Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, let’s look at Lee Strobel’s totally real atheist friends — and how his own words completely destroy that claim.
Disengagement
Posted inReligion
Ed Stetzer Wants Evangelicals to Just Calm Down Here
Reading Time: 10 minutes Ed Stetzer wrote a recent post seeking to reassure his tribe, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). He wants them to stop panicking about their kids’ disengagement from Christianity. But this attempt backfires in the end, just like everything else the SBC is doing to halt its decline.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Evangelical Churn: Why Christian Leaders’ Orders Never Change
Reading Time: 13 minutes It took Christian leaders some time to recognize that yes indeed, they were facing not just a temporary situation, but rather a serious and devastating long-term decline in membership and cultural clout. They’ve finally come to a widespread recognition of the problem. They still don’t quite know why it’s happening, though–much less what they can do to reverse it. I’ll show you their main stopgap solution today–and even better, I’ll show you why it absolutely will not work.
Posted inReligion
How to Keep Kids Christian For Life, According to Christians.
Reading Time: 14 minutes I’ll show you the weirdest and worst of those teachings here–and more importantly I’ll show you exactly why they’re wrong.
Posted inReligion
Why #EmptyThePews Is Important
Reading Time: 12 minutes Recently someone started a Twitter hashtag called #EmptyThePews to encourage Christians to let the horrifying events of this week be their breaking point–and to walk away from their churches to show that they do not stand with their racist leaders. Immediately stories began pouring through that hashtag–stories about deconversion and disengagement, indignation and anger, disappointment and betrayal: vast narratives revealed in 140 characters or less. I’ll show you why this hashtag matters.
Posted inReligion
The Critical Mistakes and Cosmic Irony of “God’s Club.”
Reading Time: 10 minutes Christians are fighting tooth and nail to get their indoctrination into schools whether it’s legal to do it or not, but there’s a truly cosmic-level irony at work here that they’re just not seeing.
Posted inReligion
The Defections of the Young
Reading Time: 9 minutes Today we’ll be talking about the increasingly-frantic attempts fundagelicals are making to understand and address the ever-increasing defections of young people from their ranks, and why those attempts are doomed to fail.
Posted inReligion
Evangelical Churn: Accusations, Power Grabs, and Overreach.
Reading Time: 10 minutes This idea is becoming one of Christians’ favorite excuses for why people leave their religion (or refuse to join it in the first place). What they don’t realize is that it also now forms one of the best illustrations anyone could devise for why evangelicalism, as a worldview and faith system, is faltering as hard as it is lately.
Posted inReligion
Churn Rate: When They Are Grown, Apparently They DO Depart From It.
Reading Time: 11 minutes Back when I was Christian, there was one Bible verse considered to be the ultimate Christian parenting guide–one that, by itself, was all anybody needed to know when it came to raising children. I bet you already know which one I’m talking about! But it’s also one of the Bible’s many false promises. Today we’ll touch on the way this verse has changed meaning over the years, as well as why it gives Christians unnecessary frustration–and unwarranted confidence–in their future. And along the way, we’ll marvel together that it is one of Christianity’s biggest names who is giving us this insight today!
Posted inGaming, Religion
How to Spot (and Reject) a Broken System: Turnover
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last time we talked about how power manifests in broken systems. Today we’ll talk about how to recognize one of the biggest signs of a broken social system: turnover, especially when combined with a particular way of speaking about those who have left.