Reading Time: 9 minutes As we examine Calvinism’s tie-ins with Robert Aaron Long’s beliefs and how he lived them out, I thought it might be useful to talk about Calvinism and its counterpart and describe how they factor into the SBC’s power squabbles.
Rachel Held Evans
Posted inReligion
Church Consultants: How (Not) to Fix Dying Churches
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we touched on the topic of church consultants. For the past 15 years or so that Christianity has been in decline in America, this field has exploded — in supply at least, though not really in demand. Pastors hire these consultants to rescue their dying churches. Today, let me show you […]
Posted inReligion
Lord Snow Presides Over A Sign of the Christian Times (LSP #52)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Christianity continues to decline with a loud, wet FLUMP. As it does, Christians leap on trends to try to stop it. One potent sign of the Christian times: hucksters shilling revitalization efforts aimed at desperate pastors. Today, Lord Snow Presides over a growing strain of snake oil in this faltering faith.
Posted inReligion
The Trendy New Christian Doubt
Reading Time: 10 minutes There’s a new way for Christians to engage with doubt: a defanged, controllable, tamed doubt that they can defeat. Sort of.
Posted inReligion
What Kim Davis Thinks She Won. (And What She Really Lost.)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Watching her, reading her words, I get the sense that she at least thinks she has genuinely and truly won something big–and her supporters largely seem to agree. She does not have the tight, smug tone of someone who is insisting she won even though she knows she’s been handed a crushing loss. I heard people talking exactly like this all the time in church, and I hear Christians talking like this every single day nowadays. I think she sincerely thinks she won something. But what does she believe she won?
Posted inReligion
The Handbook: The Original Greek and Hebrew (Is Still Nonsense).
Reading Time: 10 minutes Back in my Pentecostal days, there was a phrase I heard non-stop: “the original Greek and Hebrew,” used to describe my denomination’s doctrines and creed. The idea was that our denomination, unlike those of all those other inferior Christians doing everything wrong, had gotten our ideas from “the original Greek and Hebrew” and therefore were closer to what our god wanted out of his followers than all those other Christians were. I notice that Christians still love that phrase, so I want to talk about it today.
Posted inReligion
Excuses, Excuses: Two Ways Christians Delude Themselves about the Pew Study.
Reading Time: 9 minutes But what this study did do was to shine a line on two particular, self-servingly deluded claims made by the worst elements of Christianity: just how many members they have, and exactly how they view membership numbers. Here is how these two factors are working against Christianity in general when it comes to comprehending just how much trouble they’re in.
Posted inReligion
A Tale of Two Christianities.
Reading Time: 9 minutes There really are two types of Christian in this world, and one of them hates the other with every fiber of its hate- and rage-filled little body.
Posted inReligion
The Christian’s Guide to Ex-Christians: Stop Defending Slavery.
Reading Time: 14 minutes Seriously, folks, we’re going to have to be really careful about how we present atrocities to Christians. We thought bringing up slavery would get them to see that the Bible isn’t an eternally-valid prescription for human societies. We were wrong.
Posted inReligion
The Sand’s Just Fine.
Reading Time: 10 minutes When Rachel Held Evans wrote her beautifully moving piece in the wake of the World Vision brouhaha, How Evangelicals Won a Culture War And Lost a Generation, it was a cry from the heart: she, like many other evangelicals, has finally seen what outsiders and ex-evangelicals have always known. She might be late to the […]