The Town of Odyssey

So Dave Griffin is an interesting guy. Like a lot of people who have worked on Odyssey in the past, he's obviously not perfect and his personal values don't necessarily line up with the ministry producing Odyssey. It's cool to me when Focus works with people like that openly without feeling like they have to apologize for their partnerships (though there was the infamous firing of Kevin McCreary for less than respectable reasons...). Jesse Harnell is obviously another case, though, of someone who is definitely a secular person, but who Focus has had a pretty respectful relationship with. A bunch of AIO fans got pretty up-in-arms at him a couple weeks ago about a picture of him and his less than church appropriately dressed wife at a mini put course, though.
The relationship AIO has with non-Christians or semi-secular professional people is interesting to me. I had a pretty good time with Dave recently actually diving into this idea for a while and unpacking his history with the show.

[CONTENT WARNING: Language, Suicide] Interested to hear everyone else's thoughts on the tension in working with non-Christian actors on a distinctly "Christian" show. Obviously, you can't only work with perfect people or else no one would be able to be on the show, but let's say, for example, do you think they should work with people whose values pretty generally contradict the values of the show? Do you think Dave's values now as a militant liberal trying to stamp out the flames of evangelicalism and conservativism are too at odds with the messages of Odyssey for them to work with him still? Is Odyssey primarily a conservative/evangelical show these days, or are they getting more "woke" these days? I haven't listened in a bit, haha

Ooh, bookmarking this one to watch soon

I'm out of the loop on recent episodes but one thing I've liked about AIO for *most* of its run was that, while Focus on the Family is considerably far right evangelical-conservatism, the show typically downplayed that to be for a more general audience. Some of the early ones were a bit more hardlined, I always assumed Dobson was more hands on in those days but I have no idea if that's the case.

Back in the day it wouldn't have mattered for the most part of who worked on the show, because pre-internet hardly anyone even knew, haha. I could actually understand why they would potentially avoid certain actors, since now they have to list them in the end of the show and a kid could google them and see their views/less Christian projects, etc. (the WWE has used "well a kid could google this person" as an excuse to leave people out of their Hall of Fame, for example). I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, and it seems like they aren't really doing that, but I would understand the point if they did.