Crosswalk Talk: Celebrity Christian Interviews

Neil McDonough plays Laredo, the man hunting the outlaw in Angel and the Bad Man, and he loves it. He is a horse guy, a lifelong western fan, a producer of now nearly sixteen films alongside his wife Ruve, and a man who says he has one boss. That boss is God, and every project he and Ruve put their names on has to be something they believe He would approve. Angel Studios, where they have a first-look deal, is where that vision has found its home.

Westerns, redemption, and why great film is supposed to make...

Beth Caulfield had a full scholarship to seminary, a clear sense of where her life was going, and kids who were nearly grown. Then she found out she was pregnant at 45. What followed was not just shock, it was pressure from people inside the church and church leadership to terminate the pregnancy, shame about having those feelings at all, and a deep sense of isolation in a situation she could not talk about openly. Her film Conceivable, in theaters October 16, is her way of telling that story so no one else has to go through it alone.

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Matt Sieger spent years researching the 1978 San Francisco Giants, a team that nobody remembers winning anything but everybody in the city that year remembers. They increased their attendance by one million fans in a single season. They had nine to ten born-again Christians on a 25-man roster. They started thanking God in post-game interviews. And then the Dodgers overtook them in mid-August, the wins stopped, and the San Francisco media turned on them in a way that followed some of those players for the rest of their careers.

A fake quote, a satirical column proposing one player...

Chris Darlington has been tased on the job. He has also sat alone in a room with a guitar, written a song, and felt something that made him cry for 30 minutes straight, and he says the Holy Spirit that day had the taser beat. That song was Let Them In, and it changed the direction of his artistry. He is a deputy school resource officer in Virginia, Patsy Cline's hometown, and he is trying to become the first active-duty deputy sheriff to earn a Billboard Country Airplay hit while still serving in uniform.

From nine rejected demos...

Josh Baldwin started his second album with no label, no money, and a Kickstarter campaign that barely cleared the goal. He thought Made for More was too much for a Sunday morning. He thought churches would pass on it. He was in the car one morning dropping his kids off at school when he heard them singing the demo — I know who I am because I know who you are — and understood for the first time what that song was for. It went to number one.

Surrender, writing songs for the church to actually sing, and a new...

Matt Neff, CEO of Sight and Sound Theaters, was watching basketball with his boys the night the NBA suspended its season. He knew immediately what was coming. The next day, Pennsylvania closed large venues. Sight and Sound, which had its biggest pre-booking year on record and two brand new productions ready to open, went dark. At the end of that year they had their largest financial loss in history, and had reached three times more people with the gospel than in any previous year. The story of Jesus aired on TBN Easter weekend to an estimated three million-plus viewers...

Alister McGrath has been talking to people about faith for twenty years. For most of that time, the questions he got were adversarial — how can an intelligent person be a Christian, the kind of challenges popularized by Richard Dawkins and the new atheists. The questions have shifted. Now people are asking how Christianity changes lives, how it gives stability and meaning, why something that has lasted 2,000 years keeps surviving. His new book Rethinking Christianity: A Thoughtful Guide to a Life-Changing Faith, published by Thomas Nelson, is his answer to this cultural moment.

Disillusioned with secularism, looking for a...

Jen Lilley did not audition for the role of Gloria Stewart in Jimmy. She did not even know the film was being made. She was in a two-year season of pruning so severe she describes going from a full tree to dry wood, and she was in her prayer closet asking God what was happening when a producer called her co-host Billy Hallowell asking if he knew any actresses who felt fancy but were also completely a real mom. Billy gave them Jen's name. She got on a Zoom with director Aaron Burns, told him she had been farming...

Michael W. Smith was just planning to show up on the red carpet to support his son Tyler, who scored Daniel in the Fiery Furnace. Then he heard the music coming from upstairs in his studio — an epic battle scene — and ran up the stairs to find out what it was. That was eight months ago. He is now executive producer of the film.

Standing firm, the Forrest Frank phenomenon, and a move of God spreading from college campuses to arenas around the world: Michael shares why he believes the story of Daniel is exactly what this gene...

Bob Beltz was part of a small Wilberforce fan club long before anyone made a movie about him. As associate producer of Amazing Grace, he helped bring to the screen the story of William Wilberforce — the British parliamentarian who put a bill on the floor of Parliament every single year from 1787, watched it fail every single year, nearly had a nervous breakdown at the 10-year mark, and finally saw it pass in 1807. Three days after Parliament abolished slavery in 1833, Wilberforce died. The film is now celebrating its 20th anniversary and is back on Angel and all major platforms.

