of you who might be dealing with your own situations, but I logged forty-one different symptoms of this disease in the first year.
As I’ve mentioned before, I contracted Lyme disease and two other infections: Bartonella and Babesia. Usually, these things come as a party of more than one.
The challenge with Lyme is that if you don’t diagnose it and catch it in the first couple of months, it can become chronic. And once it becomes chronic, it becomes very difficult.
Lyme disease, I think, is one of the fastest-growing diseases in the United States. People are starting to pay more attention to it, but it’s still very hard to diagnose, very hard to test for, and when it becomes chronic, extremely hard to treat.
In my case, I started going to doctors in October of 2023, but I went through six months of doctors not having a clue what it was. I went through every test you can imagine: scans, MRIs, rounds and rounds of blood work, all sorts of things, with all sorts of doctors shrugging.
I finally went to what’s known as a functional doctor, which is a different branch of medicine. She was an M.D., but she practiced functional medicine. She did very deep, involved blood work, and it finally came back that I had Lyme disease and those two co-infections.
So by mid-2024, I at least had a diagnosis. But the doctor was very clear: this was not something where you take antibiotics and get over it in six weeks, or two weeks, or a week.
The recovery period for chronic Lyme is measured in years.
That was not how I thought the story was supposed to be written.
I had responded to God’s call, and instead of blessing and growth, I became very seriously ill, with a prognosis suggesting years of recovery just to get back to some level of functioning health.
To be blunt, 2024 is a year I strongly wish I could forget, much like 2020, and I’m sure many of you feel similarly.
The other challenge, of course, was that I was off income. I had no job, so we had no traditional health insurance. I belonged to one of those Christian health-share arrangements, which, to be honest, don’t do much.
So I had to pay one hundred percent of the treatment expenses and testing out of pocket. I’ve heard that the average person with chronic Lyme may spend around $150,000 over their lifetime trying to treat the disease. That’s how crazy it is.
We’re not at that point, but we are tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket just trying to get me back to some form of health, not to mention all the bills before that just trying to diagnose it.
So the story was not being written the way I thought it was supposed to be written.
We experienced all the devastation of 2020. We finally got ourselves back onto somewhat stable footing. Then I became ill with a very serious disease.
As you might imagine, as 2024 turned into 2025, and the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, I started asking, “God, what are You doing? What in the world is going on here? Did I not hear You? Did my wife not hear You? Is this not what You want us to do? Do You want us to stay with this Soil & Roots thing? Isn’t this supposed to grow? Where is the money?”
There is much more to it, but I won’t bore you with all the details.
It is now mid-2026, and I’m happy to report that I am about eighty-five to ninety percent better. Those forty-one symptoms are down to three or four. I still have good days and bad days. I don’t have the energy or stamina I should. I still can’t fly. There are some things I still can’t do.
But in terms of functionality, I am living much more of a quiet life.
Still, in relation to Soil & Roots, there was the question: At some point, Lord, it would be good to have some clarification that this is still where You want me.
A year of obedience and financially living on our own is one thing. But now it has turned into three years. That’s a whole different story, especially when you add the healthcare expenses on top of it.
But Jessica and I decided, sometimes obedience hurts. Sometimes obedience is uncomfortable. And we still feel as if this is where God has us.
We still believe He has a desire to invite all of us into a deeper, more intimate relationship with Him, and to understand the framework in which that happens.
The April Prayer Sprint
In April, just a couple of months ago, I asked a few friends to join me in what I called a fourteen-day prayer sprint. This was right before Easter, during Lent.
Tim and Kyle, whom you obviously know, were part of that. A new friend, Dave — whom you’ll meet in the next episode — was part of it too, along with another gentleman from Fort Worth.
We met every evening for an hour for fourteen days to pray specifically for Soil & Roots and for this quest into spiritual formation and deep discipleship.
We prayed for five things.
First, that God would be kind enough to reveal some of His hidden thoughts and His heart for deep discipleship, and for people experiencing Jesus in more profound ways.
Second, clarity. “Lord, do You still want us to do this? You’ve given us this passion and this calling, but we’re all volunteer, and we continue to have individual challenges. Is this still where You want us?”
