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.
The Broken System
Posted inReligious News
Tom Buck: In the land of hypocrisy, secrets are currency
Reading Time: 11 minutes I wonder how long Tom Buck struggled with the secrets he knew about Jeff Ford before using them to attack his faction’s newest enemy #1. One minute? Two? Less?
Posted inReligious News
How Hillsong is quickly falling apart
Reading Time: 6 minutes So far, Hillsong has lost 9 of its 16 American campuses. It’s a swift comeuppance for a church that seemed too big to fall. But Hillsong has shown, through these constant scandals, that their dazzling and trendy image is distinctly at odds with their lived reality.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Why Christians push a false narrative of hopelessness
Reading Time: 12 minutes Christians’ false narrative of hopelessness represents a big part of their current marketing to their target customers. But in truth, it only worsens the actual hopelessness that their salespeople claim to be alleviating.
Posted inCulture
Evangelical reform: Who’s gonna force accountability on pastors?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Whenever things go hideously wrong in any evangelical group, evangelicals tend to think that The Big Problem Here was a lack of accountability. Had proper accountability existed in their group, nothing bad would have happened because nothing bad could have happened without someone noticing it and addressing it. Scandals, in particular, happen because whoever caused that scandal drifted away from their accountabilibuddies.
Posted inLeaving Religion
What Finally Stopped Josh Duggar
Reading Time: 7 minutes Had we left the Duggars to their own business all this time, Josh Duggar would still be molesting little girls and consuming child pornography so horrific that one veteran investigator called it “the top five of the worst I have ever had to examine.”
Posted inGeneral
Josh McDowell: Cast Out of the Crony Network
Reading Time: 11 minutes Josh McDowell was once a power player in the evangelical crony network. Now, he’s been cast out. Come see it happen in realtime.
Posted inGeneral
Bitter: How Evangelical Women Cope With Their Seething Anger
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! Last week, we talked about anger. Then, a few days ago, we touched on how evangelicals treat women’s anger completely differently. Indeed, evangelicals have a whole word that pertains almost solely to the anger of women: bitter. Today, I’ll show you the tribe’s quirky definition of this word — and how […]
Posted inReligion
The Entirely Unsurprising Sexism That Russell Moore Revealed
Reading Time: 8 minutes Yesterday, we talked about the sheerly vicious racism on display in these leaked letters. Today, let’s talk about the mind-blowing but entirely unsurprising sexism he reveals in them.
Posted inGeneral
Russell Moore Refused to ‘Play Ball’ With the SBC (And He Paid For It!)
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! The other day, we talked about how Russell Moore ended up as the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Mostly, we talked about the absolute state of the ERLC in 2012 — and why the masters of the SBC needed Russell Moore to lead […]