Finding stories of faithfulness
and the courage to listen.
About Credible Witness
Credible Witness is a weekly podcast featuring Christian people navigating social tension and personal sacrifice in pursuit of their calling to follow Jesus. If you’ve ever struggled to reconcile your faith with the brokenness of the church—you’re not alone, and there’s something here for you in these stories.
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto, executive director of Christians for Social Action, the podcast invites listeners to listen with courage and imagine a more credible church—rooted in love, truth, and communal hope.
In this inaugural 2025 season, every Monday we’ll feature stories, perspectives, and wisdom from people wrestling with—and bearing witness to—the credibility of Christian life in the United States.
Often it’s the church that most undermines faith by copying culture rather than following Jesus.
Asking Hard Questions About the Church
Together, we’ll listen closely to the lives of Christians asking hard questions about what it means to be a credible church today. The complicated questions, the painful questions, the profound yet beautiful questions. The questions we’re sometimes afraid to even ask, let alone answer.
Throughout its history, the church has faced a near constant temptation to assimilate, to imitate, and to capitalize on the dominant powers of the world.
This is no less true today as implausible versions of Christianity grow.
Often it’s the church that most undermines faith by copying culture rather than following Jesus. This diminishes the credibility of the gospel and reveals a failure of Christian moral imagination in action.
Bearing Credible Witness to the Gospel
Jesus came to redefine reality marked by a shockingly radical love, an act of justice for the vulnerable, a communal imagination that offers hope, joy, justice, and common flourishing.
The church is meant to be a credible witness to this living reality.
Each episode of the podcast is an invitation to journey with one person as they share their story of Christian faithfulness in their own words from their own context in light of all that their life includes.
We hear from pastors, leaders, scholars, and everyday believers from different Christian denominations, social locations, gender, geography, ethnicity, and political views.
Some stories emerge from joy and enduring hope. Others are shaped by deep pain, hurt, and struggle. All of them bear credible witness to Christ in ways both ordinary and extraordinary.
Each voice reminds us that the church is not a fixed institution. It’s a living relational body, still becoming, still beloved, not through just one cultural lens, but through many, together.
An alternative to the echo chambers that divide us, each guest challenges us to listen bravely and recognize our own blind spots, especially those that divert the church from showing itself as God’s new humanity by the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is Credible Witness. Finding stories of faithfulness and the courage to listen.
Featuring Guests From
Our Host Nikki Toyama-Szeto
Nikki Toyama-Szeto is a public theologian and the Executive Director of Christians for Social Action.
With a deep commitment to justice, spiritual formation, and global faith movements, she creates space for courageous conversations at the intersection of belief and action.
As host of Credible Witness, Nikki brings humility, clarity, and a fierce hope for a Church that reflects the love of Jesus.
Credible Witness and Broad Christian Faith
Credible Witness finds its footing in the varied neighborhoods of the Protestant tradition within the Christian faith in the United States. The voices you’ll hear carry the accents of many theological, cultural, and denominational homes, each with its own gifts, struggles, dialects, and narratives.
Yet we hope to speak as part of a Way that is far older, deeper, and wider. The Protestant and Evangelical Christianity today grow from deeper historical and theological roots, nourished by the scriptures, the early Church, the Roman Catholic tradition, and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Their liturgies, theological reflection, pastoral witness, and sacramental life have profoundly shaped the soil from which Protestantism emerged. And their faithful presence continues to enrich the one Church of Jesus Christ across the globe.
Though this podcast dwells mainly within Protestant lanes, we seek to walk with full awareness of the shared inheritance we carry with our sisters and brothers of other Christian denominations. We acknowledge not only our debt to their history, but also our need for their ongoing wisdom and companionship in the gospel, which is itself an act of Christian credibility.
During our launch season, our hope is to engage Protestant voices in honest, generous conversation—keeping sight of the shared inheritance we hold with all those who follow Jesus, and never forgetting that the city of God is far larger than any single street on which we live.
Masthead and Production Notes
Credible Witness is brought to you by the Rethinking Church Initiative.
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto.
Produced and edited by Mark Labberton, Sarey Martin-Concepcion, and Evan Rosa.
Website design by Cause+Effect.
Thanks to Fuller Seminary, Christians for Social Action, and Brenda Salter McNeill, whose book inspired the our show title.
And special thanks to all of our conversation partners in the ReThinking Church Initiative and network, both public and private.
And above all, thank you for your courageous listening, and your own credible witness to the gospel.For more information, visit CredibleWitness.us.