A recent Barna survey shows churches having trouble finding pastors: first, because there are simply fewer Christians in each successive age cohort, and second, because the young adults who still affiliate with Christianity are seldom doctrinally pure enough for their elders.
In the book Before You Lose Your Mind, various progressive Christians—many exvangelical as well—discuss their deconstructions. Though written in very lofty language indeed, they all talk about feeling a deep, enormous sense of love after deconstruction. One writer in particular, Jason Elam, contributed such an interesting chapter that I had to Read more
Earlier today, I got a good laugh out of this post about evangelism from Relevant (a website/magazine site aimed squarely at Millennials). In it, Richard Coekin pretends to ask why that site’s readers are “so bad at evangelism.” The answers he offers for his strawman questions reveal that evangelicals aren’t Read more
Scholars have long known that conservative politics and media distort and mischaracterize reality. This distorted reality insulates right-wing media consumers from contradictions and challenges to their beliefs. As a means to power, conservative politicians see this as a feature, not a bug.
Evangelism, or evangelical recruitment, isn’t doing very well these days. When you read between the lines of their supposed success stories, you discover that very few people who weren’t already Christian are joining their churches. Worse, even fewer people who weren’t already baptized seek baptism from them. But evangelicals don’t Read more
Last time we met up, I showed you how evangelical leaders are dealing with ongoing declines in church attendance. Mostly, they’re just insisting up and down that church attendance is not optional, people! Hey, that approach works in apologetics! So why shouldn’t it work everywhere? But an apologetics-consuming audience is Read more
Church attendance continues to tank across America. Downward trends already in place before the pandemic declined even further in the wake of it. It’s a tough time to be a business offering only one product—active church membership—in a country that increasingly doesn’t want it. In reversing the decline of their Read more
Out of every Christian lie, the one about Jesus’ magical transformation ability might be the worst. This lie tells Christians that belief in Jesus—along with adherence to a great many asterisked terms and conditions that only get revealed long after conversion—will transform them into better people. This transformation supposedly allows Read more
Endtimes believers tend to have very short memories for their own predictions. But today’s example was surprising, even by their very expansive standards. Today, we’ll trace an interesting shift in how Endtimes hucksters sell their products to worried evangelicals. (Some evangelicals prefer to write the term as separate words: the Read more
It’s not that it’s terrible advice. It’s that almost nobody will do it. Any evangelicals still sticking around this dysfunctional flavor of Christianity are there for a reason. And this advice conflicts with that reason.