Podcast Evangelism
For those not familiar with Wes Huff, he is a Doctoral Student in Manuscript Scribal Culture, studying the habits and work of ancient scribes, which is information useful in reconstructing, deciphering, and performing textual criticism.
As Wes explains, he was just plodding along through life. Work, school, wife and children, and the small ministry he’s a part of with a couple friends called “Apologetics Canada.” Wes had done some amount of YouTube videos about apologetics and the Bible, and then started to do some response videos refuting the wild claims of Ancient Alien conspiracy theorist Billy Carson, who had been making the rounds on very prominent podcasts such as Rogan, PBD, Flagrant, and others. Carson had spread lies about the Bible to millions of people, things which were clearly false and didn’t stand up to even minor scholarly critique
So Wes made videos in response to these claims. The part where things pick up, is when a close Christian friend and neighbor of Carson asks him to come on his podcast and to debate about his ideas. This host not being up to the task himself, was suggested to reach out to Wes by a community member. The host had Wes on Virtually from Canada, and Carson and his arguments were utterly demolished, resulting in bad attitude from him, threatened lawsuits for releasing the podcast debate which tarnished his image, and a general train wreck of handling the situation.
All of that only made fame of the debate spread faster. Wes says that he didn’t even think the debate was that great or noteworthy as they didn’t have a chance to get deep into many topics before Carson walked out.
As word spreads, many of the high profile podcasts start to reach out to have Wes on to talk about the debate and fallout for Carson, and to make a defense of the Bible against things that Carson had spread previously on their shows.
The end result is that Wes Huff becomes quite famous overnight, and has spent the past several months appearing on dozens of shows, having hours and hours of conversation defending the historicity of the Bible, explaining Doctrine, and presenting the Gospel.
Gavin Ortlund makes the point that even just Wes’ most recent appearance on the Flagrant Podcast garnered a viewing of 2+million people on YouTube alone, which is about equivalent to the number of people reached by the 16 week New York evangelistic crusade by Billy Graham in 1957. Ortlund also claims that Wes’ appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast may have been one of the largest gospel broadcasts of all time, given Rogan’s multi million follower audience with 14-19 million followers on individual platforms, and likely much more cumulatively, plus the millions and millions of views from responses to responses to responses to the podcasts appearances.
I find it wild that God is such a miraculous God, that he can prepare people and their life circumstances for just such a time, that when it happens it takes off faster than anyone could ever imagine. No one could have planned or engineered the set of circumstances in which these lies, defense, drama, and response unfolded in a way to get the gospel to so many millions of people globally. Except for God.