Third, financial provision. To convert this into a full-time effort to spread deep discipleship and opportunities through the Greenhouse model cannot be done on a volunteer basis forever. We’ve had people reach out and say, “We want to start Greenhouses. We want to start these ecosystems you’ve developed to help people become more like Jesus.” And we’ve had to say, “That’s wonderful, but we don’t yet have the support structure to help you.”
Fourth, protection from spiritual warfare and forces that would seek to thwart us.
And fifth, connectedness. Could we find other people who resonate with Dallas Willard’s conclusion that we are suffering from the Great Omission — that we are not experiencing the abundant life, the with-God life, that God desires for us?
So we prayed that God would share His hidden thoughts. We prayed for clarity, financial resources, protection and insight into spiritual forces, and connection with others.
We spent fourteen days praying through those things. It was amazing. It was a time of quiet presence before Jesus, a sense of gentleness, and a sense of community between the five of us. It was a really sweet way to move toward Easter in 2026.
When we finished, we simply sat back and said, “Well, let’s see what the Lord does.”
As I close this first section, sometimes obedience feels less like a heroic leap and more like taking the next small step when you are tired, confused, ill, and not really sure what God is doing.
I wanted to share some of my personal story so you understand the backdrop of why we’re doing the podcast, the Substack articles, and the Greenhouses.
This has been born out of five and a half years of difficulty. Jessica and I are empty nesters now. We were supposed to be traveling and going out to eat and enjoying life. I’m supposed to be in my peak earning years.
But that is not the story God has written.
Instead, it has been a real trying time. There have been many blessings, and frankly, I’m at the point now where most days I am grateful for the events of 2020 and even for the illness. But that is a process that takes a long time to reach.
And I’m glad to be where we are.
Thanks for listening to that part.
Section Two: The Soil & Roots Story
Welcome back.
I want to share some of the five-year history of Soil & Roots so you have context for what is happening this summer and what we hope may happen as we head into the fall related to deep discipleship.
I hope this relates to you and your journey as well.
I mentioned earlier that Dallas Willard was someone I had never heard of. If you’ve listened to the podcast for any length of time, you know his writings have been very influential in my life over the last five years.
I think Willard is actually becoming more known and influential since his death in 2013. That’s a sign of a remarkable person — when they may have more impact after death than they did during life.
But I had been following Jesus since I was six. I had been in Protestant churches my whole life. And I had never heard of him.
I don’t even remember exactly how I came across Renovation of the Heart. This was probably in 2020 or 2021. But somewhere I saw it and read it.
There was one particular passage that struck me. It may not strike you this way, but for me, it was mind-blowing. I was a mess mentally and spiritually when I read this, and I found it profound.
On page 96, Willard writes about ideas. He says that ideas are very general models of our assumptions about reality. They are patterns of interpretation, historically developed and socially shared. They are sometimes involved with beliefs, but they are much more than beliefs, and they do not depend on belief.
That stopped me.
He says ideas are ways of thinking about and interpreting things. They are so pervasive and essential to how we think and how we approach life that we often do not even know they are there, or understand when and how they are at work.
Our idea systems are cultural artifacts. They grow up with us from earliest childhood and out of the teachings, expectations, and observable behaviors of family and community.
Then he gives examples of ideas: freedom, education, happiness, the American dream, science, progress, death, home, feminine and masculine, religion, Christianity, Islam, church, democracy, fairness, justice, family, evolution, God, and so on.
Then he says that, for all their importance to human life, ideas are never capable of final definition or precise specification, though people never stop trying to define them in their vain efforts to control them.
Ideas are broadly inclusive, historically developing ways of interpreting things and events. For all their power, they often do not emerge into the consciousness of the individual.
This is partly because we commonly identify our own governing ideas with reality itself.
In other words, the ideas that govern us, we assume are reality, even if they are not.
Willard says that, ironically, it is often people who think of themselves as practical or as people of action who are most in the grip of ideas — so far in that grip that they cannot be bothered to think. They simply do not know what moves them.
But ideas govern them and have their consequences anyway.
I was blown away.
This was the first time in my life that somebody had said, “There are forces governing you of which you are not conscious.”
I was almost offended when I read it the first time. I read that passage over and over and over again.
And I read it in the context of another of Willard’s major conclusions: that the modern church age is experiencing the Great Omission.
I’ve said this a thousand times on the podcast. We talk about making disciples, but we are not making disciples — meaning, we are not actually forming the character of people to become more like Jesus.
