Academy of the Bible with Colby F. Maier

Tracy Campbell is a Christian actor, writer, and producer who has auditioned for more than a thousand film and television projects and booked fifteen. He also walked away from roles he could have had, including one his own managers warned him would get him blacklisted. He started auditioning in Atlanta at eight years old, signed with an agency that also represented Raven-Symone, Dakota Fanning, and the Massey brothers, and was on Disney Channel's radar as a kid. His mother turned it down. She felt the Lord had told her they were not supposed to take the opportunity, so they didn't. He went to Bible school instead, and booked Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns during his second year. He later worked on House of Payne and had a small role in Mean Girls 2. In this conversation, he and Colby Maier talk about what it actually costs to follow Jesus in Hollywood, and what it protects. IN THIS EPISODE: Why Tracy tells young actors to finish Bible school or a leadership program before going anywhere near the entertainment…

Can you be spiritually alive and physically falling apart? Dylan Gemelli spent years at the top of the fitness, nutrition, and biohacking world and says none of it produced real health until God was at the center. In this conversation he and Colby Maier take apart one of the most common assumptions in Christian life, that the body and the soul are separate things. Dylan Gemelli is a prominent figure in the fitness and biohacking industry, known as the wellness revolutionary, the aging optimizer, and the mind-body connector. His expertise spans fitness, nutrition, cellular health, neuroscience, peptides, hormone optimization, and anti-aging, and his podcast reached number one in Health and Fitness in October 2025. He also spent years successful, wealthy, and miserable. He describes going to bed every night feeling off and being unable to explain why, surrounded by everything he thought he wanted. What changed was not a protocol, a supplement, or a new training split. It was putting God first, reading the…

If the enemy can't destroy you, he will rush you. In this episode of the Academy of the Bible Podcast, Colby F. Maier works through why hurry is a spiritual problem and not just a scheduling one, and why God forms you before he sends you. It starts in Mark 3. Jesus goes up a mountain, calls the twelve he wanted, and appoints them, but notice the order. He appointed them that they might be with him, and then that he might send them out to preach and heal. The first appointment was not production. It was presence. Their authority came from having been with him. A.W. Tozer named the danger: we become so engrossed with the work of the Lord that we neglect the Lord of the work. Many of us are chasing the assignment we believe God gave us while skipping the relationship that was supposed to supply it. Then Luke 2, where Jesus is twelve years old in the temple, listening to the teachers and asking questions. When his parents find him he says he had to be about his Father's business. He wasn't preaching. He wasn't…

Your AI companion always agrees with you. In this episode of the Academy of the Bible Podcast, Colby F. Maier asks what AI companionship is doing to Christian community, identity, and the friendships that actually form us. A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that 72% of American teenagers had used an AI companion, and about half used one regularly. One in three said they had talked through something serious with an AI instead of a real person. In 2026, a Stanford team published a study finding that AI models affirm people's actions about 49% more often than other humans do — even when those people described doing something wrong. After a single conversation with an agreeable AI about a real conflict, people felt more certain they were right. They were less willing to apologize and less willing to repair the relationship. And they preferred that AI. They trusted it more and wanted to come back. This is not an argument against artificial intelligence. Colby is clear that technology is agnostic — not…

Christian hip-hop artist Braille spent his first ten years as a believer without anyone teaching him the Bible. Once someone finally did, it set him on a path out of full-time music and into pastoring a local church. He read Scripture like a fortune cookie, flipping around for something that seemed relevant. He didn't know what an Ephesus was. When someone started teaching him the Bible in context, it changed what he wanted to do with his life. In this conversation, the hip-hop artist from Beautiful Eulogy and Humble Beast Records shares why he stepped away from music to pastor Saving Grace Church in Milwaukie, Oregon. Not because music was wrong, and not because every Christian artist should do the same. Because he knew what it was like to wander without discipleship, and he wanted to give what he'd received. We talk about inspiration versus formation, why most growth in Christ happens in ordinary faithfulness nobody applauds, why he spent up to fourteen hours writing a verse you hear in forty seconds, what…

Preston Sprinkle spent three years studying what the Bible says about women in leadership before he would say what he thought. He was raised in circles where women could not teach, preach, or pastor, and it made sense to him. Then he kept meeting people he deeply respected — people who loved Scripture and loved Jesus — who read the same verses and came to a different conclusion. So he admitted he didn't know what he believed, and started over. "I never want to give a thin answer to a thick question. I want the strength of my passion to match the depth of my study." In this conversation we cover the two camps and the variations inside them, what leadership actually looked like in the first-century house church, the Greco-Roman background on women's status and agency, Romans 16 and the ten women Paul names in his ministry, a deep dive into Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia, and the three hardest passages — 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 14, and 1 Timothy 2. Preston also shares his own story: an athlete who hated…

You can know the Bible and still miss Jesus. The demons prove it. In this episode of the Academy of the Bible Podcast, Colby F. Maier picks up where Episode 1 left off. If the problem was never a lack of information, then what actually turns knowledge into transformation? His answer starts in history. Two cultural movements taught the modern world, and the church with it, how to think about change. The Enlightenment said information would change us. Romanticism said experience would change us. The church inherited both, and neither one has produced transformed lives. Jesus offered a different way. He never said "know about me." He said "follow me." In the first century, following a rabbi meant apprenticeship: ordering your whole life around a master until you became like him. Through John 5:39 and James 2:19, Colby shows that even the demons have more knowledge than any of us, and it has saved none of it. The devil has information. Information does not save. This episode traces the path from information to…

You can know the Bible and still not be changed by it. In this first episode of the Academy of the Bible Podcast, Colby F. Maier makes the case that the modern church doesn't suffer from a lack of information — it suffers from a lack of spiritual formation. There are people with PhDs in theology who know Scripture inside and out, and whose lives remain untransformed. Knowledge alone cannot make us new. Colby works through James 1:22 and the warning against being hearers of the word only, then the parable of the wise and foolish builders in Matthew 7 — where both men heard the same teaching, both built, and both faced the same storm. The only difference was that one applied what he heard. Along the way: what Dallas Willard meant by the renovation of the heart, why Timothy Keller called the gospel the A to Z rather than the ABCs of the Christian life, and a question worth sitting with: you are already being discipled, so by whom, and by what? The episode closes on union with Christ, and why the gap between…

What if you could learn from some of the world’s leading Bible scholars, theologians, pastors, and Christian thinkers without going to seminary? Welcome to Academy of the Bible with Colby Maier, a podcast created to help everyday Christians understand the Bible, think deeply about their faith, and follow Jesus more faithfully in the modern world. Each episode brings you biblical teaching and conversations exploring Scripture, theology, apologetics, church history, spiritual formation, culture, and some of the biggest questions facing Christians today. Because following Jesus involves more than knowing what Christians believe. It means learning why we believe it, how the story of Scripture fits together, and what it looks like to faithfully live within that story. Whether you’ve studied the Bible for decades or you’re just beginning to ask deeper questions, you’re invited to pull up a chair. Follow Academy of the Bible now so you don’t miss the first episode. Learn more at academyofthebible.org.