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Brandy Anderson, Team Weird, and Transcending Church

Brandy Anderson, Team Weird, and Transcending Church

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 3:50 am by Gregory T. Smith

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Brandy Anderson, Team Weird, and Transcending Church 2026-10-16T18:11:08-08:00 Gregory T. Smith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I met author Brandy Anderson on Heretic Happy Hour, when podcaster Keith Giles decided that some of us belonged on “Team Weird.”

Brandy Anderson, Team Weird, and Transcending Church

To read is to transcend our own judgments and get curious about another person’s perspective. (Composite image created by Gregory T. Smith on Canva)

Team Weird

Brandy and I both published our books through Quoir. That was the initial connection. Keith Giles and Matt Distefano, co-owners of Quoir and hosts of Heretic Happy Hour, invited us for a conversation about Carl Jung, tarot, Jesus, and Lao Tzu. That was followed by “Exorcisms, the Satan, and Demons,” and a follow-up episode titled, “Demons, Ghosts, and Spirits.” Brandy published Through the Veil: A Glimpse into the Afterlife, and is a contributor to the anthology, Quantum Theology, Volume 1. Episcopal priest, spiritual director, and former professional athlete Gil Stafford, whose Quoir books blend Christian mysticism, depth psychology, and non-traditional spirituality, also joined the show.

I remember being a little dubious about Keith assigning us the moniker, “Team Weird.” Really? I thought, I get that the others are weird—but not me!

Besides Heretic Happy Hour, Brandy also invited me to be a guest on her own podcast, Transcending the Rabbit Hole. Somewhere along the way, “Team Weird” stopped sounding quite so objectionable. I think I’m ready to embrace it.

To Read is to Transcend

That may be partly why I enjoyed Brandy’s new book, Transcending Church, as much as I did. Brandy is a follower of Jesus—and she’s also bold enough to go to places I wouldn’t go on my own. I like to think of myself as spiritually experimental. But Brandy is a spiritual pioneer! She asks questions I would not think to ask. She makes claims that leave me thinking, Well, I’m not sure I’m going with you there—but maybe this is what makes her book so enjoyable.

And perhaps it’s just what good reading is supposed to do—help you see the world from someone else’s perspective. To read is to transcend our own judgments and get curious about another person’s perspective.

A Guest In Someone Else’s Brain-House

I’ve written recently how being a good guest is better than hospitality. So, I’ve also been thinking that to read is to become a guest in someone else’s brain-house. When someone invites you into their home, you don’t walk through the door judging their décor and announcing which furniture you’d move if you lived there. Or, at least, you shouldn’t.

If you’re a good guest, you don’t criticize the pink paint. Instead, you appreciate the unique personality that chose that color. You look around. You listen. You might ask why something is where it is. And you notice objects you never would have thought to use as decorations in your own home. By the time you depart, you may not decide you’d like to live there. But you can still give your blessing to the house and leave a better person for having been there.

It seems to me that this is a much healthier way to read theology than many of us were trained to do. Too often, seminary and Sunday school elevate certainty over curiosity and dogma over discovery. Students of Christian apologetics learn to play the host instead of taking the position of guest.

So, when we enter another person’s brain-house and read their thoughts, we think we get to set the rules. We critique their premise, perspectives, and positions. We decide which furnishings we agree with and which we would give to Goodwill. We treat every unfamiliar thought as if it doesn’t belong—all the while forgetting that we are the guest.

The ego loves being the host. The position of the guest requires more humility. To read is to transcend our own judgments and get curious about another person’s perspective. If we’re not going to do that, we might as well put down the book. So, I took the position of the guest when I took up Brandy’s new book, Transcending Church.

Transcending Church

Anderson’s central idea is more nuanced than simply, “leave organized religion.” She recognizes that religious systems can provide language, structure, community, and orientation for people who need direction. But when those same structures that once supported spiritual growth begin to constrain it, Anderson encourages transcendence.

