Analyzing Christianity
Lord Snow Presides #9: Ed Stetzer’s New Gig
With everything going on in Baptist-land lately, I’m just surprised he lasted this long. Lord Snow today turns his serene, leaf-green gaze toward Ed Stetzer’s job change.
Analyzing Christianity
The Power of Prayer in Christian Marketing
Last time we met up, we were talking about Christian marketing and why it sucks. Christians are required to put faith in stuff that simply isn’t true–and their magical thinking carries through to their strategies around revitalizing their brand, guaranteeing failure.
Analyzing Christianity
You Lost Me: Why Nothing Can Change.
This past week we were talking about the 2011 book You Lost Me by David Kinnaman. The book was about why modern Christian evangelical churches were losing so many young-adult members, and how they could possibly reverse that trend. Christians either agreed wholeheartedly with this book’s ideas or they hated every word of it. Either way, however, nothing whatsoever changed in the modern Christian evangelical church as a result of it. Today I’ll show you why nothing changed, and why nothing ever actually could.
Analyzing Christianity
The Trouble with Tribbers.
A long time ago I wrote about fundagelical preppers and how the doom-preparation community had been taken over by fundagelical zealots fearing Rapture and Armageddon. There are some new developments in that story–but first, here are some new Rapture scares to look at!
Analyzing Christianity
Lord Snow Presides #8: Meet Texe Marrs.
I’m looking at end-of-the-world conspiracy theorists right now and ran across a name I hadn’t heard before: Texe Marrs. I’m wondering how he’s managed to evade my notice until now, considering he clearly ran in the same sort of circles I did back in the late 1980s!
Analyzing Christianity
You Lost Me: How to create change without changing a thing
There’s another magic spell he wants to teach Christians to cast here, and that spell revolves around reframing unpleasant and negative ideas so that churches won’t have to change anything they’re doing with regard to all the stuff that people cite as reasons to steer clear of Christianity.
Analyzing Christianity
You Lost Me: No No, Y’all, David Kinnaman is All Wrong.
To say the least, we haven’t been, um, impressed by it a whole lot. And the funny thing is, a lot of his fellow fundagelicals aren’t either. It seems like for every fan of the guy’s ideas, he’s got a couple of detractors–all of whom have their own pet ideas about What the Big Problem Here Is and How to Fix It.
Analyzing Christianity
You Lost Me’s Push for Discipling: Hold On, Y’All, He Knows Exactly What to Do.
David Kinnaman’s central idea is that The Big Problem Here is that modern churches aren’t properly discipling their youth and that if this starts happening properly, young people will stop leaving and maybe even return to the groups they’ve already left. Today I’ll teach you what this confusing term means–most of the time anyway–and why this author is totally wrong.
Analyzing Christianity
You Lost Me: And How They Lost Us
David Kinnaman always couches Prodigals’ disbelief in terms of how they came to disbelieve. The exact stuff we don’t believe doesn’t interest him nearly as much as how we related to our last Christian group–and how we might relate to another in the future.
Analyzing Christianity
Lord Snow Presents #7: Signs of Decline
For a long time now we’ve been talking about evangelical churn and the strange and wacky effects of Christianity’s continuing hemorrhage of members. Here’s a new sign that I hadn’t quite thought about until now: pipe organs in need of new homes as churches all over the country close.