We may be fighting over doctrine. We may be attending church. But in terms of becoming people who naturally and organically do the things Jesus did, without even thinking about them, Willard concluded that this is largely not happening.
I began to wonder if this was tied to his concept of ideas.
If we are operating from unconscious forces — if we are being powered and governed by these mysterious things called ideas, which are formed in childhood and carried throughout life — perhaps that is part of the problem.
And if that is true, would it not make sense for a person who wants to become deep, who wants to become more like Jesus, to investigate these ideas?
Would it not make sense to try to make the unconscious conscious?
Would it not make sense to become people of depth?
Around that same time, I read Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. He is famous for this quote about deep people, and I’ve shared it before on the podcast:
“Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people or gifted people, but for deep people.”
I think Foster is right.
What the world needs most is not more government. It is not more institutionalism. It is people who are committed to becoming deep people, which is ultimately a journey of inner character formation.
And that is the central premise on which Soil & Roots rests.
We sit in the world of hidden ideas and desires. And we say that if we want to become more like Jesus, the human person must at some point take an inner journey to determine what those ideas and desires actually are, and whether they align with what Jesus is doing.
Because if we want to become more like Him, we need to become more like Him not only in our conscious ways, but also in our unconscious ways.
I know that is a lot of philosophy, but hang in there with me.
I began pairing Willard and Foster together. That is where we began asking: If deep people are what is most needed, what does that mean?
The way I’ve defined it is this: a deep person is someone who is increasingly attuned to God, others, themselves, and creation at the heart level.
A deep person is someone becoming increasingly like Jesus from the inside out.
And I think that requires exploring what the Psalms and other places in Scripture refer to as our innermost being, or our hidden parts.
What I am saying is that this is rarely done in modern Christianity. About the only places you tend to find it are in recovery groups or counseling. But in my view, this should be mainstream.
The underpinning of Soil & Roots is that every human being on the planet functions from hidden ideas and desires. If we want to become more like Jesus, we need at some point to take a journey to uncover those desires and ideas.
I understand that this is a different and sometimes controversial way of looking at discipleship, especially in an age of such intellectualism. But over the last five years, this has been validated again and again — in our own Greenhouse beta, and in conversations I’ve had with pastors and leaders all over the country.
There is a desperate need for deep people. And that must involve some kind of journey inward.
The Critical Journey and the Wall
You may recognize the phrase “journey inward” because I’ve used it before. I’m pulling it from a book called The Critical Journey, written several decades ago by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich.
It is a theory. It is not theological doctrine. But they theorize that the spiritual journey can be broken down into six stages.
Stage One is being introduced to God — evangelism, or simply waking up to the reality of God.
Stage Two is education — learning more about God, Christianity, and church.
Stage Three is service — getting plugged into a church or some sort of parachurch effort and volunteering.
Those three stages, the book suggests, are where the modern church institution tends to excel. Churches are often very good at introducing people to God, educating people about God, and plugging people into systems of service.
And that is all good. It is tremendous.
But the authors go on to point out that the later stages — stages Four, Five, and Six — are where depth is discovered.
Stage Four is called the journey inward. It always involves what they call a wall.
The wall is a time in our lives when we smack up against reality. It might be a divorce. In my case, it was massive career upheaval and the evaporation of community. It could be a health diagnosis. It could be a relational battle. It could be theological doubt.
“I’m sure this is true.”
And then, later:
“I’m not so sure that’s true.”
The wall can take many forms. But it is a time — and I’ll use this word carefully — of deconstruction, where we are forced to ask whether the things we believe are actually the things we believe.
Meaning, yes, I may believe them with my head. But does my heart believe them?
I’m not sure we become deep disciples without moving through the wall.
And most people, according to the book, when they hit the wall — because we all face the wall at some point — tend to bounce off. We go back into the earlier stages because they feel safer, or we numb ourselves so we do not have to deal with the pain and struggle that come with the wall.
If we can press through the wall and through that fourth stage, then Stage Five is the journey outward. Our hearts become less and less centered on ourselves — not in a self-deprecating way, but in a beautiful and organic way. We begin turning outward. We become more service-oriented in the way Jesus was.
Eventually, this leads to Stage Six, which is a life of love. That is really the life of Jesus.
So if we put all this together, you could position the Great Omission as a lack of opportunity for you and me to engage in stages Four, Five, and Six.
