Brian Zahnd
@brianzahnd.bsky.social
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Founding pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri; author of eleven books, including The Wood Between the Worlds.
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Peri’s photo from the car as we drove to the mountains last month.
True Christianity advances without coercion. We persuade by love, witness, reason, rhetoric, Spirit, and, if need be, by martyrdom; but never by force, never by the sword, never by the coercive apparatus of this state.
*I know I’ll be criticized for the lack of diversity and I accept that criticism. I’m not telling you what it should be but what it actually is. I’m still trying to learn.
The ten who have most influenced my theology.* (In alphabetical order.)

Walter Brueggemann
Sergius Bulgakov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Bob Dylan
René Girard
David Bentley Hart
Stanley Hauerwas
C.S. Lewis
N.T. Wright
L. Glen Zahnd
This Sunday I begin a new three-part series on the story of Job: DARK AS MIDNIGHT
* Empires are rich, powerful nations who believe they have a divine right to rule other nations and a manifest destiny to shape history according to their own agenda. As such they are an idolatrous affront to the seminal Christian confession that Jesus is Lord.
A Christianity that promotes the interests of empire* is a Christianity that rides the back of the beast as the whore of Babylon.
(The painting is Rembrandt's "Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem," 1690. I have a print of this painting in my study.)
The prophets and psalmists of lament show us how to find faith and hold on to hope in the time of tears. I'll preach on this tomorrow.
Confessing Jesus Christ is Lord
And pledging allegiance to America
Are incompatible commitments
Choose one
Choose this day
Choose whom you will serve
This Sunday I'm preaching in Denver. Amazing Grace Church, 10AM. My sermon is called, "The Lord Said to Satan..." You're invited. www.agcdenver.net
This photo is upside down. It is also an illustration about the nature of reality and illusion, heaven and earth, the eternal and the temporal. I'll talk about this next week at our Mountain Retreat where the theme is "In Search of Narnia."
Beware of isms. There be devils.
The rapture happened. I’m in heaven. 😎
A sermon in which I attempt an interpretation of what may be Jesus’ most difficult parable—the parable of the Unjust Steward.
youtu.be/bYOLy7OeAjo?...
A Strange Parable, A Curious Grace || Pastor Brian Zahnd
YouTube video by Word of Life Church
youtu.be
It grieves me to see people I’ve known for years (some as far back as the Jesus Movement of the 1970s) seduced by a mean-spirited culture-war Christianity that is but a perverse caricature of the authentic faith formed around Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, it grieves me terribly.
The task of preaching is not to bring commentary on current events but to bring a word from elsewhere.
Some of us turn off the lights and we lay
Up in the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly

~Dylan
“If any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name of Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”
~The Last Battle
When theology is forced to bow to a particular political ideology, you are going to get bad theology. The Subject of theology cannot be accurately described or curtailed by the politics of this age.