GodInk Podcast Reaches Adventist and Non-Adventist Youth

Two Michigan pastors' podcast features productive conversations for youth and young adults. 

In the summer of 2022, Garhett Morgan and Jermaine Gayle pulled into Camp Au Sable’s parking lot, prepared to speak for a week of Teen Camp. When they arrived, they had already planned out what their messages were going to be, but they hadn’t decided who was going to be speaking when. As they sat down to prepare one last time, they had an idea. What if they stood up and spoke all of the messages together as if they were having a conversation? “We did the first night in tandem,” Morgan shares, “and it was a blast, so we decided … to do everything together.”

Their messages then began to take the form of a conversation, and Gayle says, “At the end of the week, the teens challenged us to start a podcast.”

The idea was taken to heart, but Gayle and Morgan didn’t do anything with it. In 2023, they were asked to speak at Teen Camp again. Campers and staff again reflected their desire to see Gayle and Morgan create a podcast, so “we jokingly passed out sticky notes,” Gayle says, “and asked campers to write down podcast names.” They received over 100 submissions, a much more resounding response than they were expecting.

Someone—and “we don’t know who,” Morgan says—wrote down the name GodInk, and Morgan and Gayle loved it. “The idea behind it,” Gayle says, “is tracing the handwriting of God through the messy stories of Scripture.”

After that, planning began in earnest, and the first season of the GodInk podcast, Moses: When God Rewrites Your Story, was released on December 30, 2024. The first episode, “God at a Funeral,” tackles the story of Moses’ death.

The podcast, geared towards “young people, collegiants, and young adults,” according to Morgan, aims to have productive conversations about topics youth are interested in. “Young people seldom hide from difficult conversations … they don’t hide from them, they want to talk about them,” Gayle explains, “and they’re eager to listen to someone process those things with them.”

“One of the complaints we hear often from young people,” adds Morgan, “is that they don’t really get answers—they get a canned answer…they don’t want a black-and-white answer so much as they want a discussion of the principle of things.”

GodInk aims to be a platform designed for difficult conversations, viewed through a spiritual and biblical lens. “Having difficult conversations,” Morgan says, “teaches youth how to think and speak spiritually. It might get uncomfortable, but let’s think about it together, and let’s see how God relates to this, and try to see it through His eyes.”

It isn’t only Adventist youth who are affected by difficult topics, such as “racism, issues of sexuality, or church problems,” Gayle shares. “There is a non-Adventist audience out there, too.” GodInk’s difficult conversations “have not only attracted our own young people but also non-Adventists,” Gayle says.

Each episode of the podcast follows a similar pattern. It opens with a narrative at the beginning of the podcast in the first person. “You’re listening as if you are Moses,” says Gayle. “We want to make it as real as possible so that listeners think, ‘What would I do if that was me?’”

Once they have dived into the story and connected with their listeners, Gayle and Morgan “unpack” and “process” the lessons found in the story. “We just want it to be biblical,” Gayle says, and he further explains, “We aren’t just talking about issues for the sake of talking about issues, but we are discussing them because they appear in the biblical narrative.”

Three months after launching, the podcast had over 970 listeners and has received excellent reviews.

Morgan and Gayle both have a passion for youth and enjoy working with young people. “Young people ask questions and want to have conversations,” Morgan says. “I love to have conversations with them and learn their perspective, because it is different than mine, and I can learn from that.” Gayle and Morgan have a burden and a passion for youth because, as Morgan states, “If we don’t invest in our young people, then we as a church are going to grow very obsolete when trying to reach young people in the future.”

Currently, the entire first season of GodInk, Moses: When God Rewrites Your Story, has been released and is available wherever you get your podcasts. The second season, The Church in the Wilderness, will be released in August 2025.