What is
?
A place to be lifted by real stories, and to witness how the Lord works in people's lives.
Where it started
He wanted you to hear what he kept hearing
Testified began in pastoral conversations, with a wish that other people could be lifted by them too.
Mike serves as a pastor in Southwest Michigan. One of the greatest joys of that work is sitting with prospective members and hearing their testimony. In those conversations he kept witnessing how the Lord works in a real life: the struggle, the doubt, the surrender, and the ordinary years that follow.
For years he wished fellow Christians could hear those stories and be uplifted by them the way he was.
He wanted a room where people could sit close to that work and witness it for themselves. That wish is this podcast. Listeners hear the intimate details of Christians' lives, and the hope is that those stories lift someone else the way they lifted him.
Testified is an independent, listener-supported show about the roads people travel toward and through Christian faith. It is for the person who believes, the person who is still unsure, and everyone carrying questions they have kept quiet. Each episode is a long-form conversation. Guests tell the truth about who they were, what opened them, and what it has meant to keep walking. Wherever you are on that road, you are welcome here.
The lives
Witness how the Lord works
Every episode is someone willing to say what happened to them. These are guests who have already sat in the chair.
In part two of our conversation with Fred Jolly, we pick up where his story left off and explore how his faith has continued to evolve over more than four decades. One of the most significant revelations is that Fred never actually found the scientific answer to the question that had occupied him since childhood: What distinguishes the living from the nonliving?
What makes something alive? And what happens when life ends?
What happens when tragedy shatters your faith, and the God you once believed in becomes the very One you blame? At just 17, Thad experienced the devastating loss of his stepfather to suicide.
The room
How the conversation works
The hosts go first. The guest steps into a room already in motion.
Mike and Brendon do not interview from a distance. They lead with their own experience - belief and doubt, confidence and resistance - including doubt that returns after years of Christian faith. Then they open the door for the guest. That posture matters: it signals that struggle is welcome here, and that none of us has arrived.
Salvation is treated as more than a single lightning strike. The show makes room for the arrival and the years after - doubt that returns, faith that has to be chosen again, ordinary life that stays complicated.
A question across the conversations
“What hope are you holding fast?”
It asks what hope you are willing to name, even while you are still wavering, and leaves space for an honest answer.
Every episode
The arc of every episode
Five movements. A conversation, held in order.
Who You Were
The world before faith - character, longing, and life without sermon language.
The Softening
What softened your heart and began to reshape your faith journey - the moment, person, or experience that started opening you to something new.
The Moment of Salvation
When you chose to accept the Lord as your Savior - or when you sensed the Lord choosing you. Particular, disorienting, and hard to perform.
Life on the Other Side
Honest resolution: faith that has to be chosen again in an ordinary, complicated life.
Direct Address
A word to the listener still in the in-between - the reluctant seeker, the believer whose faith is being tested, anyone who knows the journey is not finished.
The name
Why “Testified”
The name points to a confession of hope, and the long work of holding it.
"Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful."
The title comes from Hebrews 10:23. The call is to hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, because the one who promised is faithful. To testify is to say that hope out loud: an honest account of what you have seen and what you are still trusting.
That hope and the slow work of keeping it belong in the same story. The verse says the promise holds when we struggle. Testified holds both - the confession, and the ordinary, complicated life it has to live in.
Most guests on this show are telling a version of that arc. Many listeners are still somewhere in the middle, holding hope through loss, through questions, through an encounter they are still learning how to name. The name is an invitation to say what is true.
Get involved
You're welcome here whether you want to listen, share your own story, or encourage someone you know - someone with a compelling story worth telling - to step forward.