Redemptive Ana...What?

When we launched our podcast a couple years ago, we did it with the purpose of relating faith and spirituality to various animated movies and TV shows. Some episodes were hits and some were misses (just the name of the game sometimes), but that did not stop us from putting out content. We genuinely loved and still love what we do, but we had to come up with a way to convey what we were trying to say.

Several months ago, we were having dinner with a couple of friends from church. Our podcast came up in conversation and explaining what our podcast was about was a bit of a struggle. While trying to explain, one of the friends said, "oh so you make redemptive analogies". Without missing a beat, I replied with, "what is that"? Never having heard the phrase before I was very curious. We state this phrase in our intro, so I wanted to make sure I knew what it meant. Simply, put it is the method of delivering the gospel through a relatable medium to a group of people or certain sect of people.

This has been used for many years apparently. However, when you think about it this was very evident in the 90's and early 2000's within the Christian community. For the first time, we had Christian pop, rock, punk and even rap. Christian romance novels were the new Harlequin novels. Hollywood movies starring Kirk Cameron about the end of days were the new Mission Impossible. All these methods weren't changing the gospel but delivering it in a way to be relatable to those who may not have known the gospel through traditional means.

After talking with our friends about this, I said "we need to incorporate that phrase". Thus, here we are season three. with the intro to tell you what it is we do. While not all of our episodes are super faith based (it is never meant to be a sermon), we will always do our best to open the door for conversation for listeners to dive deeper in their faith. Whether we discuss the similarities between Jesus and Tanjiro from Demon Slayer, or if we just have a discussion regarding faith displayed in the movie Jonah (as told by Veggietales; we will be there delivering that nugget or two of truth.

Above all else, we want to use redemptive analogies for brighten the day of our listeners. What redemptive analogies can you see in our culture today?