We are often in institutions that do not really know how to operate in stages Four, Five, and Six. The institutions we are part of often function primarily in stages One, Two, and Three.
So when we inevitably hit the wall, we have very few options.
What do we do with this?
If I express my theological doubts at church, am I going to get kicked out? Maybe. Maybe not.
If I confess some of the hidden ideas and desires I’m now bumping into, are people going to hate me? Are they going to judge me?
This is real. We hear from people all the time who have had these experiences.
So what is evolving with Soil & Roots is that Soil & Roots is becoming a bridge — a pathway through Stage Four and the wall.
I think God has been developing, really without me fully knowing it, the elements necessary to help someone who is facing the wall and going through some of that tumult be gently and safely guided through Stage Four into the deeper stages.
Now, the book would say the stages are not strictly linear. We bounce around. Sometimes we can be in more than one at once. So I don’t want to make this sound like a simple “do X and Y will happen” process.
But I do think that what God has called us to is providing safe, guided passage into and through Stage Four and into the deeper stages of life.
That kind of inner character formation must involve self-knowledge and a deepening knowledge of God. It needs an ecosystem that allows us to explore and wrestle with these things in such a way that we come out the other side less angry, less anxious, more forgiving, more generous, more like Jesus, and more relationally secure.
Painful Self-Probing and the Search Beneath the Surface
I’m reminded here of the A.W. Tozer quote, which has become very important to me.
Tozer said that it is of immense importance that our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements and belief statements are of little consequence.
Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is.
Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.
Now, this is not about endless self-analysis. It is not about navel-gazing.
But if you put all of this together — Willard’s Great Omission, the existence of hidden ideas and desires that drive us, Foster’s longing for deep people, and Tozer’s call to painful self-probing — we begin to see something important.
If we become deep people more like Jesus by exploring the hidden ideas and desires that shape us, then painful self-probing is a necessary part of depth.
And that is largely missing in the modern church ecosystem.
So we can now see why Soil & Roots is so essential.
How does this happen?
How do we move from the safer, institutionalized stages — and again, there are benefits to those — into the wilder, more surrendering stages of Four, Five, and Six, in a way that gently moves us to become more like Jesus?
The traditional answers tend to be sermons, private prayer time, and private devotions. Those things are good.
But I want to bring us back to a C.S. Lewis quote that has really stuck with me.
Lewis says God works on us in all sorts of ways, not only through what we think of as our religious life. He works through nature, through our own bodies, through books, and sometimes through experiences that may seem, at the time, anti-Christian.
He says that when a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realizes he does not believe in Christianity and stops going — provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to annoy his parents — the Spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before.
But here is the key point:
Above all, God works on us through each other.
Through each other.
And this is not just sitting near people in a church service on Sunday.
What Lewis is getting at, and what I agree with, is that this refining process — this painful self-probing, this moving through the wall into the deeper stages of discipleship with Jesus — is best taken with people. We need people with whom we can be raw and vulnerable, in a safe and nonjudgmental environment, as we wrestle with these things.
That was the impetus for starting the Greenhouse.
The Greenhouse
If you’re not familiar with the Greenhouse model, we’ve talked about it in previous episodes. But basically, it is a group of four to twelve people who meet weekly and come together with the intentional purpose of becoming more like Jesus.
We engage in dialogue, spiritual disciplines, and activities that are not always the traditional Western things — though they are not crazy either.
For example, we practice soul care.
How is it going with your soul? How are you really?
Don’t give me the surface answer and say, “I’m fine.” How are you really? What is going on in your heart? What is going on with Jesus?
The point is that the inward journey — Stage Four, the wall, the passage from surface Christianity into deep discipleship — is best taken with other people.
But it needs to happen in an environment that is safe, guided, gentle, and not shaped by rejection or judgmentalism.
And again, I am not winking at sinful behaviors. That is not what I’m doing.
I am simply saying that in many cases, we lack the ecosystem in which Stage Four best happens. We do not have the spiritual friends we need to help guide us through the wall.
It is difficult.
We need safe, patient people with whom we can be raw. People who can certainly challenge us and encourage us. But, as I’ve said many times, the most important thing is that they are with us.
People who are with us.
If I go back to my own story in 2020, the deepest heartbreak was not being forced out of my own organization. It was the fact that so many people I thought were friends — people I thought were journeying with me — stopped because things did not go the way they wanted.
