Brian Zahnd, a popular conference speaker and author of A Farewell to Mars, has signed a contract for two more books with InterVarsity Press. The first of the two books, tentatively titled The Wood Between the Worlds, is scheduled to release in Winter 2023.

“We are so pleased to continue our publishing relationship with Brian Zahnd,” said Elissa Schauer, managing and associate trade editor at IVP. “This next book focuses on the cross—how it helps us understand who God is and how that knowledge can transform our lives. What we appreciate about Brian is that he writes with both empathy and authenticity as he points us toward a genuine faith that can flourish in this age. He is the pastor so many of us need for this moment in time.”

Zahnd’s first book with IVP, When Everything’s on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes (November 9, 2021), explores the question of whether it’s possible to hold on to faith in an age of unbelief. Zahnd extends an invitation to move beyond the crisis of faith and helps his readers understand and move toward the journey of reconstruction. In his next book, Zahnd looks to the cross to make sense of God in this age of unbelief. He says that everything that can be known about God is in some way present at the cross.

“The cross of Christ is the wood between the worlds,” Zahnd writes. “There is the world that was and the world to come, and in between those two worlds is the wood upon which the Son of God was hung. As in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the wood between the worlds is a portal. In this world of sin and death we do not despair, because we believe there is a portal that will transport us to a world where, in the beloved words of Lady Julian, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’”

Brian Zahnd is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a nondenominational Christian congregation in Saint Joseph, Missouri. He and his wife, Peri, founded the church in 1981. Zahnd is also the author of several books, including Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, Water to Wine, Beauty Will Save the World, Unconditional?: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness and others.