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If you could share a quiet table with Jesus for two hours, what would you ask—and how would your life change afterward? That question launched David Gregory from a self‑published novella to half a million copies sold and three film adaptations, but the deeper story is how a simple truth reshaped his faith: you can’t live the Christian life; Christ lives it in you.
We welcome David to unpack the journey from The Rest of the Gospel, which distilled Dan Stone’s teaching on union with Christ, to the Perfect Stranger trilogy that invited skeptics into a page‑turning conversation. He explains why short, engaging fiction can carry sound theology further than a sermon, and how a dinner in a Cincinnati trattoria became a global gospel invitation. David also gets candid about the realities of today’s publishing world—why authors now juggle writing, editing, design, and relentless marketing—and how he’s learned to release outcomes to God even when a strong book needs more visibility.
The conversation centers on One of Us, David’s provocative retelling of the four Gospels set in modern America. We explore Manuel, a Mexican‑American mechanic whose words and works ripple across social media, drawing crowds, curiosity, and resistance from government, media, big tech, and religious elites. David shares the storytelling choices behind a mixed‑gender circle of close followers and how the novel addresses current issues while staying faithful to the character of Christ. Most of all, he challenges a common blind spot: Jesus lived as a fully human Son dependent on the Father, modeling the vine‑and‑branch life he now lives through us. If your yoke feels heavy, this reframing offers rest, clarity, and courage for daily trust.
Listen for practical encouragement, honest insight, and a fresh way to see familiar stories. If the themes resonate, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review—then tell us: which scene from a modern Gospel would you most want to witness?
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00:00 - Welcome And Guest Introduction
01:29 - The Rest Of The Gospel: Core Message
05:52 - Why Fiction Reaches Skeptics
08:36 - From Self-Pub To Half-Million Sales
11:26 - The Perfect Stranger Trilogy And Films
15:19 - Expectation, Surprise, And God’s Plans
17:41 - Hard Truths About Modern Publishing
21:29 - Marketing Struggles And Surrender
24:19 - One Of Us: Jesus In Modern America
29:21 - Forces That Oppose A Modern Jesus
32:26 - Controversial Choices: Disciples And Issues
36:21 - Would America Welcome Jesus Today
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Hi everyone, thank you again for joining me on another episode of the Doors Doors show.
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Today on our podcast is um we are part of the Auduri Audio Group which inspires and uplift through discussions, testimonies, and teachings, equipping listeners for meaningful conversations.
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On today's episode, we have David Gregory, who is the New York Times bestselling author of Dinner was a perfect speaker, sold half a million copies.
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The last Christian well he is also the author of the last Christian Christie award finalist for Best Christian Fiction and ten uh other books.
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Three of his books have been made into feature films.
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He is also a Dallas seminary graduate, international conference speaker, and former radio broadcaster.
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David is a leading voice seeking to bring uh the message of Christ to a new generation in unconventional ways and also the worldwide into a deeper experience of Christ in them.
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David, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
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Absolutely.
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Thanks for the invitation.
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Yes.
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I always like to open up with a icebreaker question.
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I noticed you know, you started your writing career when you're a little, you know, older.
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What made you start your writing career, you know, when you got you know older in age?
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Yeah.
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Um the first book I put together was actually a nonfiction book called The Rest of the Gospel.
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And it was primarily the material of a pastor from Kentucky named Dan Stone.
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And I had gone to several retreats or conferences that he had taught at.
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And his message of Christ in us and our union with Christ and learning to live out of our union with Christ was really the best I had ever heard.
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And so uh after a number of years, I approached him and said, Hey, I'd like to take some of your material and put it into book form.
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And he said, Great, go for it.
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And he sent me a bunch of audio tapes.
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I already had a bunch of audio tapes.
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So I listened to about a hundred audio tapes that uh he had done of his uh teaching and uh transcribed all or part of about 50 of them, and it turned into the first book that I wrote called The Rest of the Gospel.
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And I had no idea what God would do with it.
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I thought, hey, if we end up selling a thousand copies of this, great.
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And really I did very little to market it.
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It just took off by word of mouth and has ended up selling over a hundred thousand copies.
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And so um I still run into people.
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I just had a couple of people tell me at a convention I went to in May, they came up and said, you know, if I was on a desert island and I only had two books to read, I would take the Bible and the rest of the gospel.
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And so uh I'm just because it impacted their lives that much.
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And so I'm thrilled to be used by God in a way that uh uh uh it wasn't even my primary material, it was Dan's.
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But God used me to put it into print, and I'm just thrilled that he's used it in people's lives.
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What was the concept of the book?