Nazareth grew up in Kuwait as a Coptic Christian, moved to America with dreams of becoming rich and famous, and was on track to get there. NBC had a sitcom in development for him. His manager told him he was going to be the biggest star in the country. Then he went to church with a friend, walked forward, gave his life to Christ, and called his manager Monday morning to quit. After 250 F-words from his manager, he was released — and never signed with one again.

God created humor, clean comedy is having its moment, and the on...

Natalie Layne grew up with worship leader parents, was playing keys in church by age 12, and gave her life to Jesus at 13. She never had the dramatic testimony — no alley moment, no rock bottom, no radical rescue story. For a long time she thought that made her story less powerful. Her new EP Still Running to You, releasing September 9, is her answer to that lie.

Steadfast faith, the gift of being kept, and a hymn that still says everything: Natalie shares why she believes the church kid testimony is just as miraculous as anyone else's, because what Go...

John Cooper, lead singer of Skillet, wrote Scream during one of the hardest seasons of his life — betrayal, slander, and the kind of disorientation that comes when the rug is pulled out from under everything you trusted. The song is raw, reaching, and ends with a cry to God: come pull me out from under the noise and thunder. The new EP is called After the Storm, and he says the title is aptly chosen because he is finally on the other side.

Suffering, social media, and the 4-billion-stream song his label almost never let him record: Jo...

Mena Massoud grew up doing church plays and Stations of the Cross as a Coptic Christian, the son of Egyptian parents who moved to Canada when he was three and a half. He went to the University of Toronto for neuroscience, auditioned for theater school on a leap of faith, got one of the thirty spots, and eventually landed Aladdin after a six-month silence from Disney followed by a call to fly to London and screen test with Guy Ritchie. Now he is playing Daniel in Daniel in the Fiery Furnace, a biblical film about a man who refused...

Kristin Jordan was trying to get her three-year-old son to sleep when he started talking about the monster under his bed. Instead of dismissing the fear, the Holy Spirit gave her a thought — what if the monster is more afraid of you than you are of him? That became the seed of Shilo and the Not So Scary Girl Above His Bed, a children's book about a lovable character who is afraid but takes one brave step anyway, written by Kristin and her husband Montell Jordan, the R&B singer behind This Is How We Do It.

Fa...

Sujo John arrived in America from India in February 2001 with $60 in his wallet and two bags full of dreams. By September he was on the 81st floor of the North Tower, his pregnant wife was on the 71st floor of the South Tower, and the morning of September 11 he sent an email to a friend at 7:32AM saying something is happening to me — I've been chasing stuff in America and I need to chase after God. Sixteen minutes later, American Flight 11 hit his floor.

Survival, purpose, and a girl in a red light district who grabbed his ar...

Patrick Hill was a fullback at the University of Miami, had stints with the Titans, Broncos, and Texans, and when football doors stopped opening he asked God to lead him somewhere else. That somewhere else turned out to be a nursing program at UCLA, and eventually a career as an inpatient psychiatric nurse and orthopedic nurse practitioner. The transition made more sense than people might expect — a fullback's whole job is selfless service, blocking so someone else can score. Patrick just traded the field for the ward.

True strength, Mercy Ships, and the devotional series that brought an...

Darlene Zschech was singing commercial jingles to pay the bills, her husband's business was struggling, they had two small children, and the dream of full-time ministry felt impossibly far away. She sat down at her piano, opened her Bible, and prayed. Twenty minutes later she had Shout to the Lord, and she was so unsure of it that when she finally played it for her worship pastor, she made him turn around and face the wall so she wouldn't have to watch his reaction.

Worship, revival, and a song that left her hands before she understood what...

DOE, Grammy-winning singer and founding member of Forever Jones, has been leading worship her whole life. But her third solo album Shiloh, releasing August 28, is different from anything she has made before. Her mother is singing on it. Three of her siblings are in the videos. And the central conviction running through every song is one she has carried since long before she had a child of her own — someone had to make sure you knew who Jesus was, and it is your job to make sure the next generation knows too.

Generational legacy, the gospel as th...

Nick Skytland, Vice President of AI Research at GLOO, has been tracking how pastors use AI for a year through a joint research initiative with Barna. The headline finding will surprise people: 87% of pastors are using AI in some form. Only 13% say they do not use it at all. But how they are using it — and where the cautions lie — is where the conversation gets important.

Brainstorming, biblical research, and the Friday sermon temptation: Nick walks through the data, including the 24% of pastors who now use AI to write or edit sermons, double last year's number, and why...

