I’ve mentioned before the Pentecostal-yardstick act that erupted whenever I or someone from my church met another Christian, haven’t I? When meeting someone new, I couldn’t just be happy to know someone new and get to know that person. I had to figure out if that person needed saving–or correction Read more
(Content note: religious abuse, mind-blowing misogyny and anti-LGBTQ bigotry.) Big, big news, R2Ders! Over the last few days we’ve been seeing a lot of news about Mark Driscoll, the Lizard King of Misogynists, and finally there’s some kind of resolution to his increasingly-erratic, unstable fall from grace. See, it seems Read more
I’ve written about the 1988 Rapture scare that I went through as a teenager, the one that scared me into joining a Pentecostal church, but I want to mention briefly what it was like for me to be a teenager during a Rapture scare because I think we’ve kind of Read more
I saw this really interesting piece about “church cannibalism” and it ties into something else I was reading about the dwindling of religious belief in America. What these two stories tell me is that Americans are steadily becoming less religiously observant over time, but huge megachurches are growing in membership Read more
Good news for folks in the UYC! Dale McGowan’s newest book, In Faith and In Doubt: How Religious Believers and Nonbelievers Can Create Strong Marriages and Loving Families is coming out soon. I wanted to start talking about it, since I have a personal connection to this book due to Read more
Remember furries? Those are the kids who think that they’re “really” animals in human form. Back in the 90s they were the emerging weirdos of the internet and became our collective punching bags, a low status they bore with varying degrees of grace. You’d see them prancing around town in Read more
Welcome back! Last time we talked about how Christians share many qualities in common with Nice Guys™. Modern Christian fundagelical culture has produced a bumper crop of Christians who are singularly incapable of recognizing when their input is desired or requested, who genuinely think that they’re doing people a favor Read more
Christianity’s got a big image problem, and a lot of the reason for that problem comes from its own followers. It’s just so weird to me to see that the Christians who are the most gung-ho about engaging people about their religion seem like they’re the most inept at actually Read more
Have you seen this blog post, An Open Letter to My Future Wife? We’re going to tackle it today and talk about reality vs. fantasy in marriage. Remember how I complained a while ago about how it seems like there are all these baby-Christians out there who’ve just gotten married Read more
One group of Christians, however, is finally coming to grips with their own drop in numbers. They might have the wrong explanation for it and the most nonsensical way possible of dealing with it, but they’re at least dimly aware that their denomination is starting to falter. That group is the Southern Baptist Convention, who recently declared that their denomination is facing a “baptism drought.” Today we’ll talk about why they’re facing it, and why they think they are, because those are two different things.