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What was the premise of the book, and what do you want people to get out of it?
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Yeah, the main premise of the book, I will say, uh, is summarized by three questions that uh someone posed, or three statements that someone posed to Dan that he telling his own personal story, he tells in the first chapter of the book.
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And the three statements were you can't live the Christian life.
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Christ is the life, Christ lives in you, and he will live the life.
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When Dan, by his own admission, fully embraced that reality that God had not called us to produce this Christian life through our own resources, our own strength, our own abilities, but that the only one who can live his life in reality is Jesus, and he has come to live in us in order to live his life through us, then uh it completely changed his lot.
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And when I began hearing uh Dan's message and realized, oh, this is really what the New Testament is talking about, because I saw it all through the New Testament, then it had the same impact on my life.
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And so that really is the core message of the book.
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Why are you so passionate about communicating through fiction?
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Well, my very first book, my very first fiction book, I wrote while I was at Dallas Seminary.
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This was just oh, three or four years later.
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And I had the idea of uh taking some material that I wanted to put into book form, and God gave me the idea of putting it into a brief story of Jesus having dinner in a nice Italian restaurant one night in Cincinnati with a modern-day skeptic agnostic who was just struggling with things in his life, as we all do.
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And so I ended up writing this book that I called Dinner with a Perfect Stranger.
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And so it's basically the premise is what would you want to talk to Jesus about if you had him to yourself for two hours?
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Uh if you were a you know, agnostic skeptic.
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And so my goal was I always kind of considered myself to be the world's worst evangelist, but I was a good writer, and so I just thought, well, I'll just take what I would want to, you know, sit down and tell somebody.
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I'll just take and put that into a conversation between Jesus and this skeptic.
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And my goal really was just to um have something on hand that I could give to people, family, friends, people I met, whatever, that would present the gospel in a very biblical way and at the same time hopefully be engaging and entertaining and something that once they opened and started reading the first couple of pages, they would want to go straight through and read the whole thing.
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Because it's short, it's only 100 pages.
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So I didn't really have any goals for the book beyond that, but I did have a contact at Random House and uh the large publisher, and so I sent them a copy and said, Hey, I self-published this book if you're interested in looking at it.
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Well, they wanted to uh, they got back with me and said, We want to publish your book.
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So I said, Great.
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So we signed a contract.
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Well, they end up selling half a million copies of it.
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And an independent film producer in Louisville calls me up and says, Hey, I want to make a movie over your book.
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And so I say, Great.
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So he makes a movie of the book, and it ends up being seen by millions of people uh on TBN, which has aired it many times.
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And uh then I write two sequels, Random House publishes the sequels, he makes two more movies, and so the whole thing uh just ended up basically putting the gospel in front, literally millions of people between the book and the books and the movies.
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And here is this quote world's worst evangelist being used by God to spread the gospel in this way.
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And so the whole thing just came as a complete shock, uh, came out of nowhere to me, but God knew what he was doing.
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And so my my real passion in writing, uh in presenting the gospel or presenting truth in fiction form is honestly real simple.
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There are a whole lot of people who might read an engaging and entertaining 100-page story that won't sit down and read a 300-page story, which is understandable.
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And so my goal was just, hey, I want to reach people who will read this kind of book.
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And so that really was my passion uh behind writing the book and wanting to see it to get out to people.
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Yeah.
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What was the other two movies that you well that you pushing me into your book?
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And what was the title of them?
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Yeah.
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Uh so the first book was Dinner with a Perfect Stranger.
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The second book was called A Day with a Perfect Stranger.
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So this is a story that takes place three weeks later.
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And the third book is called Night with a Perfect Stranger, and uh, it's a story of the same original character's encounter with Jesus as he's driving one late night from Chicago to Cincinnati uh five years later.
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And so the three movies that Jefferson Moore, the film producer, made were uh The Perfect Stranger, that's the first one.
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The second one is called Another Perfect Stranger, and the third one is called Nikki and the Perfect Stranger.
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So is it um through the through the three movies?
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Do we see the character who is the agnostic?
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Yeah, we see him becoming more and more closer to God, and maybe at the end, you know, um accepting him as Lord and Savior?
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Or not to happen?
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Actually, he does that at the very end of the first book.
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Okay.
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He finally, through the course of this dinner, because he thinks he's just sitting, he doesn't realize, I mean, he gets an invitation to dine at an Italian restaurant with Jesus of Nazareth.
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Well, who's gonna believe that?
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And so he goes thinking, well, this is just a prank, some friends of mine are bullied, but I'll go see what they have in mind and I'll get a good dinner out of it.
