As a teenager growing up in the Bible Belt, Zack was convinced the rapture would happen at any moment. If he didn’t want to be left behind, he had to be ready and that meant never missing church, never sinning, and always listening to nothing but Christian music. But when the rapture didn’t happen, his tightly wound faith began to fray. After all, if he had been wrong about the rapture, what else about my faith had he been wrong about? The story of faith lost and found again is the subject of my new book, Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong.

Part memoir, part tour of the apocalypse, and part call to action, Unraptured traces how the Church’s focus on escaping earth for heaven has it mired in decay. Teetering on the brink of irrelevancy in a world rocked by refugee crises, climate change, war and rumors of war, the Church cannot afford to focus on escape in the future when there is so much to do and so many to serve in the here and now. By reimagining what it means to live in the end times, Unraptured uses these signs of the times to help readers reorient their understanding of the gospel around loving and caring for the least of these.

And there may be no better way to talk about this apocalyptic way of life than with BBQ.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: What in the world does BBQ have to do with apocalyptic theology?

The answer is a lot.

Combining his love for BBQ and passion for reimagining the faith, Zack will weave a narrative around the process of making BBQ – while actually cooking BBQ – drawing out various lessons on faith, the apocalypse, and low and slow Christianity.