Joel, Stu and Tim are relaunching the Shock Absorber Network, and this episode explains what it is, why it matters and how you can be part of it.

Ministry was never meant to be done alone. But for a lot of church leaders, that's exactly what it feels like, isolated in your local context, carrying the weight of cultural change without anyone to process it with.

Stu traces the thinking all the way back to his first PhD at UNSW, where he was studying Christian youth ministry as a social movement using new social movement theory. That research, and thirty-plus years of doing exactly this kind of relational networking through Soul Revival, is the foundation of what the Shock Absorber Network is trying to build. Not an institution, not a franchise, not a brand. A relational, non-competitive, theologically grounded space where ministry leaders can pray together, share ideas and learn from each other across churches and denominations.

Tim unpacks Archie Poulos' research on why networking is actually essential to long-term ministry health, not a nice-to-have when you've got spare time, but a genuine factor in whether you and your ministry survive and flourish over the long haul. The alternative, as Archie points out, is that isolation tips into competition, and competition is the opposite of what Jesus prays for in John 17.

Practically, it starts simply: a new website at shockabsorber.com.au, a mailing list, and a Zoom prayer meeting once a term. No money, no compulsion, no franchise. Just friends in ministry, gathered around Jesus.

Timestamps

01:45 Relaunching the Shock Absorber Network — what it is and where the idea came from
05:20 Memories of the Treehouse — what church networking has looked like at Soul Revival
09:30 Archie Poulos on why networking is essential to ministry health
17:45 Are movements dangerous? New social movement theory explained
28:00 The biblical foundation — loving your neighbour, John 15 and Matthew 22
36:00 What the network looks like practically — website, Zoom prayer meetings and how to join

Discussed on this episode

The High-Level Skill of Ministry Networking and Collaboration, by Mikey Lynch
We need to get better at networking - Archie Poulos on The Pastors' Heart
New Social Movement Theory
Collective Identity
Collective Identity and Social Movements

Jump in at shockabsorber.com.au — and send your thoughts to joel@shockabsorber.com.au

Everyone's chasing the algorithm. More clicks, better thumbnails, optimised titles, short-form funnels. So what does a Christian do with all of that?

Joel and Tim start with football, Real Madrid vs Barcelona, identity, rivalry and what success actually means, and end up somewhere and end up with a biblical framework for thinking about metrics of success in a world that rewards inflammatory, clickbaity and often dishonest content.

Along the way they work through the cultural mandate in Genesis 1 and 2, the trifecta of good, true and beautiful, Proverbs' wisdom about living with the grain of God's design, and whether Christians should be on these platforms at all — or whether the algorithm has simply evangelised us instead.

If you're wrestling with digital content, social media, and what faithful presence online actually looks like, enjoy!

Timestamps
00:00 Intro: trains, voyages and retractable stadium pitches
05:40 Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Real Madrid, Barcelona and what success actually means
17:55 Chasing the algorithm: what ChatGPT says about podcast success
24:45 The cultural mandate: why content creation starts in Genesis
32:00 Good, true and beautiful: a biblical filter for everything you make
42:30 Should Christians be on these platforms at all? McLuhan, Haidt and the pub analogy
51:30 The quiet revival and Tim's takeaway

Discussed on this episode
Real Madrid's retractable pitch
Tottenham Hotspur's retractable pitch
Fear and Loathing in La Liga, by Sid Lowe
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt
Indistractable, by Nir Eyal
The Sirens' Call, by Chris Hayes
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
The Medium is the Message, by Marshall McLuhan
Cross Formed Kidmin Podcast

Subscribe, leave a review, and send your thoughts to Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au

Richard Dawkins likes Christmas carols. Tom Holland calls himself a Christian. Robert Greene thinks religion is great for transcending the banality of social media.

Joel and Tim trace a thread from Bluey, through the culture war trap of coding everything left or right, into Skye Jethani's four distorted postures toward God, and land on the one thing that separates Christianity from every other self-improvement and philosophical framework: Jesus himself.

Timestamps
05:47 Bluey is not a normal kids show
25:44 We can progress and conserve
39:51 Life with God
58:56 Tim's Takeaway - Seek the kingdom above all else

Discussed on this episode
‘Bluey’ Is the Most Conservative Show on TV, by Louise Perry
Bluey Takeaway
Bud Light Boycott
Robert Greene, Religion's True Purpose
Tom Holland on UnHerd
With, by Skye Jethani
Parenting in God's Family - Volume 2

Subscribe, leave a review, and send your thoughts to Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au

Most churches have got the small group and the Sunday service figured out. But there's a whole layer of community that's gone missing, and it might be why people keep saying "I don't feel like I belong here."

Joel, Stu and Tim dig into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology of friendship as an ecclesial category, and why his concentric circles of relationship, drawn straight from Jesus' own relational model, give churches a practical framework for building community that's expansive instead of cliquey.

They also pull in Robin Dunbar's research on the cognitive limits of human relationship, and land somewhere surprising: biology and theology are telling the same story.

Plus: e-bikes, convicts, the Industrial Revolution, and why teenagers might actually be ahead of the church on this one.