Anderson says, “There comes a moment in the spiritual journey when the structures that once felt supportive begin to feel constricting.” Then, she says, “It signals a shift from seeking the sacred through systems to recognizing it directly (pg. 171).”

This transcendence does not necessarily mean abandoning church altogether, or becoming anti-Christian. She doesn’t advocate replacing fundamentalist religion with equally fundamentalist spirituality. Instead, As I read her, religion is the finger that points to the moon, not the moon itself. Religion is the cup that contains Truth, not Truth itself. This is what she means by “transcending church.” Not abandoning it but being willing to exchange certainty for discovery.

Come to think of it, this is the way Jesus approached religion as well. When religion substituted external authority and conformity for love, truth, and a direct encounter with God, Jesus challenged it. Anderson says, “Jesus does not abolish religion, but reveals what it has been pointing toward all along (pg. 174).” That resonated with me.

Salvation as Restoration

So did Brandy’s movement away from punishment and toward wholeness. She considers sin less a matter of divine bookkeeping and more a condition of fragmentation. We become misaligned when we believe the world’s lie that we are separate from our Creator. She sees the cross as liberation rather than appeasement. Resurrection becomes not only something that Jesus experienced, but a pattern that continues within our own restoration. For Anderson, Christ’s mission was “not to save us from the punishment of an angry deity, but to restore us to wholeness (pg. 35).”

Logos and Tao

Another place where I found common ground with Anderson was in her discussion of the universe’s foundational principle. Referring to the Logos, or “Word” of the Gospel of John, she writes, “If Logos is the ordering intelligence of reality, then it cannot be reduced to a doctrine, a metaphysical label, or a theological abstraction. Logos names the way in which the world coheres (pg. 207).”

Then she expands that: “To speak of Logos is to speak about the deep architecture of reality, the pattern that persists beneath all things, the coherence that holds multiplicity without dissolving it into sameness (pg. 208).”

Finally, she said, “If Logos names the deep structure of reality, then Christ names its human expression (pg 209).”

I found myself scribbling in the margin, “The Logos is the Tao… not synonyms, but similar modes of the same Essence.” In my book, Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Way of Love, I have written more extensively about this, even observing how translators used the word Tao to render the Greek word Logos.

That was a room in Anderson’s theological house where I felt very much at home. There are other rooms where I probably wouldn’t put down roots. And that’s okay. I don’t think the value of Transcending Church lies in agreement with every point of Brandy’s wide-ranging cosmology**. Its value lies in what happens when we open ourselves to encounter an expansive spiritual vision without immediately reaching for either absolute agreement or argumentation.**

Transcending our Assumptions

Maybe, as readers and as travelers in this world, this is one of the things we most need to transcend: the assumption that our own tradition must always be the host.

Perhaps we don’t need some opinionated version of orthodoxy standing at the head of the table telling everyone else what they need to believe. Perhaps, like Alice, we can find ourselves growing, shrinking, and adapting to new ways of being when we humbly eat what is served.

I’m glad I read Anderson’s book—and hope you will, too. May it leave you less wedded to the need for certainty, and more open to the possibility that the Way of Jesus is larger than the religious systems we have built around it. And if embracing that makes me part of Team Weird, I think I’m finally okay with that.

Click here to get Transcending Church: Following Christ Out of the System and Into the Sacred.

Check out related articles on my blog:

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About Gregory T. Smith

I live in the beautiful Fraser Valley of British Columbia and work in northern Washington State as a behavioral health specialist with people experiencing homelessness and those who are overly involved in the criminal justice system. Before that, I spent over a quarter-century as lead pastor of several Virginia churches. My newspaper column, “Spirit and Truth,” ran in Virginia newspapers for fifteen years. I am one of fourteen contributing authors of the Patheos/Quoir Publishing book “Sitting in the Shade of Another Tree: What We Learn by Listening to Other Faiths.” I hold a degree in Religious Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University and also studied at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. My wife Christina and I have seven children between us, and we are still collecting grandchildren. You can read more about the author here.

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