Candid Conversations with Dr. Jonathan Youssef

After six incredible years of open, honest, and Christ-centered dialogue, Candid Conversations with Jonathan Youssef is coming to a close as Jonathan Youssef looks back on six years of candid conversations about life and faith. In this final episode, he expresses gratitude to every guest and listener who made this journey so meaningful and shares what’s next as he steps into his new role as Senior Pastor of The Church of The Apostles. From all of us on the Candid Conversations and Leading The Way teams: thank you for listening, praying, and growing alongside us. It’s been an honor to share this space with you.

This Christmas season, many of us are carrying more than gifts and traditions. We’re carrying fear, weariness, uncertainty, and unanswered questions. We sing the familiar words, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” but what do they really mean when the world feels anything but peaceful? In this special Christmas reflection, Jonathan Youssef explores the meaning behind this beloved hymn lyric and the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World who meets us in our deepest hopes and fears.

Our culture doesn’t just move fast—it demands that we keep up. But what do our souls, our families, and our faith lose when we never slow down? Jonathan Youssef is joined again by author and nonprofit leader Kristen Welch for a deeply honest discussion about busyness, spiritual burnout, and the life-giving invitation to sit with Jesus. Kristen shares how years of faithful work and constant activity slowly led her toward spiritual depletion and how solitude and surrender became the pathway back to intimacy with God. Together, Jonathan and Kristen explore the dangers of equating productivity with faithfulness, the role of spiritual disciplines in a distracted world, and what it looks like to lead and live from a place of rest rather than striving.

Do you ever feel like you’re doing all the right things, but you still feel tired, anxious, and spiritually stretched thin? Jonathan sits down with Justin Whitmel Earley for part 2 of an insightful conversation on why the habits of your body may be the missing piece in your walk with Christ. Justin shares how a season of panic attacks and sleepless nights exposed deeper spiritual needs and how rediscovering God’s design for rest transformed his life. Together they take on our culture’s obsession with control, the illusion of self-sufficiency, and the freedom that comes when we finally admit, “I am not God and praise God for that.” This episode is an invitation to slow down, breathe deeply, and allow the Gospel to shape the way you live every single day.

What do your everyday habits—your screen time, your schedule, your workload—have to do with your spiritual life? In this two-part conversation, Jonathan sits down with Justin Whitmel Earley author of The Common Rule, Habits of the Household, and his newest book, The Body Teaches the Soul. In Part 1, Justin shares how a season of crippling anxiety and mental collapse as a young lawyer forced him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about discipleship, the body, and the habits that quietly shape our lives. Justin tells the story of moving from missionary work in China to corporate law in the United States and how, even with solid theology and a half-finished seminary degree, he found himself preaching a gospel of peace while his body was a wreck of anxiety. That crisis became the doorway into discovering how God uses ordinary, physical habits to form us spiritually. Together, Jonathan and Justin explore why what you repeatedly do, often without thinking, matters more than you realize, and how the “liturgies” of our phones, work lives, and cultural moment either draw us toward Christ or away from Him.