This busy Easter season, Ben Mandrell wants evangelicals to see him as a valid source of advice for learning to evangelize without losing one’s friends. But he has no idea how to do it himself.
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.
So far, Hillsong has lost 9 of its 16 American campuses. It’s a swift comeuppance for a church that seemed too big to fall. But Hillsong has shown, through these constant scandals, that their dazzling and trendy image is distinctly at odds with their lived reality.
A traveling evangelist has begun upselling a failed 2014 evangelism campaign called “Who’s Your One?” Today, let me show you what this campaign is, who started it and who adopted it and why, how it failed, and most importantly what it tells us about the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole.
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
Recently, Elon Musk challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat–with the winner taking Ukraine. It was a dumb joke, for all that Musk claimed to be “absolutely serious” about it. But it caught my attention because the person he challenged happens to be one of the biggest authoritarians on the planet. That kind of challenge means something to an authoritarian that a non-authoritarian doesn’t quite understand.
A few days ago, the world learned that Brian Houston–beleaguered founder of Hillsong Church, a global megachurch–violated his church’s code of conduct with “inappropriate behavior” directed at two women. He’s trying his best to spin-doctor what he did, but he’s just making his situation worse. In the process, he’s revealing just how extensive his enabler network is–and how far they’re willing to go to protect Hillsong itself.
Studies have repeatedly shown that when we have an emotional feeling about a claim, we tend to react to it way differently than if it’s neutral for us. In particular, if the claim challenges our worldview or makes us feel criticized or less-than, we tend to reject it out of hand no matter how much evidence it has to support itself. It’s really hard for us to engage with an idea that makes us feel that way, and even harder for us to change our mind about it.