Welcome

Ladies and gents, welcome to Voices of Life, the podcast with topics related to the apostolic faith in the 21st century. Let's talk about what interests you here on Voices of Life. 

Hello and welcome to our first podcast. My name is Pastor Sascha Wey and I'm the pastor here in Mannheim, Germany. This church has been established many years ago, about 40 years ago or so, over 40 years actually. It was established by a missionary and then my dad took over the church and he had been the pastor for a long, long time. So the last 2 years ago I have been the pastor here and I'm so happy not to be the only 1 here, especially now on this podcast. 

I have a good-looking and competent friends and brothers of the church here at the table. And why don't you just introduce yourselves? 

I mean, good looking, yes, competent, I don't know. I am Justin Gregg. I am 1 of the leaders of the Young Adults group in this church, or for most of you who know, Hyphen group. 

My name is Steven Bechberger, and I'm the music director here in this church. 

My name is Sebastian Engbert, and I'm part of the youth leader team here in this church. 

Yes, so we are planning to do a podcast, as you can tell. The question is, there are so many podcasts, why do we need another podcast, actually? 

Yeah, that's a very good question. And the reason that we said we want to start this podcast is because we want to spread the apostolic faith and want to really make people know about it and find new channels for that. And you have to know, we started this podcast as a German podcast also, But we are an international church here in Mannheim, so we also have attendees and members of the church which only speak English. So for those, we of course also want to record English episodes. And for anyone else who's a native English speaker or maybe lives somewhere in Europe and can this way hear us from Germany through English because as we all know it's 1 of or maybe the world language. 

Yeah and to get it out of the way right away. 

Yes. 

We are not native speakers in English. This is our second language, most of us, so you have noticed it so far, I guess. Please be patient with us. We try our best. That's right. 

So our podcast is a little different. It has a different style, maybe. Justin, maybe you can say a little bit about that. 

Yes, it's, I would say a more laid back podcast, we could say. You can imagine us sitting in a cafe. We're not sitting in a cafe right now, but you can imagine 4 friends sitting at a cafe and talk about different themes about God and life in general. We won't also have a Bible study for most of y'all. It's just us having conversations about different things. 

We are also 4 people with different age groups. I won't say a number, so don't worry, Pastor. Oh! But we are all different in, of course, everybody's different, but we are in most fields very different. I like sports. 

My brother here, Sebastian, likes computers. My brother here, Steven, he is awesome in music and loves music as well. So we're all different here, but we still sit here and have a goal and we want to talk about the Lord and everybody is welcome here. It doesn't matter what interests you. Of course, you have to have an interest of the Lord and of faith, of course, but you are welcome here no matter where you're from, how old you are, how young you are. 

Right. So basically, we are not going into very theological, deep discussions with the big, big words. So if that's something you're looking for, we are the wrong podcast. But if you like to have interesting subjects and interesting discussions and also some fun in between, then you are here at the right podcast. But there are some other things that we would like to address with this podcast. 

Maybe, Brother Stephen, you can tell a little bit about it. 

We have thought about different topics that we want to go through concerning, first of all, the apostolic faith and the apostolic life in everyday life. How do we react to certain situations? How do we react to everything that is going on in the world? We have wars, we have rumors of wars, we have all kinds of things that are going on. How does an apostolic person react to these things? 

The other thing is that we will put a focus on is our everyday life with God. How do we incorporate our practices like prayer, like fasting, like Bible reading? How do you do that in such a busy life with family and friends and school or work? Whatever you're doing right now and wherever you are in life, We all have different kinds of busyness, but still we need to take time for those practices. And that's what we want to talk about. 

How do we incorporate those practices? What did we learn? What did we hear from others? What did we experience? So it's going to be also just an exchange of experience, like Justin said, talking about, hey, what do you think about it? 

How do you feel about it? Right. And in the end, another thing is, another topic, of course, there are many more, but 1 thing that I want to touch is also the subject of lifestyle. So it has to do a little bit with our faith, but it's also like everyday things. For example, how to organize your time. 

Time management. And I know that we have some people here on this table that are very good 

in this. 

I'm not 1 of those. 

I was 

about to say, I'm not, not me. 

We are working on it. 

Yeah, but there's organization and possibilities to organize your time or your day and structure it and that's also something we're going to touch on. 

So like you said, things we've learned also and things we've heard. And we do have some guests also on our podcast. And we like to hear from them. So we do have recorded already a few episodes. That's not a secret. 

And we had some guests here already. And usually those are pastors when we have a church rally or we have conferences when they come over and visit us in Germany. In Mannheim, sometimes they are available for a podcast. And so you can look forward to it. It's going to be some great episodes that we have already prepared for you. 

And they are basically when they are from the States in English, but maybe brother Sebastian you can. 

Yeah. I mean, as we are in Germany, it probably or it will happen that sometimes we have only German speaking guests, maybe, but a lot of Germans speak English, thankfully, so most of the time you'll hear something from that guest, no matter if he's German or not German. Also, as I already mentioned, we have this podcast in German and we publish in German and in English. So if you are maybe able to speak German or you are learning German and want to improve it or something like that, you can also always check out our German episode. And because they are not 1 to 1 or how do you say they are not exactly the same, you will pick up some things in 1 episode that you didn't pick up in the other 1. 

So that's a great opportunity then for you. Now coming or talking about publishing episodes, we publish every Monday in German and every Thursday in English. Yes sir. So every week you can hear something from us and we hope that you will become 1 of our faithful listeners and be there for us to provide feedback and join us on this journey of starting this podcast. We are really excited for it and we thank you for tuning in. 

Sebastian you mentioned feedback. It's also very important. Like we said in the intro, you want to talk about things that interest you. So just leave a feedback, leave a question in the comment section and just give us topics which we should talk about. So we want to that we can talk about it as well. 

So just leave comments in the comment section. 

Very important. 

Yeah. So as you can tell, we are excited for this podcast and we hope you will enjoy our podcast as well. And I think there are so many other things we could say about our podcast the best thing is just listen to it and we already published 1 episode for you guys so just tune in and listen to it we would love to get your feedback. Alright, 

See you in the next episode! Until next time!