Upon watching Jordan Peele’s summer monster movie Nope, I was… unhappy. After obsessing over Get Out and enjoying Us for years, I had high expectations for this movie to… *mean* something. But when I rolled credits on it, I felt like I had watched a summer monster movie. Where was the scathing critique on race, government, capitalism, or whiteness? It wasn’t there. All I could think about was the haunting first five minutes of the film over and over. And so, I took to studyin

Something I don't talk about enough is the absolute joy I get from our weekly nerdy sermons. I can only imagine the fourteen-year-old weeb stumbling on our channel and watching through dozens of videos on their favorite anime, games, and movies. Since I was a kid, I have been searching for the exact thing I am now appointed to craft with the aid of the Holy Spirit. However, these are intentionally crafted to be brief and easy to consume. If you've watched my sermons in a more

Nerd Pastor Nate is a featured writer for Rethink Church writing on gaming, anime, and other pop culture topics. Read the full article below or visit the main site here.

I’m generally not one for First-Person Shooter style games, but when I heard that Ben Esposito of Edith Finch, Donut County, and the Sonic Dreams collection (we actually don’t talk about that one, shhh) anyway when I heard he was the driving force behind this game - I knew I had to pick it up. This is an indie dev legend dropping a new game. But I wasn’t expecting it to look like… well, like a PS2-era COD mod. But I braved it anyway, dove headfirst, and was NOT disappointed.

When I first started developing a church for nerds, geeks, and gamers, I thought what I was creating was novel. It didn't take long to discover that, while it was undoubtedly niche, the nerd church was not a new thought by a long shot. So I pivoted and took several months to learn from groups like Love Thy Nerd, God Squad Church, and GameChurch. I met some extraordinary leaders, innovators, and like-minded nerds who wanted to do the work of connecting the world of faith and f

We wrapped up our first ever community challenge event at the end of June - Mileage Mania. For the entire month of June, we challenged the community to come together and log miles walked/ran/biked towards a joint goal. I had set my expectations where I thought we would likely be and hoo boy was I wrong! Y'all proved to excel far beyond my wildest imaginations. To be transparent - I thought we would have 8-10 people sign up for the event. I thought we would be able to comforta

Stranger Things - the show so nice we have to write a sermon about this season twice. Well, the truth is it’ll be like twenty years before we get another season, so we have to milk it while it’s here. Just kidding - but really. Part 2 dropped, and it was pretty good. Some stereotypically weird choices from the Duffers, but the exploration of this world continues to be some of my favorite stuff. And one of my favorite characters that they have ever explored is the one and only

This past Sunday marked an important day in the United Methodist Church. Clergy across the denomination will be preaching their very first sermon at their new appointments, assuming they weren't reappointed to their existing charge. I was at this point two years ago. I said goodbye to the rural church I was serving at the time and - instead of preaching - began to feverishly prepare for whatever this would become someday. I knew the name at that point. If I recall correctly,

Listen - whenever I said I didn’t want to watch another Isekai so long as I live, I didn’t mean yall literally had to make a whole anime about assassinating the genre itself. But thanks? For this video, I want to look at the new anime The Executioner and Her Way of Life. This story takes another story and turns it upside down but simultaneously reveals that maybe the original story wasn’t that bad to begin with… I don’t know. It’s a bit nuanced, but the best stories always ar