Timestamps
05:11 Friendship as an ecclesial category
13:14 The 3, the 12, the 72, the 120
19:24 Jesus saves us into community
24:03 Cultural differences and individualism influencing friendship
34:09 The Dunbar number and what friendship brings
43:17 Tim's takeaway - How would your relationships at church change if you saw them as friends?

Discussed on this episode
The Lesser of Two Weevils - Master and Commander
When Church Was a Family, by Joesph Hellerman
Dunbar's Number

Subscribe, leave a review, and send your thoughts to Joel at joel@shockabsorber.com.au

Tim and Joel are back for 2026 with a conversation about authority, hierarchy, and authentic relationship with Jesus.

It starts with parenting, authoritarian (high control, low love) versus authoritative (high control, high love). But the real question: how does the parent-child relationship mirror our relationship with God? For those with great fathers, God being the perfect Father is comforting. For those with absent or abusive fathers, it's healing.

This opens a bigger conversation about hierarchy and power. Postmodernism wants to deconstruct all hierarchies as inherently corrupt. But because there's an inherent power imbalance between Creator and creation, they argue there must be such a thing as good hierarchy. The difference isn't whether power exists, but how it's used, to serve others or serve yourself.

Tim shares about joining the Crossformed Kids podcast, leading into intergenerational ministry and reciprocity. A five-year-old is no more or less saved than a senior minister. Equal in God's kingdom, even while maintaining appropriate roles. They discuss Tom Holland's "Dominion", how even secular progressive concern for the vulnerable is borrowed from Christian moral tradition. Marx's vision could only emerge from a Christian worldview.

The conversation turns to math with Joel reading John Lennox and his son to discover how mathematics reveals God's beauty and order. The elegance of math points to a rational universe created by a rational God.

Finally, parasocial relationships, Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 Word of the Year. People are forming one-way relationships with celebrities and AI chatbots. Tim contrasts this with his word for the year: abiding. "I don't want a parasocial relationship with Jesus. I want to genuinely abide in Him."

The takeaway? God has the right to tell us how to live. And because He's the perfect Father, that's not oppressive, it's beautiful and relational.
https://online.hillsdale.edu/
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Intro and welcome back for the new year
09:33 - Parenting, hierarchies, and power and our true Father
25:32 - Tim's hosting another podcast, the reciprocity of intergenerational relationships and ceding power to God's good hierarchy
36:20 - God is a God who cares for vulnerable people
43:20 - Science and maths explaining God's created world
54:52 - Parasocial versus abiding
1:13:06 - Tim's Takeaway: authentic relationship with Jesus

DISCUSSED ON THIS EPISODE:
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari
Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch
Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell
Crossformed Kidmin Podcast
The Child in God's Church, by Tim Beilharz
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, by Tom Holland
Anglicare Australia
The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, by Glen Scrivener
Hillsdale College online courses
Can Science Explain Everything?, by John Lennox
Why This Oxford Mathematician is Confident God Exists | John Lennox
The 2025 Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year
Death of Rob Hirst

Recorded five days after the Bondi terrorist attack, Tim reflects on the strange providence of preaching about peace the morning before the attack.

His sermon from Philippians 4 explored why we struggle to find peace in a world online world where research shows rising depression, anxiety, and suicidality across all generations. But the biblical vision of peace (shalom) is both gift and obedience: the Spirit gives us peace, and the Spirit empowers us to pursue peace. Prayer, that act of relationship, trust, and faith is what guards our hearts and minds. Not the outcome, but the praying.

Joel and Tim then dive into a fascinating cultural analysis: "Why Didn't Your Grandparents Deconstruct?" which argues that church hurt, moral failure, bad theology, and unanswered questions have always so why is deconstruction so prevalent among millennials?

The answer is postmodernism's cultural programming. Previous generations lived in a hegemonic meta-narrative. Even when they experienced church pain, there was nowhere else to go. But millennials came of age in the '90s when postmodernism went mainstream. The new cultural catechism taught: truth is socially constructed, institutions are corrupt, every story masks a power play (especially religion), and authenticity comes through deconstruction. If something feels constraining, the answer isn't reform—it's exit. Walk away or burn it down.

As Christmas approaches, Tim and Joel discuss Soul Revival's four yearly high points: Christmas, Easter, Week Away, and Planning Days. They unpack why gathering on Christmas Day matters, the strategy behind the Kids Christmas Eve service, and why telling the Christmas story every year matters for forming young disciples.

The episode ends on the question of traditions: which ones do we hold, which do we discard, and why does the gospel tradition at Christmas still matter in a world that tells us all traditions deserve deconstruction?

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro, Bondi attack and Tim's sermon on peace
15:51 - Deconstruction: The answer isn't reform, it's exit
31:06 - The traditions we hold and the traditions we discard

Discussed on this episode:
Tim’s sermon on God, Why Can’t I Find Peace?
On Bondi Beach, by Louise Perry
Why Didn’t Your Grandparents Deconstruct?, by Paul Anleitner

About the Shock Absorber:
A podcast for church leaders and ministry pioneers who want to do church differently. Hosted by Stu Crawshaw, Tim Beilharz, and Joel McMaster from Soul Revival Church.