Nathan Gamble grew up in church. He knew the creed, got confirmed, got baptized as an infant, and showed up every Sunday. He knew every rhythm of the Christian life — and had nothing in his heart for any of it. Then at 18 he moved to LA by himself, worked a lot, had no friends, hit rock bottom, and considered ending his life. A few connections later, he found himself hanging out with broke Bible college students in Ventura, California who were inexplicably joyful, and he wanted whatever they had. Two weeks after enrolling, he got saved.

Isolation, ge...

Alex Kendrick and his brother Stephen went to Brazil to train 65 young Christian filmmakers. They came home with a Sony-funded feature film shot in Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro, starring a husband and wife who got pregnant during production and welcomed their baby two weeks before this interview. The new film is Flywheel: Ignition of the Soul, a remake of the very first movie the Kendrick brothers ever made, updated for modern day Brazil and releasing in American theaters October 16.

Lordship, the movie screen as a canvas for the human heart, and a God who put every...

Bear Grylls has built a career taking people into the places where the real conversations happen — not the two-minute chat show slot where nobody asks about faith, but the mountaintop at sunset, the canyon at dusk, the forest trail where walls come down and people start talking about what actually matters. His new Prime Video series Chosen in the Wild takes the cast and crew of The Chosen into exactly those places, and Bear says what he has seen in these actors surprised him — many of them were not people of faith when they joined the show, and the tran...

Ben Peterson, founder of Engage Your Destiny and former military chaplain's assistant, has led more than 8,000 sailors, airmen, marines, and soldiers to Christ in the last three years. He works with the most faithless generation in American history — only 3% of Gen Z holds a fully biblical worldview — and he is watching them turn to AI chatbots for spiritual advice, emotional support, and the sense of belonging their brains are wired to crave. His new book When Intelligence Isn't Human: Navigating Your Faith in the Age of AI is his response.

The Tower of Babel, the dopamine loop, and...

John James was the voice of Shine, Breakfast, Take Me to Your Leader, and Not Ashamed — the songs that defined the Newsboys' most creative era and introduced a generation to Christian music that was quirky, bold, and unlike anything else on the radio. He spent 16 years with the band. Then his world fell apart. He lost his marriage, his ministry, his career, and eventually flew back to Australia not to start over but, as he puts it plainly, to disappear and die.

Brokenness, the lies that keep you silent, and the God who refuses to give up on...

Willie and Korie Robertson have been watching how entertainment shapes culture since Duck Dynasty first aired on cable. They have seen cable give way to streaming, watched the iPads appear in their grandchildren's hands, and decided that the answer to bad content is not just criticism — it is a better option. EKKL Entertainment is their answer: a faith and family streaming platform that also houses podcasts and devotionals, built for families who are tired of trying to figure out what is safe to watch.

Faith families, Hollywood's blind spot, and a rock star who finds God in a...

Jon Erwin has been dreaming about the story of George Washington for over a decade. He read approximately 30 books, brought in historians obsessed with the subject, and set out not to photograph history but to paint an accurate portrait of a young man raging against an unfair world who decided to build a better one. Young Washington finished third at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend, making it the only film about American history in theaters on the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding — and the only modern theatrical film about George Washington in decades.

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Steven Curtis Chapman grew up watching his grandfather Ruble Rudd — a Purple Heart World War II veteran who came home with shrapnel permanently lodged in his leg, the only survivor of his platoon — live out a quiet, grateful patriotism that never left him. That legacy is at the heart of a new song Steven wrote for America's 250th birthday, a reimagining of America the Beautiful with the same chorus and new verses, recorded with country singer Chris Janson and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry on July 31, 2024 — the same night Ricky Skaggs walked out to invite Steven to become the Op...

Tenroc has spent his life making hits for other people. Grammy nominated producer and songwriter, he has worked with Rihanna, Jonas Brothers, Julia Michaels, Renee Rapp, and others — building songs, polishing them, handing them off, and going back to do it again. He never wanted to be the one out front. Then, about a year ago, he was driving a church van full of youth with his wife in the passenger seat when he heard God say something that changed everything.

God's personhood, misdirected worship, and why the universe is not listening when you talk to it: Te...

Dr. Jay Richards, philosopher, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and vice president at the Heritage Foundation, has spent his career dismantling one of the most persistent myths in modern culture — that science and Christianity have always been at war. The founders of almost every sub-discipline of modern science, from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton, were either conventional or devout Christians. The warfare narrative was invented in the 19th century, and the evidence has been moving in the opposite direction ever since.

Design, purpose, and the 20th century discoveries that materialism cannot explain: Dr. Richards walks through wh...

