Dear Fellow Believers,

Rodney and I begin a new video series today, bringing forward into the video world the ZenderTalks I made in the spring and summer of 2001 from my studio in downtown Greenwich, Ohio—above the post office, across from the bank, and down the road from the grocery store.

A believer named Stan Hartmann and his wife Ruth became supporters of this work around early 2000, I think, and they invited my entire family out to Seattle, Washington in the summer of 2000. It was a great time of fellowship. Stan arranged for a meeting, which was conducted at someone's home in Seattle, very near Puget Sound.

Stan and Ruth actually lived across the mountains in a city called Wenatchee, in the high desert. Stan marketed apples.

Stan and another fellow invited me to lunch the day after the meeting, and it was during this lunch that Stan talked to me about starting a publishing company. I had yet to write a single book. Needless to say, Stan inspired me, and the name of our company, Starke & Hartmann, is named after him; the "Starke" is the county in Ohio were my sister Kelly lives—Stark—with an "e" added for flair.

It was also in Washington—whether at this lunch meeting or not I can't remember—that I told Stan my idea of doing a kind of talk show. (Mind you, this was eight years before my first YouTube video.) I'm not sure where I got the idea to do an Internet show. I was very new at the Internet. I don't think I was aware of any other show of the sort that then existed—especially not on the topic of the glories of God and Christ. When I think back, I believe most of my inspiration came from listening to Conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh. Stan said, "I think you can do it."

So I went home and the first thing I did was to write, "How to Quit Church Without Quitting God." That must have been the fall of 2000. Then, in the spring, I worked on launching the little talk show I'd been thinking about.

I have no idea what program I used on my computer to make these shows. I don't even remember what kind of computer I had. (I believe it was the computer where the boxes that looked like a cow.) My friend Charlie Cronk (from Grace Cafe) helped me hook up a microphone and showed me how to record.

Two years before I had secured a little office about 1.5 miles from my home in Greenwich, Ohio. It was in a 150 year-old building. My office was on top of the post office. I probably spent three hours making each 7-minute show. I decided to call it ZenderTalk.

I wanted to do the same thing with this audio show as I did with my newsletter, The Idle Babbler Illustrated (started in 1994), which was to just throw my personality full into it. I had noticed that not a lot of that was being done in the world of concordant Bible studies and mature truth. But this is what I did, and people liked it.

Much of my time was spent in getting the music right, putting in sound effects, basically trying to make the show sound as professional as possible. I strove for everything to sound good. I figured God was worth it, and I still think that way. I feel that we ought to put the best production qualities that we can into the presentation of God---without getting too overly caught up in it, of course. It can be professional without being overly slick. I knew there was no way that my manner of speaking could ever be construed as overly slick, so I didn't have much to worry about.

After doing fifty shows, it became so hard and so time-consuming that I stopped. Did that ever cause a ruckus! People had become addicted to the show, as I broadcasted it faithfully every day, five days a week. I think I had about 800 listeners per show. The uproar, as I said, was considerable when I stopped. It may have been several months later when I started up again and recorded shows 51-130. After that I stopped for good to concentrate on writing.

From that old office above the post office in Greenwich, Ohio, I wrote 1) How to Quit Church Without Quitting God, 2) Flawed by Design, 3) Martin Zender's Guide to Intelligent Prayer, 5) The Really Bad Thing About Free Will, and 6) Martin Zender Goes to Hell. I also wrote my novel, "Goddess of Nazareth" there, and a second novel, yet unpublished, called "The Banger Four."

I moved out of that office and back home in 2007---I think. I made my first YouTube video from my back porch in 2008. I would not make another YouTube video until 2009 with the series known as, "The Crack O' Dawn Report."

Please enjoy these early recordings. You will laugh as you hear how many times the nearby train crashed the show. It was all part of the charm, I reckon.

The beautiful thing about the truth that I and others teach is that it's timeless. These shows are as valuable now as they were twenty-three years ago. I thank God for that.

Thanks for listening and watching.

I am remaining your brother in Christ and servant in the Lord,

--Martin