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And so during the course of his dinner with this guy who claims to be Jesus, he ends up figuring out, hey, this really is Jesus.
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I mean, he knows things that nobody else would know.
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He is, he's he's talking with me in a way that nobody else would talk with me.
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And so he finally, by the end of the of the first book, puts his faith in Christ and and receives Christ.
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And so uh the second book, A Day with a Perfect Stranger, Jesus encounters the first character is is named Nick.
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Jesus encounters and sits next to Nick's wife on an airplane flight from Cincinnati uh to Dallas and then a connecting flight from Dallas to Tucson, and they happen to be, they happen to be sitting next to each other on both flights.
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And so he the book is about his conversations with her, and his conversations with her take a totally different tone.
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He doesn't say, hey, I'm Jesus.
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Actually, she figures that out on her own by the end of the book.
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And so the third book, A Night with a Perfect Stranger, and the third movie, goes back to the original character, Nick, and it's five years later.
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Nick's been a Christian for five years.
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He's kind of doing all the Christian stuff that he's been taught to do, you know, at church and so forth.
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And it's just not really working very well for him.
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He doesn't feel really close to God.
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He doesn't seem to be living the Christian life in the way that he feels like he should be living it.
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And so um he actually ends up running out of gas on the interstate.
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He pulls uh at midnight, he pulls off on the shoulder, and there in his headlights is Jesus, whom he of course recognizes because he had dinner with him five years before.
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Jesus comes uh over to the passenger window and says, Hey, can I hop in?
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And so they spend the rest of the night driving and you know, talking, and Jesus essentially talking with them about, hey, you're not the one that's intended to live this life.
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I am the life, and I am in you to live it through you.
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And I want you to walk by faith in that reality, just like Paul says in Galatians 20 2.20.
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I've been crucified with Christ.
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It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.
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And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in him who lives in me.
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Now you mentioned earlier that, you know, your first book, you know, got 500,000 copies.
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Yeah.
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So what was your expect and I know you said, you know, you'd be happy if a thousand, you know, were sold.
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Right.
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What was your taking of of what that book, you know, would become?
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Did you have any expectation?
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You know, honestly, I didn't.
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As I said, uh with Dinner with the Perfect Stranger, when I wrote it, I just self-published it.
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I had some copies sitting in the garage.
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I just wanted something that I could use to share the gospel with people.
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And the fact that God took this thing and ended up putting it in the hands in book form and movie form of all these people around the world, it's just like, okay, this was completely unexpected.
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But God is, you know, he's able to do whatever he wants to do with the whatever we end up being able to do in the way that he's gifted us and the abilities that he's given us.
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And so obviously I'm thrilled that that he saw fit to do that.
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Yeah.
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What would you say to, you know, my audience and maybe somebody's listening and they're wanting to become an author, or maybe they ha maybe they sold a book and it's not doing well, you know, that type of thing.
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What would you say to them?
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What encouragement would you have you know, would you give them?
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Well, the first thing I would say was, well, I could relate to you if your book's not selling well, because I've had plenty of books that haven't sold very well either.
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So just because you have one book that sells really well doesn't mean that something you write 10 years later is gonna sell well.
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The publishing industry has changed so much in the last 20 years since Dinner with a Perfect Stranger was published.
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Back then, the publishers did, I mean, uh Random House did a huge amount of marketing for Dinner with a Perfect Stranger.
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That wasn't unusual for publishers to do a lot of marketing at that time for books that they wanted to invest in.
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And so the writer's job really was to write the book and then just to do what the publisher told them to do.
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Hey, we set up five radio interviews, here they are, call the radio station at this time and be on the air for 10 or 15 minutes, or whatever it might have been.
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That has totally changed.
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Authors now not only have to write the book, they have to almost always, unless you have a name that that everybody knows.
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Uh, I mean, if you're Donald Trump and you write a book, you don't have to spend a lot of time marketing it.
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But you have to not only write the book, you have to uh if you self-publish it, you have to be the one to get it edited, you have to be the one to do the cover design and the interior layout, and you have to be the one to market it.
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And so oftentimes, and I certainly find this to be the case, that's the hardest thing.
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For me, writing a book is a lot easier than marketing a book because I'm not the world's greatest marketer.
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And so it's a real challenge, even if you had a book that you think is good.
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For instance, the last one I wrote is a full-length novel called One of Us.
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It came out the last half of last year.
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It hasn't done real well as far as sales go.
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And I think the book is really good.
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I had a good author friend say, tell me, he said, honestly, I think you have another bestseller on your hands.
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I think this is better with dinner with a perfect stranger.
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But it hasn't done very well, and that's because it hasn't been marketed very well.
