Christians love callings that represent a complete reversal of expectations. They enjoy stories about unexpected, inverted expectations. However, these stories must end the correct way.
In Christianese, a calling represents Jesus’ orders for what his followers are meant to be doing with their lives. But in reality, finding one’s calling works in a very prosaic–and earthly–way. Even then, it doesn’t work at all the way that Christians think it does.
When I was just a teenager, some evangelical set this over-simplistic equation in front of me: Pick your master, because you’ll always be a slave to something.
Many Christians have this idea that their faith imbues them with a sort of glowing-but-invisible aura that both attracts and repels non-Christians. It’s their Jesus Aura.
Sometimes when I look back at my days as a Christian, I’m thunderstruck by how absolutely exhausting it was in every single way. For a religion promising peace, rest, a light yoke, and vaguely-defined joy to its followers, Christianity brought precious little of any of it to any of us. Not long ago, I ran across a Southern Baptist Bible study about sin that really reminded me of that exhaustion.
I do not recognize my experiences in this belligerent fundagelical’s listicle. But that’s kind of the point, in a way.
Today, we check out one of the goofier aspects of the Endtimes: how weirdly voluntary the Mark of the Beast always is.
The reason evangelicals invented complementarianism was to win a denominational slapfight. That’s it. The architects of it just wanted to demolish feminism. So they simply did not care how complementarianism would play out in the everyday lives of their increasingly-authoritarian flocks.
Testimonies, in Christianity, are short anecdotes about how Christians came to believe the various claims made by their flavor of the religion. They’ve been on my mind lately because not long ago, a Christian told me that he thought Christian testimonies constituted valid and very real evidence for Christians’ claims. Read more…
Y’all, I got to feeling helpful. And I wondered what the Book of Revelation really says about solving conflicts. So today, we’re going to whisk through one of the weirdest books in the entire Bible to see what it REALLY tells evangelicals to do.