Thread by @BrianZahnd

There are real challenges to sustaining a vibrant Christian faith over the course of a lifetime. I fully understand the need to rethink and to adjust course in our faith journey. I’ve had my own experience with this. (1/6)

In midlife I discovered that the Christianity I knew was too weak and too thin, too compromised with consumerism and too accommodating to Americanism. To sustain a vibrant Christian faith I had to find a Christianity worthy of the Christ whose name it bears. (2/6)

The good news is that such a Christianity exists. It’s always existed — though rarely, if ever, is it the dominant expression of Christianity. Sometimes we have to go on a theological journey to find a faith that can endure for a lifetime. (3/6)

I describe my experience with this as my water to wine journey. In my forties I made the faith-saving discovery that Jesus can turn a weak, watered-down Christianity into a rich, robust, intoxicating Christianity. I speak from experience. (4/6)

I know what it is to let go of an anti-intellectual theology, a doom-oriented eschatology, a ticket-to-heaven soteriology, a hyper-individualized ecclesiology and discover that something far, far better had been there all along. (5/6)

Ever since my initial encounter with Christ as a teenager, I instinctively knew that Jesus was the beauty that saves the world. What I faced in midlife wasn’t a deficiency in Jesus, but a falseness that marred the beauty of Christ. (6/6)