When the Podcast gets Personal: Parasocial Podcasting and the Quiet Work of Presence

Phillip Dieke

There was a moment, a few years ago, that surprised me with how much it landed. I’ve been a faithful listener of a tech and business podcast twice a week for years. It became consistently woven into my routines. At the end of every episode, the hosts read the same list of names: producers, editors, the people who make the show possible. One day, they paused.

They shared that a longtime producer was leaving. They named the loss honestly and clearly but not dramatically. They said, “It feels like we’re losing part of the team.” And even though I had never heard this producer speak, never knew their voice, I felt it too. The rhythm would change. Something familiar would be gone.

I remember tweeting at them saying something like, It feels like we lost part of the family. They responded simply, “That means we did our job.”

That exchange has stayed with me. Because what it named was the reality of a parasocial relationship. A relationship that isn’t reciprocal in the traditional sense but is still real. These people were in my ears for hours every week. They shaped how I thought, what I noticed, what questions I carried. They were present with me while cooking dinner, driving, walking the dog. Not at me but with me.

Podcasting works this way.

There is an intimacy to having that voice in your ears that mirrors something ancient. Long before screens, faith has always been carried by proclamation, storytelling, prayer spoken aloud. The podcast isn’t a rejection of that tradition but it might be one of its newest expressions. A sermon gathered people at a set time and place. A podcast meets people on their schedule, in their bodies, in the texture of daily life.

That doesn’t make it better but it does make it different. And that difference matters.

The way we host our podcast reflects this conviction. It isn’t a lecture. It isn’t content delivered at a listener. It’s a table that we want listeners to feel like they are sitting at. Two co-hosts, usually a guest or two, curiosity held openly. The hope is never that someone simply agrees but that something stirs. That the questions we’re asking are already alive in the listener, waiting for language. On their terms

That’s where the parasocial relationship does its quiet work. It becomes a safe container. Listening is low risk. No parking lot anxiety. No wondering if you’ll fit in. No fear of saying the wrong thing out loud. You’re allowed to explore. To disagree. To linger. To stay anonymous. In that way, podcasting often functions as a threshold space especially for people who have complicated histories with church or religious communities.

And that, too, is part of the tradition.

Formation has always happened through repetition and presence. Through voices we return to. Through words that slowly rewire how we imagine God, ourselves, and the world. Even when I don’t agree with everything a podcast says or it values push against mine. I am still being mindfully formed. Sometimes by clarity. Sometimes by contrast. Sometimes by forcing the deeper question.

Our Parasocial Podcast Community

For us, this season has been about inviting people not just into ideas, but into practice. We are focusing on practices rooted in nature, embodiment, and communal presence. The podcast becomes the doorway, not the destination. A place of resonance that eventually invites people back into physical spaces of connection that are often not with us, but with others in their own contexts.

And sometimes, it doesn’t. Some listeners will never show up in person. And that’s okay. Relationship for the sake of relationship has always been the ethic. Not conversion. Not capture. Not metrics. Presence. Digital ministry doesn’t exist to funnel people somewhere else. It exists because relationship itself is holy whether mediated through a pulpit, a forest trail, or a pair of earbuds.

Which brings me back to that producer leaving. When the producer tweeted back to me and said, “That means we did our job,” they weren’t celebrating attachment. They were naming faithfulness. The quiet success of showing up consistently, honestly, humanly. They did this so well that I, on the other side of the microphone, felt connected, shaped, accompanied.

If podcasting can do that, maybe it’s simply the work we get to do. And if someone someday feels the loss when we’re gone? Maybe then we’ll be able to say it too:

We did our job.