‘I packed my bags and left consumer Christianity behind’

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Review of Water to Wine: some of my story by Brian Zahnd

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Brian Zahnd was a pastor of a successful church in Missouri that he had founded and led for over 20 years:

“From a certain perspective things couldn’t have been better. I had a large church with a large staff supported by a large budget worshiping in a large complex. I was large and in charge! I had it made.”

But, aged 45, he had a crisis provoked by increasingly dissatisfaction:

“I was weary of the tired cliches of bumper-sticker evangelicalism. I was disenchanted by paper-thin Christianity propped up by cheap certitude. I was yearning for something deeper, richer, fuller.”

Water into Wine tells the story of how he found something ‘deeper, richer, fuller’ and how this turned his faith from water into wine.  

Gateway

It started in 2004 when he read Dallas Willard’s influential book The Divine Conspiracy. This was a gateway which drew him into reading theologians he had not engaged with before: Augustine, Aquinas, Karl Barth, Thomas Merton, Eugene Peterson, Richard Rohr and N.T. Wright.  The effect was transformative:

“Over the next couple of years I read myself into a completely new and much richer place”

Zahnd begins to see how much his approach to ministry was influenced by idolatry:

“My speciality had been the idol of certitude…I knew how to give easy answers, claim the promises, and cast everything in black and white. I was sure of everything. But all of that had changed”

Deconstruction and pain

Water to Wine is a journey of theological deconstruction and re-construction. It will be helpful to many who want to follow Jesus but are disillusioned with cliché, shallowness and narcissism within church culture.

But as a church leader, this change for Zahnd did not come without cost and he lost friends and many members of his congregation because they do not approve of his theological transition.  

“These were days of pressure and pain. The pressure came from living on the fault-line between two shifting tectonic plates. One plate was moving me away from a compromised Christianity co-opted by consumerism.”

‘Grape-juice Christianity’

The pain and cost of faithful struggle is a central theme:

“I once heard an Italian winemaker say that to produce good wine the grapes must struggle, they must suffer. The taste of good wine is the taste of struggle and suffering mellowed into beauty. There’s a deep truth there that applies to far more than winemaking – it also applies to the formation of the soul.”

Zahnd pinpoints how suffering is at odds with popular Christian culture:

“American Christianity, on the other hand, is conditioned to avoid suffering at all cost…Grape-juice Christianity is what is produced by the purveyors of the motivational-seminar, you-can-have-it-all, success-in-life, pop-psychology Christianity. It’s a children’s drink. I don’t want to drink that anymore. I don’t want to serve that anymore. I want vintage wine. The kind of faith marked by mystery, grace and authenticity.”

Discovering liturgy

Zahnd’s transition was not just theological but also changed his spiritual practices. The Eucharist becomes more central and he celebrates it every week in the church services. He also discovered the importance of more liturgical ways of praying:  

“We have made the mistake of thinking people can pray well with desire and instinct alone…we just end up recycling our own issues – mostly anger and anxiety…we say prayers that begin and end in our own little self.”

In contrast, liturgies carry the distilled wisdom of generations and express divine truth. He challenges those who dismiss a ‘formal track’ to guide prayer and worship:

‘The objection I often hear to the use of liturgy is that it is dead. But that’s a category mistake. Liturgy is neither alive nor dead. Liturgy is either true or false. What is alive or dead is the worshiper. So what we need is a true liturgy and a living worshiper.”

Embracing mystery

Brian Zahnd’s sermons and books have been immensely nourishing to my walk of faith in recent years. He expresses deep theological truth in an accessible, generous and spiritually vibrant way.  He has strong views but avoids cheap shots, cynicism or sniping at others.

Towards the end of the book he quotes the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (interestingly John Mark Comer uses the same quote in Practicing the Way):

 “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’, one who has ‘experienced’ something, or he will cease to be anything at all.”

The world does not need more watery ‘consumer Christianity’. We need the deeper, mysterious ‘full-bodied’ wine of Jesus’ grace and truth.

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• Buy Water to Wine: some of my story by Brian Zahnd
• The Wood Between the Worlds: a Poetic Theology of the Cross by Brian Zahnd
• Watch Postcards from Babylon: Evangelicals in the shadow of Christian Nationalism
• Visit Word of Life the church where Brian Zahnd is pastor