All of a sudden, I was persona non grata.
I felt that at a very deep level.
It seemed to me that if I was going through a crisis, that should have been the time when those around me who claimed to be friends came closer.
That is actually the way Jessica and I have tried to practice friendship over the years. We have not always been successful, but that has been our desire.
Shouldn’t a crisis be the time when those who call me friend draw near and say, “We are going to be with you. We are going to sit with you. We are not going to give you advice. We are not going to tell you what to do. We are just going to sit with you”?
That presence itself can be healing.
And I think that needs to be resurrected in the modern church, especially in small groups.
That is the ethos of a Greenhouse.
A Survey Response That Captures the Need
Let me make one last point in this section about the Soil & Roots story over the last five years.
We just wrapped up a spiritual formation survey. We have about 100,000 subscribers on Substack all over the world. On any given week, when I send out an email, around 20,000 people read it, which gives us a pretty meaningful cross-section.
We sent a spiritual formation survey to that whole group and asked, “How’s it going? How is your journey with Jesus? How are you feeling about the modern church? Are you spiritually exhausted? Are you attuning to Jesus? Do you sense His delight in you? Or is it more surface-level, where you’re just doing the things you’re supposed to do?”
The responses were very helpful. I’m going to share some of the higher-level responses on Substack in the next month or so. But I wanted to read one comment because I think it typifies the person who is at Stage Four, facing the wall, and wrestling with why I feel so compelled to continue with Soil & Roots.
This person wrote:
“The church I go to on Sundays is a big church. The place I met Jesus, though, was a house church, and you can feel the Holy Spirit as soon as you walk in the door. I believe these small gatherings will be a refuge for people of all walks of life. The modern church culture makes it very difficult for people to be open and honest because people are so busy trying to look like they have it all together. I think what Christians are really missing today is transparency and realness. I know this, yet I’m caught in the same trap. We’re dying. We’re broken. We’re depressed. We’re dead inside, yet we’re smiling and singing and laughing like we don’t have a care in the world. And if we’re honest about our struggles, we’re talked about and judged. We have to change this.”
I deeply appreciate whoever sent that in. We had many other comments like it.
That is exactly the burden I feel, because I have lived it in visceral ways. My wife has lived it. Many of you have shared stories of how you’ve lived it too — this sense of deep loneliness, deep disconnection, and, when life comes in on us, not having a safe place to walk through the wall together.
That is the burden driving what we are doing.
So to sum up: Soil & Roots is based on the premise that the human person functions from hidden ideas and desires that we can go entire lifetimes without becoming conscious of or exploring.
And yet, if we want to become people of depth — which Foster said is the desperate need of our age — we must become conscious of the unconscious.
The best place to do that is in safe ecosystems where that is the point. Not forever, but for a period of time, so that we pass through Stage Four and the wall together, not alone, as we seek to become more like Jesus and more loving.
That is the work I believe Soil & Roots has been entrusted with and has been exploring for the last five years.
How do we become deep people in trusted communities from the inside out?
Section Three: What Is Happening This Summer
I warned you this was going to be long, so forgiveness requested. Put it on pause and come back if you need to.
I want to share some of what has happened since April.
I left the personal story in April of this year, 2026, when we finished our fourteen-day prayer sprint and prayed for those five things. The Lord has answered some of those prayers in really encouraging ways.
One of the primary things we have learned is that the Soil & Roots community — the beta Greenhouse we have been meeting with for the last three years — has borne real fruit. This is a group of people who have been coming together to become more like Jesus. We just finished our third year.
The podcast now has 144 episodes. It is hard to know exactly how many people listen or watch, but people do so in different parts of the world.
Then there is Substack.
Those have been our primary ways of exploring deep discipleship and how we become more like Jesus from the inside out.
And I have to say, Soil & Roots is still very small. The idea began in 2021. The podcast started in 2022. The organization started in 2023. And by all intents and purposes, we are still tiny.
We are all volunteer. No one has ever taken a paycheck. We have hired some contract labor for certain things, but I remain full-time volunteer. Kyle, Tim, and others are still volunteering.
But when people engage with us, the engagement is very deep. The questions we receive and the stories we hear are substantial.
