As he holds a plastic-bottle version of Voss, the artesian water sourced from Norway, which typically comes in a sleek glass bottle, the Rev. Christian Anderson talked about financial constraints. “We have a budget, like $3 per episode,” said Anderson, vicar of operations at St. Mary’s Church in Stuart, Florida.
Directing his comments to his company across the table, he said, “You’re a real classy dude, every time I see you … your hair looks good, you always smell great,” and told him the reason for his choice of beverage. “I wanted to respect your diet, you said, ‘Halal?’”
In this January 31 episode of The Pour, an online talk show hosted by Anderson, his friend Imam Fahad Mirza was his guest. As its name implies, Anderson shares a drink chosen in honor of who’s on the show.
Telegenic with perfectly styled hair, the Episcopal priest, who’s also an actor, donned his clerical collar as he played a character: an upbeat and goofy talk show host. “They have to be okay with me just saying these insane, odd questions or comments,” Anderson told TLC about who he invites. “Someone who is not going to be taken aback or frustrated with my antics.”
Mirza, who met Anderson while doing interfaith work, was game. He drove two hours to Stuart to shoot the episode and discuss “what’s going on in the family of Abraham.”
“I’m here just checking on the neighbors, making sure you know, are my Christian brothers and sisters all right at St. Mary’s?” he said.
Anderson and Mirza then began talking about an interfaith event, the first they held together with a rabbi, at a Jewish temple just days after the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
“Thank God I had a jacket on because my armpits were sweating, because I was so concerned and worried,” said Mirza. “Am I going to get backlash?” Anderson noted that some in the temple knew people who had been taken hostage in Gaza. But as they shared on the show, the event met without incident and proved fruitful for everyone who participated.
The Pour, inspired by Between Two Ferns, the Zach Galifianakis-hosted parody talk show, launched on Labor Day weekend 2024. The program dives into serious topics with guests who, like Mirza, don’t take themselves too seriously. The program is short, the lengthiest episode just under 16 minutes. It’s uploaded every Friday on the official YouTube channel of St. Mary’s in Stuart, and every episode is repurposed into a set of Instagram reels and Tiktok videos.
“I don’t want to make it for the church folks,” Anderson said. “I’m trying to think of what topics would engage people outside of the church world.” The Pour has touched on a range of issues about faith and beyond, in the seven months it’s been on production.
In October, Anderson interviewed the parish’s head of finance, Tom Winters, about the advantages of a for-profit-minded church (“The business of church is so tough that the game has to be stepped up”). Days before the November presidential election, he spoke with a Lutheran pastor who said, “Jesus is too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals.” In March, he spoke with Noel Thomas, who founded an organization committed to ending the human slave trade.
In the episode “Can a Trafficker Be Redeemed and Saved?” Thomas described a time when he and a team investigated brothels in India using a hidden camera beneath a hoodie. “We were pointing it up at this various brothels and when we look up at this one, we see this 14-year-old girl that’s being trafficked, kept behind iron bars,” Thomas said. His commitment to fighting human trafficking is personal. Years ago, his sister, then four years old, was nearly kidnapped at an indoor flea market.
Consistent with the show’s format, Anderson began the episode pretending to be confused. “You’re not talking about car traffic stuff?” he said.
Anderson had the idea for the project during a sabbatical. He had been a parish priest for seven years and served as an interim rector for about a year and a half. When the Rev. Joseph Shepley was called to serve as rector at St. Mary’s, Anderson asked for time off. “Absolutely. Go take it,” he remembers Shepley saying.
Anderson has always wanted to be an Episcopal priest. A cradle Episcopalian, he was 10 when he told his grandmother about his desire. In 2003, after moving to Los Angeles, he found opportunities “here and there to jump into acting work,” spending 10 years in television, commercials, and theater before attending Virginia Theological Seminary, where he graduated cum laude.
In 2019, three years after joining St. Mary’s, he started a YouTube channel to “fulfill a little bit of that creative bone.” He now runs it with his wife, Anastasia, and has over 86,000 subscribers. They share videos about life as a multicultural family. Anastasia is from Ghana.
When he returned from sabbatical in July 2024, he wanted to focus on the creative aspects of ministry. “It just seemed like it was time after eight years of doing more traditional ministry to start to expand and push out,” he said. In creating The Pour, he hoped to reach people who “are just out there searching and seeking, but they never might find their way into a church, let alone our church.”
Over the summer, they shot the first episode with Winters behind the camera, the rector’s office as the studio (while he was on vacation), several colleagues in the parish office as the studio audience, and Anderson as both host and video editor.
Malinda Fritz, the parish’s youth director, was the first guest. In the show’s trailer, Anderson asked about the one thing the church can do to better serve the youth (“Serving the youth,” Fritz said plainly). The inaugural drink was a kombucha from Walgreens, which Fritz called disgusting.
None of the 30-plus episodes have gone viral, though the short-form versions posted on Instagram and TikTok have gained some traction. Anderson said it could be the YouTube algorithm working against the show, as it is embedded in other videos in the parish’s channel. Creating a new YouTube channel just for The Pour is under consideration.
Nonetheless, the project has encouraged parishioners and even drew attention from members of the community outside the church. “There’s people who stopped me in the town who have watched it,” Anderson said.
Two months ago, someone from St. Mary’s in Stuart gave money to help fund the project. “Someone got excited and just said, ‘I like this, we know it’s the future for how we’re going to connect with folks out there who don’t have a church home,’” he said of the donor. “So, let’s keep it going.”
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