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And I thought it would, I thought word of mouth would produce more sales, but it really hasn't.
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So I'm still working through that.
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That's in God's hands.
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I've gotten to the point in my career where if I write something that I think is really good, and not everything I write is, but if I write something I think is really good, and it's like, hey, I think a lot of people would really like to read this book, and it doesn't sell well, I've really gotten to the point where I'm able to say, you know, God, this is in your hands, and you do with it what you want to do with it.
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Ultimately, I can't make something succeed.
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I know how you feel.
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I've been there, done that, I I did my own book, my own autobiography.
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Yeah.
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I had to re-edit it and try to sell it again.
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And a lot of the sales that, you know, from my book came from when I was speaking and would travel and I would, you know, have a box and just have the book and the box and which makes sense, because you had a platform you were speaking.
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Yeah.
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Put them out on the table and and sell them that way.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Your books in the past have not shy away from conf controversy.
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What controversial choices have you made in one of us?
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Well, as I said, one of us was my is is my latest book.
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It has a real simple premise.
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Basically, I've taken the story of the four gospels in the New Testament and simply transferred them from first century Israel to 21st century America.
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And so essentially the book asks the question okay, what would it look like if Jesus' first appearing was here and now, as opposed to first century Israel?
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Now, admittedly, everything doesn't translate.
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We don't have a temple, we don't have the same religious system, etc.
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But my goal was to write a book that uh was true to the to the gospels in in the the stories that are being told and in the character of Christ, but to write it in the here and now, essentially to give people kind of an outside-the-box look at Jesus.
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You know, we um we get so used to the stories, especially in the gospels.
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I mean, they become very familiar to us.
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And so I wanted to write something that somebody would read and say to themselves, oh, I've never really quite looked at that story that way.
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You know, here's the story of Jesus and the woman at the well, or the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, or the story of, you know, of Jesus teaching the Sermon on the Mount or whatever.
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And I want somebody to say, oh, I've never quite looked at it that way.
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You're right.
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That's really what the Gospels are saying.
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And I have a deeper understanding of the person and the teaching and the work of Christ having read this book.
00:20:07.410 --> 00:20:11.650
And so to accomplish the book, I had to make some choices.
00:20:11.890 --> 00:20:14.370
Okay, where's Jesus going to be from?
00:20:14.529 --> 00:20:18.769
And so Jesus, the Jesus character in the book, his name is Manuel.
00:20:19.170 --> 00:20:23.250
He is an auto work he is an auto mechanic from McAllen, Texas.
00:20:23.490 --> 00:20:27.009
And his father is Anglo, his mother is Mexican.
00:20:27.330 --> 00:20:41.170
And uh the story starts actually where the Gospel of Mark starts, with this John the Baptist character who's a Mexican preacher, who wanders every day into the Rio Grande and starts preaching, and he attracts a big following.
00:20:41.410 --> 00:20:50.450
And basically the story just goes from there all the way through Jesus' crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.
00:20:50.690 --> 00:20:58.130
And so it's very true to the four gospels, and yet I've changed the setting and the time.
00:20:58.529 --> 00:21:11.730
And so basically it kind of asks, okay, what would it look like for Jesus to be interacting uh with uh software programmer and accountants and truck drivers instead of fishermen and first century shepherds?
00:21:12.529 --> 00:21:13.090
Yeah.
00:21:13.890 --> 00:21:36.850
Who were the people that in the end of the book were crucifying he everyday people or yeah, I had to decide, okay, if Jesus, if his first coming were to modern day America, what are the forces that would end up aligned against him?
00:21:37.250 --> 00:21:42.610
Because of course when you read the gospels, there are various forces that align to oppose Jesus.
00:21:43.250 --> 00:21:44.930
Because he was a threat.
00:21:45.250 --> 00:21:47.330
And so I had to ask the same question.
00:21:47.410 --> 00:21:56.289
And so essentially the forces that oppose him are largely the government because he's a threat to their power.
00:21:57.650 --> 00:22:13.810
Uh the news medium doesn't really want to report uh the real story, uh, big tech, which uh is not real thrilled with what the Jesus character is telling people, and so they want to censor what's online about him.
00:22:14.210 --> 00:22:30.210
And uh And the religious leaders of the day, who in my book are not Christians because Jesus hasn't come yet, so of course there is no Christianity, but it's kind of a watered-down form of Judaism that's kind of been passed along to the Western world.
00:22:30.450 --> 00:22:36.289
And so the religious leaders of the day are largely opposed to him, just like they were in Jesus' day.
00:22:36.529 --> 00:22:44.529
And so all of these forces kind of align against him to try to do away with him just like they did in the first century.