We have seen people become really committed. When someone gets into the podcast, they often stick with it. Some of you binge-listen, which is crazy, but God bless you. Others take your time and move through pieces and parts, which is great too.
But this is not casual consumption of material. Many of you are allowing yourselves to begin exploring the depths of your own hearts and the heart of God in what I think are some unique ways.
That has been beautiful.
So we have seen good fruit. We’ve had wonderful engagement. We’ve had the beta Greenhouse. We have an audience on Substack. We have an audience on the podcast.
But I wanted to figure out why it wasn’t growing more.
Were we missing something? Was I not communicating properly? What was I doing wrong? Or, frankly, do not enough people really care?
Willard suggested that maybe many of us do not really want to become deep disciples. Maybe that yearning is not as present in people’s hearts as we might hope.
I’m probably a little more optimistic than that.
You have reported to us that you are beginning to uncover hidden ideas. You are becoming more honest and raw in your relationship with Jesus and with yourself. You are sharing amazing stories. You are growing in self-awareness.
So I asked my friend Zach Layton, who has been on the podcast, to take a look. He runs an agency in Idaho that helps Christian ministries message and communicate better.
I said, “Can you take a look at the last five years’ worth of content and exploration? Are we not resonating? What’s going on?”
He ran a bunch of tests. The reports came back from him and from another place, and they said the same thing.
The Soil & Roots messaging, content, and exploration are good. People are interested in it. It is a different way of looking at discipleship. It is nontraditional, but in a good way. It is provocative and helpful.
But the way I have titled and set things up online has made it non-discoverable.
In other words, if you look at how I was titling episodes, I was trying to be creative. I was using pop culture references or song titles, because I get bored with very straightforward titles.
The Soil & Roots material is deep and sometimes difficult. It is not a comedy show, though I do like to laugh. Maybe you would not know that by listening to the podcast.
But I made significant mistakes in how I titled Substack articles and podcast episodes. Google could not find them.
If someone searched for “Is there more to the Christian life?” or “deep discipleship” or “how is my inner life formed?” Soil & Roots might not even pop up, because I had messed up the way things should be written and some of the technical work behind the scenes.
That is frustrating, especially for me as a performance-oriented guy.
I didn’t know. But it is not as if I couldn’t have found out. I just didn’t think that far ahead.
So one of the major projects I’m working on this summer is cleaning up all the episodes, Substack articles, and the website. Those are the three major pieces.
We are making them discoverable so people can find what we’re talking about. It is a massive project. I’m trying to get through it as quickly as I can, while still being careful.
You may not care about this, but if you go back and look at Spotify and the episode titles, they have all changed. They are more searchable. I’m also cleaning up the technical material behind the scenes.
That is one primary challenge.
It is not that people are not interested. It is that they cannot find us.
Hopefully, by the end of the summer, people will be able to find us more easily, and there will be greater fruit and engagement.
The second thing is that I was looking for fresh voices to help me review the last five years and figure out what the next season of Soil & Roots should look like.
That has been terrific.
God very graciously, after our April prayer time, brought three new individuals into the Soil & Roots orbit. They have become deeply passionate. They are older than I am, wiser than I am, and they know their way around.
We are meeting weekly. You are going to meet two of them in the next episode. I’m inviting them into the Greenhouse episode for Episode 145.
We are reviewing all that we have worked on over the last five years and planning the next version — the next season — of Soil & Roots.
And it is super exciting.
There is a lot going on behind the scenes. I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but I do want to lay out what the fall may look like, how we are changing and updating the Greenhouse model, and where Soil & Roots is headed.
This summer is not a pause for us. I know summer is a pause for much of life, but we are meeting, writing, praying, studying, redoing, and reorganizing.
I think the next season of Soil & Roots is going to be very exciting.
Section Four: What Is Coming Next
We’ve covered some of my personal story and Jessica’s story, because our stories are together. We’ve talked about the key elements of Soil & Roots as an organization and the pathway into deep discipleship. And I’ve shared a little about what is happening this summer: fixing the internet-related things I mishandled, making us searchable and discoverable, reviewing the last five years, and planning for what is ahead.
For the last three years, we have been beta testing the Greenhouse.
Again, the Greenhouse is the primary mechanism we have been testing, where a person can come in and explore hidden ideas and desires in a place designed for those things to be wrestled with in the presence of Jesus, with the hope that we come out more like Jesus by the time we are done.
