No Degree. No Seminary. So Why Did the GC Call Him Anyway | unScripted EP 22
20 Jun 2026
They said he had no degree and no seminary. Six weeks later, he was running a GC ministry. Now Jim Howard is leading Adventist World Radio — and what AWR is doing around the world right now will surprise you.
In this episode of unScripted, Shawn Boonstra sits down with Jim Howard, director of AWR (Adventist World Radio), for a wide-open conversation about faith, failure, unexpected calling, and what it actually takes to reach the most unreachable people on earth.
Jim's story starts with a party house in Missouri, a failed engineering degree, and a Bible he picked up just to "not embarrass himself." What happened next changed everything. No seminary. No formal theological training. Just a converted accountant giving Bible studies on his lunch breaks — until the calls started coming.
But this episode isn't just about Jim. It's about a little device called a God Pod reaching into Hutterite colonies in North America, radio signals piercing into North Korea from Guam, a husband and wife in Uganda secretly listening to the same broadcast — and showing up to be baptized at the same place at the same time.
And then Jim drops something Adventists don't talk about enough: generating millions of media interests might actually do more harm than good if the local church isn't ready to receive them.
In this episode:
How Jim Howard went from accounting to AWR without a theology degree
What a God Pod is — and why a 14-year-old in a Hutterite community is writing a book on Adventism because of one
AWR's presence in Asia, Europe, PNG, Madagascar, and North America's Salem Network
The "broadcast to baptism" vision — and the Global Bible School connecting interests to local churches
One Voice 27 and what it means for your local church right now
🕐 Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro
0:43 – Introducing Jim Howard / AWR
1:04 – Jim's path: engineering, parties, reading the Bible by accident
4:52 – Becoming a bi-vocational pastor with no theology degree
8:17 – How Jim ended up at the GC ("good news, honey" rejection story)
10:44 – What AWR actually does — radio, shortwave, and the God Pod
13:49 – A 14-year-old Hutterite boy and the book he's writing
21:06 – The Uganda couple secretly listening to the same broadcast
23:01 – What makes Jim Howard excited to get up in the morning
23:29 – Salem Network, Hope Lifts 365, broadcasting into 14 North American cities
24:34 – Global Bible School and the "broadcast to baptism" problem
25:52 – How to get involved with AWR
🌐 Find AWR: awr.org
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