Reading Time: 10 minutes Dwell Community Church (formerly Xenos Christian Fellowship) can’t catch a break! Their leaders keep getting accused of being a cult. I can see why! Dwell/Xenos functions as a dysfunctional authoritarian system.
Christianese
Posted inReligion
Baptists think they know exactly how to avoid deception
Reading Time: 11 minutes Back when I was Pentecostal, I found myself debating a pair of Southern Baptist guys. At the time, I believed in speaking in tongues, and I rejected the Trinity. They were deeply concerned that I’d go to hell over this huge deception, so they sought to persuade me I was wrong. I’m sure you’ll be […]
Posted inReligion
The reality of people being ‘hungry for the Word’
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the Christ-o-sphere, people have always been hungry for the Word, even if in reality they reject Christian sales pitches now more than ever. Today, let me show you how Christians use this beloved Christianese phrase, and what reality has to say about the matter.
Posted inReligion
Evangelist recruiters and the omnimax god who needs human help
Reading Time: 9 minutes Christians demonstrate by their actions that they know perfectly well their god couldn’t manage to arrange a visit to the potty without them helping him every step of the way.
Posted inCulture
Culture warriors just wrecked an old denomination
Reading Time: 7 minutes In 2012, the RCA began to break apart over homosexuality. One faction –the more mainline end — wanted inclusion. The other — the culture warriors — wanted to the denomination to be bigots-for-Jesus. That breakup completed this month, with 43 congregations full of culture warriors leaving. They’re joining a new denomination, ARC (Alliance of Reformed Churches). All this, over a culture war evangelicals lost over a decade ago!
Posted inCulture
How Christian Music Soothed Chris Pratt
Reading Time: 8 minutes Instead of doing anything constructive or meaningful, Chris Pratt felt super-sorry for himself, then tried to find ways to soothe himself with a huge dopamine hit. And thanks to evangelicalism, he found exactly what he needed.
Posted inGeneral
How Controlling People Try to Force Forgiveness
Reading Time: 6 minutes That’s what I saw in that one video that I wish I could find again. In the context of apologizing, an influencer got up on stage and began talking about her own apparent requirements for granting forgiveness. She told her audience that if someone comes to her admitting their mistake and owning up to it, then she forgives them. Ta-da! Very clearly, she was ordering her audience to do the same for her.
Posted inGeneral
The SBC’s Big Plan: Sowing Division to Poach New Members
Reading Time: 8 minutes Yesterday, we talked about how strange Ronnie Floyd’s VISION 2025 initiative seems. He wants the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to put into place all this expanded room for more members, but doesn’t include any specific plans to get more members. I theorized at the time that maybe he planned to poach regressive evangelicals from other, more sensible denominations during this pandemic. Well, today we’ll see that this does indeed appear to be exactly what the SBC’s top leaders are counting on. They’re deliberately sowing division to bring vaccine denialists and QAnon- and Trump-addled Christians to their very regressive banner.
Posted inReligion
How to Totally Solve Spiritual Drought
Reading Time: 5 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we checked out a Christian essay describing spiritual drought. That’s the feeling Christians get when they just don’t feel connected or filled-up by their god. At any given time, huge numbers of Christians feel this way. And obviously, that’s a problem. After all, their marketing says their god is standing by, […]
Posted inGeneral
Christianese 101: Translating Evangelists’ Success Stories
Reading Time: 10 minutes Hi and welcome back! Sometimes, it’s fun to reveal the real meaning of all the Christianese that evangelicals use. Because oh, they use a lot of it. And the more Christianese you see in use, the less the Christians involved have to say that’s real and true. So when I say that evangelism might just be the […]