We have spent three years with a wonderful group of people. By mid-April, I sensed that this particular beta test season was ending. We had learned what we needed to learn. We had experienced things. We had heard testimonies from people about how the Lord had changed them and how they were becoming more aware of themselves and of God.
All the things you would hope were happening were, in fact, happening.
But it was time to assess it and figure out how this should happen going forward.
The original structure had us practicing four different rhythms. We originally met twice a week, and then eventually once a week. It was good, but it was not necessarily organized in a specific framework.
There were also questions about what a Greenhouse actually is.
My wife named it, which I love. Several years ago, when we were first building the guts of Soil & Roots, she called it a Greenhouse. It is such a Soil & Roots kind of name.
A greenhouse is a safe place where things grow. We come together to be rooted and grown in Jesus. It is a brilliant term.
But the obvious challenge is that people immediately want to categorize it.
Is this a small group? Is it a Bible study? Is it Sunday school?
Actually, it is not any of those things.
It is hard to introduce a new term into modern life and make it stick. Some have asked whether it is a home church. I did not know for a while whether God might be moving us toward starting a home church network.
Where we have landed, hot off the press, is that the next version of the Greenhouse will be a two-year small community walking together through a specific guided framework into deep discipleship.
It is not a church. It is not a small group. It is not a Bible study.
It is a Greenhouse.
It is a place where we come together with specific rhythms and an atmosphere where these things can be explored.
Basically, it is a two-year structured pathway through Stage Four — through the inward journey.
Therefore, it is not for everybody, obviously, because people are at different stages of development.
But for those who are feeling an inner sense of deconstruction, unrest, doubt, or who are experiencing the wall physically, vocationally, or relationally, that is what it is designed for.
We are time-boxing it to two years for a couple of reasons.
First, it feels like the right amount of time for trust to be built and for good, solid, healthy, intimate relationships to form.
Second, it is probably enough time to look at Jesus in that way and also explore our own stories and inward journeys.
Again, you do not want to get stuck in Stage Four.
This is not competing with the church. Churches can do Greenhouses. Parachurch ministries can do Greenhouses. If someone is not in a church, they can form a Greenhouse.
At the end of that two-year period, if a Greenhouse wants to stay together and continue as a community, wonderful. We will support that and figure out what that looks like.
If other Greenhouses want to spawn out of that, wonderful.
The Greenhouse is helped or guided by a facilitator. That is a key role. This is the person who facilitates the discussions and the pathway, makes sure everyone is being heard, asks curious questions, and practices a Socratic method rather than a scholastic method.
In other words, more questions and listening, less blurting out information.
Perhaps some people who go through the two-year Greenhouse experience will feel called to become facilitators. So one Greenhouse may spawn other Greenhouses.
Or, if a Greenhouse is done and people want to move on to other things, then they are done. The two-year experience is over.
We are holding that open-handedly.
Instead of saying this is a home church — because it is not — we are saying it is a two-year guided journey into Stage Four, into deep discipleship, with four to twelve people guided by a facilitator.
I love it.
It is not where I thought this was going when Soil & Roots first started testing the Greenhouse, but I think it is right.
What has been so encouraging over the last few months is that I had to step back and look at the last five years of content and realize that this is actually what God was developing.
It did not come out in order. If you listen through the entire podcast, you are hearing me wrestle with and explore these things in the order I encountered them. Listening chronologically is good, and we have encouraged people to do that, but it is not necessarily the best order for accomplishing this in a two-year community.
But the raw elements were all there.
I have been working on what is known as a theory of change: How does a person’s heart actually become more like Jesus?
All the elements were already embedded in the content that Tim and I have developed.
Now we are working on what happens in the Greenhouse over that two-year period. What do we practice? What needs to be covered? What needs to be explored? How does it stay safe and gentle, while still moving us through Stage Four and the wall together?
Most of the elements are there. They were hidden in the content that had already been developed. It is such a cool story.
As we head into mid-June, we have finished the theory of change — how a person becomes more like Jesus from the inside out — and we are now building the two-year journey.
Again, those elements exist. We are just reordering them and putting them into a framework that makes sense. It has been amazing.
The Role of the Facilitator
The role of the facilitator is essential.
The facilitator is a unique kind of person in modern Christianity because we do not necessarily have the best examples for this role.