Connect with us at joel@shockabsorber.com

Soul Revival Church meet across the Sutherland Shire & in Ryde: soulrevivalchurch.com

With Stu traveling and Tim unwell, Joel brings in the super-subs, Ethan and Brayden, to tackle the 6-7 meme and what it tells us about internet culture, and how Christians should respond.

They start with a primer on the 6-7 meme, following a breakdown by aidanetcetera on Instagram that claims it's evidence that "postmodernists won the culture war" and what it means to meme something into relevance.

The guys discuss whether this holds up. Is 6-7 actually abstract art, or is it just teenagers doing what they've always done, creating subculture that adults don't understand? They discuss the lifecycle of memes (why they die when younger kids adopt them), the difference between little memes and big movements like grunge, and whether capital-M Movements can even happen anymore when everyone's algorithm shows them different realities.

But this isn't just internet anthropology. Joel shares his research on getting his 11-year-old son a phone, Australia's social media ban for under-16s, the rise of sextortion, why helicopter parenting offline paired with complete digital freedom is naive, and what Christian wisdom looks like in practice.

If older Christians are going to say the internet is bad for development and then we sit around on our phones, what are we modelling? Despite cultural shifts toward declining literacy and shorter attention spans, God is still moving, people are becoming Christians through social media, mini-revivals are happening in the UK, and young believers are figuring out how to be Christian in digital spaces.

The episode lands on a hopeful note: movements still happen, they just look different now. And Christians are always in the middle of them. From women transforming the Roman Empire through radical hospitality to hippies doubling down on to Gen Z finding Jesus through TikTok, God works through every cultural shift. The question isn't whether to fear the movement, but how to partner with young people as they generatively figure out what it means to follow Jesus online and offline.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro and laying out the generations
04:16 - Is this 6-7 meme a work of art?
12:55 - When are memes cool and not cool?
20:38 - A movement of understanding how to be online
28:21 - Leaning into what people see as freedoms without knowing the consequences
34:19 - What do we model as the digital world becomes increasingly more prevalent?
43:44 - Movements still happen, and Christians are still in them

Discussed on this episode:
aidanetcetera on Instagram
Doot Doot, by Skrilla
Lamelo Ball basketball edits
Social media ban
Lewis’s Chip Lunch episode on the internet
Richard Dawkins a cultural Christian

About the Shock Absorber:
A podcast for church leaders and ministry pioneers who want to do church differently. Hosted by Stu Crawshaw, Tim Beilharz, and Joel McMaster from Soul Revival Church.

Soul Revival Church meet across the Sutherland Shire & in Ryde: soulrevivalchurch.com

Joel reclaims the hosting chair from Tim (who did a great job, but still...). They start off by debating favourite movies, why Tim can't finish The Godfather, and the comfort of rewatching The Bourne Identity, but quickly pivot into questions of efficiency, productivity and whether we should be as efficient as the world demands us to be.

Tim has been reading extensively about digital culture, AI, and what it means to be embodied Christians in an increasingly disembodied world. He introduces two key books: Christine Rosen's secular "The Extinction of Experience" and Samuel D. James's Christian "Digital Liturgies." Both argue, from different angles, that we're losing something fundamentally human as we trade physical experiences for digital ones.

The theological anchor is incarnation. God created us as embodied beings. Jesus took on flesh and was resurrected into a physical body. This matters profoundly for how we think about technology, productivity, and formation as disciples. When Mark Andreessen coins the term "reality privilege" to argue that most people's physical experiences are worse than what digital worlds can offer, he's essentially making the argument of The Matrix's Cypher: the fake world is better than the real one.

Tim and Joel push back hard. They discuss why God is not efficient (it took 1800 years from Abraham to Jesus), why the Bible is intentionally slow and story-shaped rather than a bullet-point list, why handwriting matters, why reading actual books matters, why face-to-face conversations are "3D" while text messages are "2D," and why the church must be a place of refuge from culture's aggressive push toward endless efficiency and productivity.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro, favourite movies
11:47 - We are created incarnate
26:22 - Does every moment have to be productive?
33:52 - The devious trick of efficiency
44:42 - How we are formed matters
1:06:30 - Tim's Takeaway

Discussed on this episode:
Anchorman
Step Brothers
The Mummy I
The Mummy Returns
Alien
Young Frankenstein
The Bourne Identity
The Fast and the Furious
The Godfather
The Social Network
A Few Good Men
Die Hard
Lethal Weapon
Tunnel 29, by Helena Merriman
The Escape Artist, by Jonathan Freedland
Cloverfield
The Extinction of Experience, by Christine Rosen:
Digital Liturgies, by Samuel D. James
Marc Andreesen
The Jungle Village Hooked on Phones

About the Shock Absorber:
A podcast for church leaders and ministry pioneers who want to do church differently. Hosted by Stu Crawshaw, Tim Beilharz, and Joel McMaster from Soul Revival Church.

Soul Revival Church meet across the Sutherland Shire & in Ryde: soulrevivalchurch.com