Christianity Today September 14, 2026 8 min signal 2026-09-14

Wendell Berry, 'bad-weather churchgoer'

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

September 14, 2026

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Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Wendell Berry—who died on August 31 at the age of 92—deeply influenced countless Christians through his fiction, essays, and poetry. I count myself among his adoring fans. To me, Berry was a prophet, critiquing the church’s excesses and idols while proclaiming what it could be, a membership of “many small, fragile lights in the dark.”

All this influence, on me and others, happened despite Berry being, as he described himself, a “bad-weather churchgoer.” That’s ironic since he has deeply impacted and informed my own churchgoing, rain or shine, more than almost any other believer has.

I discovered Berry’s work in my early 20s while living just outside of Los Angeles, a long way—both geographically and culturally—from my hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Berry’s hometown of Port Royal, Kentucky. At the time, I was attending a church that met in a local high school and included the name of our palm tree–lined town in its title.

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As the church grew, it added satellite sites, telecasted its sermons, and soon dropped our town’s name for something more “global.” Once attendance grew to over 5,000, it turned one of its sanctuaries into a permanent sound stage, guaranteeing better lighting and polish for viewers tuning in from around the world.

The more I read Berry during those years, the greater dissonance I felt watching my pastor projected on a screen, speaking to us from miles away. Berry helped me realize that making room for a sound stage meant crowding out an embodied congregation who’d previously filled a space each Sunday.

The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson wrote that under Berry’s “tutelage,” he learned “that it is absurd to resent your place: your place is that without which you could not do your work. Parish work is every bit as physical as farm work. It is these people, at this time, under these conditions.” Berry went so far as to claim that “the Devil’s work is abstraction.” If we are not rooted in place, we abdicate the stewardship of what has been entrusted to us. My church outside Los Angeles couldn’t serve Communion to a streamer, no matter how sophisticated its sound stage.

I eventually left that megachurch in favor of a church a few towns over with a decidedly DIY approach to Sunday mornings. Soon I found myself duct-taping cords to old carpet, preparing for a borrowed sanctuary to fill with 50-some folks. My new congregation offered me the physical bread and wine of the Eucharist feast rather than a projected sermon and an absent pastor. It saw its local community as its primary ministry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, my church learned of a grassroots food distribution service that also provided legal support for people experiencing discriminatory and predatory home rental schemes. We have continued to support that service, without fanfare, for the six years since.

Berry’s writing helped persuade me to leave one church for another. And as I navigated my 20s and wrestled with my place within Christianity and country, his other critiques provided much-needed perspective. He wrote of the church’s complicity with racism (1970’s The Hidden Wound) and its attraction to nationalism (2022’s The Need to be Whole). He warned of lofty theology (1993’s Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community) and arrogant, overconfident belief systems (2005’s The Way of Ignorance). His novel Jayber Crow (2000) is so full of ecclesial censure and encouragement that it deserves its own article.

But behind all this wisdom remains that “bad-weather churchgoer” quip. And it troubles me. How could a Christian who extolled the value of staying in a particular place, with a particular people, not be especially involved in his own parish? Can you offer credible advice to the Church if you’re not part of a church?

Granted, I’m no Berry scholar. But I know of only two brief mentions of his specific congregational life—a 2014 introduction to a collection of poetry and a 2019 interview. “On Sunday mornings,” he writes in that introduction,

I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams. But the gospels, for me, were not a church discovery. I had finally to carry them into the woods and read them there in order to see my need for them.

And here he is in that 2019 interview:

I go [to church] in bad weather, and am glad to. … I go up there and that place is full of ghosts for me. I can look at those pews and see my grandfather, and his friends, and others who are dear and close to me still. I’m sitting there very often with my children or my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren.

His wife, too: Tanya “played piano regularly at church, taught Sunday school, sang in a women’s local choral group, hosted meals for folks after Sunday service,” says the writer Gracy Olmstead in a Berry Center lecture.

Perhaps Berry, too, was more involved than he let on in these offhand remarks. (He said he “often” attended, after all.) Part of me suspects his reticence to name his congregation or share further details was an act of deference to the private lives of his fellow worshipers. As he put it to an interviewer in 1991,

A writer inevitably makes public a considerable part of his or her inner life. I have never felt that that implied any necessary publicizing of private life. There are a number of good reasons to maintain a certain privacy, and chief among them is courtesy. One’s life, after all, is not entirely, or perhaps not at all, one’s own. One cannot publicize one’s own private life without publicizing at the same time the private lives of other people.

Still, though, I wish Berry had spoken more forcefully about the importance of the local church —not just as a site of ancestral legacy but as crucial to Christian life. As the director of admissions at a seminary, I spend every fall encouraging our new students to find a church to attend weekly, not just occasionally. From the beginning, believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). Paul wrote letters not to countries or cities but to specific churches.

To be clear, I never spoke with Berry about his bad-weather attendance. I wasn’t able to sit with him on his front porch on a Sunday afternoon and ask open-ended questions about how his prophetic warnings impacted his ability to sit in the pews, or how he understood an individual faith within the body of Christ.

That said, I’m blessed to have someone with whom I can talk. Joe Brown—my grandfather and lifelong resident of the same rural place in Oklahoma—has been attending the local Evangelical Friends church for at least 75 years. He started while courting my grandmother, and they eventually raised two sons in the pews.

When I was 5, my mom and dad grieved in that church, alongside Grandad Brown, for my grandmother’s funeral. Then, a few years later, we all sat in that same sanctuary and watched him stand at the altar across from his new bride, my new grandmother. He looked to the pastor officiating the service—who was also his hunting buddy—and asked when he could finally kiss her.

Today, Grandad Brown is almost 92. He and my “new” grandmother stand at their church’s front door every week, greeting each person who enters. My grandad—just like Berry—sits in that sanctuary alongside his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. His granddaughter leads worship, and his grandson is now the head pastor.

I called him last week—he was at work in his furniture store—and asked him what advice he’d give about sticking with a church over a long period of time. He thought for a moment. “I think you start with [a particular church], and you get to know everybody,” he ventured. “Then, when grandkids come along, as well as their children, it turns into one big family. One big family makes you not want to leave. You want to stay with it.”

Thanks to Grandad Brown, I believe that churches, including his in Oklahoma and mine in California, are a necessary part of the localism my beloved Wendell Berry so revered. I’m glad for the rainy Sundays he made his way into his pews. I’m glad for the Sundays I make it into mine too.

Drew Brown is a writer currently pursuing his doctor of ministry degree at Western Theological Seminary. He writes on his Substack, Slow Faith.

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