00:22:44.850 --> 00:22:45.490
Yeah.
00:22:46.450 --> 00:23:05.970
When we talk about controversies, was it people coming to you or was a publishing company coming to you and saying, hey, this may be a very controversial book because of, you know, being um set in modern day America, or what was that?
00:23:06.610 --> 00:23:09.890
I I had to make some decisions uh about various things.
00:23:10.049 --> 00:23:11.810
I mean, as I said, you know, who is Jesus?
00:23:11.970 --> 00:23:16.930
Okay, Jesus ends up being a Mexican-American from McAllen, Texas.
00:23:17.170 --> 00:23:18.450
Who are his disciples?
00:23:18.610 --> 00:23:20.130
Are they all going to be men?
00:23:20.690 --> 00:23:24.690
Or are they gonna be, you know, 50% male and 50% female?
00:23:24.850 --> 00:23:31.170
I ended up going with seven of his closest followers or guys, and seven of them are young women.
00:23:31.330 --> 00:23:35.490
And uh, I mean, they're all fairly young, just like they were in the gospels.
00:23:35.730 --> 00:23:42.049
And um, was I trying to make a statement about the role of women in the church by doing that?
00:23:42.370 --> 00:23:43.250
Not really.
00:23:43.650 --> 00:23:54.289
I was much more just trying to write a story that would appeal to the modern reader, and it seemed odd to me.
00:23:55.330 --> 00:24:04.130
In modern times, it would seem odd to me to write that story with Jesus, uh, Jesus' closest followers all being guys.
00:24:04.370 --> 00:24:10.289
It's just like, okay, this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in the here and now.
00:24:10.450 --> 00:24:16.610
And so um, I wasn't really trying to make a theological or uh ecclesiastical point.
00:24:16.850 --> 00:24:26.130
I was just trying to ask myself, okay, what makes the most sense from a modern storytelling standpoint?
00:24:26.370 --> 00:24:36.210
And so I also had to decide, okay, what modern issues, what current issues is Jesus going to address, and what are people going to confront him with?
00:24:36.450 --> 00:24:51.730
And for instance, in the book, one of the issues he ends up having to address is the whole transgenderism issue, because that he is he is uh confronted with that at a at a in a question and answer session that he has at a university.
00:24:52.049 --> 00:24:57.890
And he just says, well, in the beginning, God created the male and female.
00:24:58.210 --> 00:25:03.410
So he does exactly what he does in the gospels, which is he just says, this is what the scriptures say.
00:25:03.570 --> 00:25:05.650
God created the male and female.
00:25:06.049 --> 00:25:14.769
And so that doesn't sit well with people that are on the other side of the issue in the book, but Jesus just, the Jesus character just speaks truth to them.
00:25:14.930 --> 00:25:17.570
It's like, well, this is the reality.
00:25:18.930 --> 00:26:30.580
Outside of the book itself, how do you see modern day America and the people in America, how do you think that they would treat Hegel if he were walking around modern-day America today?
00:26:32.019 --> 00:26:42.100
I think, and this is what I end up portraying in the book, there are a lot of people who would end up being attracted to him just as they were in the first century.
00:26:42.180 --> 00:26:43.940
They would end up wanting to follow him.
00:26:44.180 --> 00:26:48.340
He would be, of course, this huge internet and social media phenomenon.
00:26:48.500 --> 00:26:55.620
I mean, there would be videos of him, you know, basically, you know, every minute of his life that people could video.
00:26:56.180 --> 00:27:00.100
Anything he did in public would immediately be scrutinized.
00:27:00.580 --> 00:27:16.580
But I think there are a large number of people that would be they would be interested from a uh from intellectual curiosity, but not that interested as to what he has to offer.
00:27:16.900 --> 00:27:20.740
And that's just the way it was like in the first century.
00:27:20.980 --> 00:27:26.500
And there would be those who would actively oppose him, just like it is in the first century.
00:27:26.660 --> 00:27:37.300
I I think the truth is the the response to him today would be essentially the same response that people had to him 2,000 years ago, because people just don't change.
00:27:37.460 --> 00:27:44.580
I mean, human nature is the same, and uh so you know, different people are gonna respond to him in different ways.
00:27:44.900 --> 00:27:45.460
Right.
00:27:46.500 --> 00:27:52.900
What is the shirt missing in the life of Jesus and why is it so critical?
00:27:53.300 --> 00:27:54.180
What is the first what?
00:27:54.420 --> 00:27:54.900
I'm sorry.
00:27:55.460 --> 00:27:58.900
What is the shirt missing in the life of?
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