Quick reference
Meeting dates and times
Here is a link to a calendar of meeting dates and times:
The calendar is also embedded below for quick reference:
Note that this calendar includes meetings for two types of Bible studies: the CrossTalk Bible Study (which is probably what most people are interested in), and the Ichthys Bible Study (which is a different meeting where followers of Ichthys and other ministries in its orbit—like my own ministry—can meet to discuss things adjacent to the teachings of Ichthys). Everyone is welcome at both meetings, but what we talk about in the Ichthys Bible Study meetings will tend to be a bit less generally applicable to most Christians, since it relates to a particular flavor of Christian theology. You might compare how Presbyterians and Baptists have plenty of common ground, but still have their own specific theological beliefs that are generally only of interest to people who follow their branch of theology. Same general idea here. This certainly doesn’t mean that people who don’t agree with all of what Ichthys teaches aren’t welcome—far from it. If you are interested in attending two Bible studies a week, then even if you don’t read or follow Ichthys, there is no reason you can’t come to the Sunday Ichthys Bible Study meetings alongside the Saturday CrossTalk Bible Study meetings. The structure is generally similar across the two Bible studies, so if you want more of the same, doing that will make good sense for you.
Each of these two types of Bible studies has its own GroupMe group chat where I post meeting info and recording info every week, as well as other general announcements. I also cross-post on a couple other platforms, to give people a choice as to how they participate:
- The Signal group chat is for international folks (GroupMe only works in the US) and folks who prefer only communicating with open-source E2EE apps. We settled on Signal instead of WhatsApp or Telegram or WeChat or what have you due to Signal’s excellent privacy features.
- The Discord group chat is for people who already basically live in Discord, and would rather participate that way.
You can join as many or as few of these as you want. Since I do cross-post announcements and such, the choice is really up to you. Many people do participate across multiple different platforms, so you don’t have to only pick one.
Here are the invite links:
CrossTalk Bible Study:
Ichthys Bible Study:
Why Saturday evenings for the CrossTalk Bible Study meeting time?
We obviously avoid Sunday morning meetings so that people don’t have to make an exclusive choice between our Bible Study meetings and Sunday morning church services, but can benefit from both. I also avoid Sunday afternoon and Sunday evening meetings since some churches have additional events after their services on Sundays (so Sundays are likely to already be pretty full for some Christians). Finally, I also avoid Friday evening meetings since that is a popular time-slot for movie nights, game nights, and other similar social events (or date nights for couples). This is largely how we ended up with the Saturday evening meeting time-slot.
Joining us in person
As to getting to my house and parking, I share my address in the group chats before each meeting.
I somewhat encourage people to park in the parking lot of the Elementary School directly behind my house and then walk the half block or so to get to my house, since parking there reduces the risk of y’all’s cars getting hit when parked on the street, nobody has to parallel park, nobody will ever end up getting boxed-in (like can happen if someone parks behind you on my driveway), my neighbors will probably be less annoyed overall, and it ensures that the parking directly in front of my house can stay open in case someone is on crutches or in a wheelchair or otherwise actually must park close due some other physical need. If you are on crutches or in a wheelchair or have any other need like that, then do of course park as close to the front door as you feasibly can. You are also welcome to park in the driveway.
While we do typically give people a few minutes to trickle in, we will actually start reasonably close to the scheduled times, so just plan accordingly. It is least disruptive for everyone if most people are there when we start, but if you do end up running a bit late for whatever reason, just try to slip in quietly while minimizing the amount you disturb others as best you can. It’s alright—life happens.
Joining us over Zoom
The Zoom meetings happen at the same time as the in-person meetings shown above on the calendar schedule—the Zoom meetings are fully tied-in to the in-person meetings. And when I say fully, I mean fully; we use an 8-channel wireless microphone system to ensure all discussion gets captured on the meetings, so people who aren’t in-person can follow everything.
The link to directly join our Zoom meetings is also shared in the group chats before each meeting. We generally don’t change the meeting room/passcode, so you can probably just bookmark it once and then keep using the same link, but we don’t post the meeting information publicly here for privacy reasons.
Thus, once you are active on one or more of the group chats, you will be able to join our meetings over Zoom.
We do ask that most Zoom participants stay muted when not talking, especially if you have noise around you.
Even people who are local to me in the Warner Robins area are more than welcome to join via Zoom rather than making the drive. There are, of course, quite a few benefits to being face-to-face when we gather as believers, but since everything is already set up for Zoom so that some of my geographically-dispersed friends can participate too, local folks can obviously do the same, no problem.
This lets people who are sick still listen in and participate, for example, without risking spreading the illness.
Our Bible study meetings
What we do
Typically, we’ll watch some video content together (most probably some Bible study content from YouTube), and then discuss it as a group. I come prepared with some topics I think might be interesting to discuss, but we usually let the conversations go where they may so long as they stay generally on-topic.
These meetings are basically “only” Bible studies. By that, I mean that we don’t have any formally scheduled time for music, communion, the sharing of prayer requests (although you are welcome to share prayer requests in the group chats if you so desire), group prayer, and so on. We also don’t do icebreaker games or have any sort of formally scheduled social/fellowship time (although people often do hang out for a while after the Bible studies to chat and share what’s going on in their lives). I generally encourage that, and it really does quite frequently happen in practice. The point is that this is nonetheless a bit different than it being “officially scheduled”.
I mostly do things this way to make sure that people who have other time commitments can have well-defined (rather than open-ended) start times and end times, so that they can plan around our meetings in their schedules.
Finding true (rather than only apparent) unity in the truth
The Church (with a capital C) is in fact composed of all people who truly believe—and we are all supposed to be united to such a high degree that we function as one single body, the body of Christ here in the world. However, it is a sad truth that there is much factionalism and us vs. them rhetoric within the ranks of those professing Christianity.
It is not that we want to encourage a form of ecumenism where truth is the casualty; quite to the contrary, the truth in the Word of God is the very thing that unites us. If we focus our hearts and minds upon learning, believing, and applying the Bible—to the exclusion of most all else—we will come to observe that it is easy to find ourselves running side-by-side with a wide variety of people from all sorts of backgrounds, regardless of such things as race, gender, culture, nationality, socioeconomic status, and whatever else it is we imagine divides us. (Compare Galatians 3:28).
In other words, if we dive deep into the Word of God and keep our focus there, we will see superficial differences fade away as the truth takes front-and-center.
Finding this form of fully-realized unity in the truth (no matter our other differences) can be considered another primary goal of these Bible studies. It is a beautiful thing.
Meeting recordings
All of our Bible studies are recorded so that people who miss a week (for whatever reason) can easily catch back up, and also so that it is possible for anyone interested to go back through the discussions over time to revisit them. This is especially useful after it has been months or years, and remembrance has started to fade; repetition is essential to the learning process. Additionally, having this backlog of past recordings also lets new group members benefit from all of our past discussions too.
However, none of these recordings are posted publicly to the internet, but only shared within the group chats. This is important for a couple reasons:
- It helps protect our privacy
- It means we can talk more freely and generally have to be less guarded about what we say, since the recordings will not end up publicly memorialized for all time on the internet
These recordings are for us and only us, basically. I do create public Bible study content on the YouTube channel, but nowadays none of that content comes from our group meeting recordings. (This did not used to be the case; this is a change as of 2025).