It is not primarily a teaching role. It is someone who needs to be a really good listener — a very good listener — and someone who is comfortable not teaching, which can be difficult.
It is someone who is attuned to God, but also deeply self-aware. Someone dialed into their own heart.
God has brought these advisors, and one of them, David, whom you’ll meet next week, has been around a long time. He is a professional Christian coach. That is what he does. He facilitates.
God raised him up out of the blue. He heard a podcast episode five or six months ago and called me. We have become good friends, and now he is involved with Soil & Roots.
He is helping construct the training and support for facilitators, because I think as the facilitator goes, so goes each Greenhouse.
There are a lot of balls in the air.
As we head into the fall, we hope the beta Greenhouse we ran for three years will retire, and that a few of these new Greenhouse models will begin to bubble up. I think that is going to happen.
We will build the training for facilitators and begin moving into this new framework: a guided pathway through Stage Four and through the wall in a way that is unique, Jesus-centered, and, I think, beautiful.
It is not the be-all and end-all.
Sometimes I get asked whether I think the institutional church is bad or whether small groups are bad. You know I am a critic, though not because I want to be. I am critical of modern Christianity in many ways.
But I think there is tremendous value and a lot of good in institutions that help us with Stages One, Two, and Three.
My heart, though, is for the person who is facing the wall.
Because I have been there. I have lived it. And most of you, if not all of you, have lived it too.
What This Means for You
I will share more as we move through the rest of the summer, but I wanted you to hear from me where things are — where I am, and where Soil & Roots is.
If you are wondering about next steps, if you have interest in a Greenhouse or in becoming a facilitator, reach out.
I’ve said my email address many times: fish@soilandroots.org.
I do not know yet exactly what will happen as we head into the fall. I do not know how many Greenhouses we will have, where they will be, or how they will be structured. Some of that is still being worked out.
But if you feel Jesus tugging you either to help facilitate a Greenhouse or to be part of one, please reach out and let me know.
There are also prayer requests.
As I said, Jessica and I are on a journey that we thought would be one year and is now three years. We are still praying for financial abundance. I absolutely feel called to be full-time in this, and several other people feel the same call.
For those of you who are donating, I cannot tell you how important that has been. Although nobody is getting paid, your donations have covered expenses, which, even for a small ministry, are substantial.
So thank you for your financial support.
We are praying for that to increase through people who may be called to help us build this. I do not know where that will go. We will have to see.
You can pray for financial provision. Pray that we continue to make connections. Pray that the material becomes discoverable and serves other people.
Those would all be wonderful things to pray for.
Closing: Five Years In
I have shared a lot, and thanks for sticking with me for over an hour.
I hope this has been helpful. I just wanted to share my heart. Maybe it has been a little bit of a brain dump, but I hope you have been able to follow it and that it makes sense.
Five years in, we are a little tired. We are a little bruised. But we are also deeply grateful — grateful for you, grateful for Jesus, and grateful for the journey into depth that we are all on.
We are not there yet, but we are on the journey together.
We desperately want you to experience Him in new, fresh, and deeper ways — the ways He has been inviting us to experience Him.
So thank you for walking with us. Thank you for listening, praying, sharing the podcast, leaving five-star reviews, and commenting on Substack. It has been terrific.
I’m glad you are with us.
If you want more information on Soil & Roots, you know the drill. Check us out at soilandroots.org, which is becoming increasingly discoverable. You can also read my articles on Substack — just search for Soil & Roots.
If we can serve you in some way, or if you are feeling a pull to engage more deeply, email me at fish@soilandroots.org.
You can also reach out to Kyle at kyle@soilandroots.org. He is helping a ton with mobilizing these Greenhouses.
We cannot wait to share more with you as we move through the summer.
One last thing: Episode 145, which I’m going to try to record next week, will include two individuals from this advisory group.
David Smith is the gentleman I mentioned from Redding, California, who is helping a lot on the facilitator side. And then there is Rhonda Jenkins, whom I cannot wait for you to meet. She was my spiritual director for two years, and God really moved on her heart — and I totally affirmed it — for her to be involved here.
She has moved over to contribute and help with Soil & Roots.
They are two saints, and I want you to hear their stories. I want them to share why they are involved in deep discipleship efforts and how all of this is unfolding.
We’re going to have a lovely discussion. That will be Episode 145.
All right. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.
Continue the Journey