Anne Wilson is 24 years old, has a K-LOVE Award for Hey Girl, a debut country album called Rebel, a new book by the same name, and no social media on her phone. In 2023 she bought a flip phone, used it for a year, and has not looked back. She is one of the boldest Christian voices in country music right now, and she will tell you that boldness did not come from strategy — it came from watching her five-foot-tall, opinionated mother walk into rooms and say exactly what she believed.

Faith in country music, the emptiness Gen Z...

Leanna Crawford writes songs the way other people write journal entries — because she needs them first. Her sophomore album Thank God, releasing July 26, is the most personal thing she has made, built around gratitude for unanswered prayers, the freedom that comes from forgiveness, and the simple conviction that sitting at the feet of Jesus is better than any to-do list she could ever complete. She did not plan for it to be called Thank God. The songs told her that was the name.

Comparison, forgiveness, and what it means to trust God with the nos: Leanna shares th...

Todd Nettleton has spent more than two decades working with Voice of the Martyrs, and he has sat with enough persecuted Christians around the world to know that what happened in a Roman coliseum in 203 AD is still happening today — just in different arenas. On this year's Day of the Christian Martyr, June 29, Voice of the Martyrs is spotlighting Perpetua, a 22-year-old woman from a noble family in ancient Carthage who kept a journal in prison while her father begged her to deny Christ and come home to her nursing baby. She was killed for refusing. Her journal survived ne...

Bella Taylor Smith was 17 when she got saved at a summer camp during a worship service and realized that singing was not just something she could do — it was what she was made for. Years later, when a Voice Australia application popped up on her computer during Covid lockdowns, she felt the Lord prompting her to apply. She won. And then, rather than chasing the biggest mainstream opportunity that win could have opened, she and her husband moved to Nashville to make Christian music full time.

Worship, the local church, and music made for your living room: Be...

Bethany Wohrle has been with Bethel Music since she was 17 years old. Her voice is on All Hail King Jesus and Living Hope, songs with tens of millions of streams that have been sung in churches around the world. But when her niece Junie died unexpectedly at 18 months old in February 2023, Bethany nearly didn't show up to the Nashville writing camp she had scheduled for her debut solo album just weeks later. She went anyway, and what happened in those writing rooms was not what she expected.

Grief, hope, and a God who is still good even...

Anike grew up with a Muslim father, a conviction that some of the music she was listening to was wrong, and no idea she would one day be the first female artist signed to Reach Records. She looked up Christian remixes, found Lecrae, convinced her family to let her go to a church summer camp by calling it an internship program, and gave her life to Jesus on day three. Two days later, Lecrae showed up at the camp. She had no idea what God was setting in motion.

Christian hip hop, the gospel carried in a...

Dr. Thomas Kidd, professor at Midwestern Seminary and author of biographies on Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and George Whitefield, has spent his career at the intersection of American history and Christian faith. He is one of the most careful historians working on the founding era today, and when he says the debate over whether America was founded as a Christian nation has enough to offend both sides, he means it — and he can explain exactly why.

The founders, the First Amendment, and the tens of millions of churchgoers nobody is counting: Dr. Kidd unpacks why th...

Sam Eaton grew up hiding under tables in kindergarten because he was afraid of the world. His father's alcoholism left deep roots of trauma, and years later, after watching four people in his school community die by suicide, he could no longer stay silent about the pain he had carried alone for years. Sam is the founder of Recklessly Alive, a suicide prevention ministry, and the author of the new book You Can Do This: Daily Affirmations to Live Recklessly Alive. He has spoken at more than 250 events across the country, and he opens up here about his own...

Kristian Stanfill has been part of Passion Music for over 20 years. He has seen a lot. But what he is witnessing right now among Gen Z, he says, is different. Not hype. Not emotional. Students showing up at Globe Life Field in Arlington at 3am, lining up around the building with their physical Bibles, just to make sure they could get into the room. Forty-five thousand of them. All hungry for the same thing.

Repentance, revival, and a generation that wants something durable enough to build a life on: Christian shares what he believes Asbury 2023 cracked open...

Dr. Michael Behe, biochemist and professor at Lehigh University, has spent his career making a case that most scientists would rather not hear. The concept he became famous for, irreducible complexity, argues that the molecular machinery inside living cells is so intricately assembled that removing a single part causes the entire system to collapse. Darwin thought the closer you looked at biology, the simpler it would get. The opposite turned out to be true, and that discovery has never stopped being inconvenient for strict materialism.

Science pointing beyond itself, the mind behind the machinery, and what a...