Award-winning talk show host Dr. Oz and NY Times best-selling author and preacher DeVon Franklin are teaming up for a new weekly science and faith series called “Faithful Fridays.”
Airing on The Dr. Oz Show throughout the month of February, the series will feature a new topic each week to help viewers find peace, happiness and renewed faith. With interviews, feature stories and a panel of faith leaders including Hillsong’s Carl Lentz and best-selling Christian author Priscilla Shirer the series will show the link between faith and well-being.
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Dr. Oz hopes the show will bust the myth that science and faith can’t go hand in hand. A practicing physician with a minister for a mother-in-law and a wife who attended theology school, faith has always been integral to Oz’s own life.
“Science is so good at answering questions it’s designed to answer,” Oz says. “[But] it’s not designed to answer other questions and that’s where you’ve got to find some way through. Faith happens to be the path that I’ve chosen personally, but you’ve got to find a way, otherwise you’ll have a big question mark there.”
The idea for the new series came after Franklin visited The Dr. Oz Show last year.
“We brought DeVon on to talk about a tactic that I thought was going to be interesting but that I didn’t think would be that influential in my life which was the 7th Day Restart,” Dr. Oz tells Guideposts.org
The host had done faith-centered programming before – most notably with pastor Rick Warren – but Franklin’s segment on the importance of observing the Sabbath really hit home.
“I thought, ‘Well I go to church, I take time [off],’ but Devon’s idea was, ‘No, it’s not some little deviation. You actually need to work hard on that seventh day on things you don’t normally work hard on,’” Dr. Oz says. “Epiphanies don’t happen that often in my advanced age but when they happen, you remember them.”
The host gave Franklin a call at the beginning of this year, wanting to know how they could work together to bring faith to his audience.
“The idea just came organically,” Franklin says. “We talked about Faithful Fridays and the month of February and that’s where the Blessed Challenged came from which is, ‘How do you live a blessed life for thirty days? What are the changes and adjustments you can make in those thirty days that really are the jumpstart for what we hope will be long term transformation in someone’s life?’”
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Oz hopes even the skeptics will tune in for this new series aimed at giving practical advice for people struggling with everything from stress and money troubles to negative thinking.
“Being a skeptic doesn’t mean you’re close-minded,” Oz says. “It means you’re asking. You’re searching. So I actually like skeptics because they ask the questions we ought to be addressing. One of the best parts about the whole program is it is just accessible, straight up material. If you really think about it, it’s stuff you ought to be doing anyway.”
At least, the duo hopes, the show will provide some hope and inspiration to those in need.“Whenever there’s a transition of power politically or even in your family; if someone passes away, or your boss gets fired or you change jobs, whenever there’s a major change in someone’s life — research shows this — it’s the perfect time for faith,” Franklin says. “Faith becomes the anchor, faith becomes ground zero from which they can build their life again. Hopefully, through watching the show, no matter what they’re seeing on other stations, all the rhetoric and that kind of stuff, they’ll watch this and say, ‘I’m going to be alright. My family’s going to be okay.’ And their faith will be the affirmation of that and put them on a path to ultimately achieving that.”
