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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This book is a good example of how wishful thinking and self-deception makes Christians incapable of seeing what’s happening in their religion, much less acting to change anything for the better.
So Preston Sprinkle went into the overflowing hopper of Christians Who Think They’re Saying Something New and Exciting But Aren’t, and we all moved on. Then around Easter I caught wind of him proudly announcing that he’d written some more stuff on the subject and done a podcast or something, and I found myself groaning inwardly.
I’ve been coming into contact with a lot of different ideas about apologetics itself as a field. One of the more intriguing of those ideas comes from Myron Penner, a Christian who wrote a book called The End of Apologetics. He did an interview with a blogger when the book came out, and the reactions to that interview were so fascinating that I wanted to show them to you.