Slowly, I’m working through the posts in our archive library like the Lone Ranger: Riding into town one day, fixing all its problems, and riding back out to the sunset afterward. I’ve got about 2200 posts to fix, and I’ll get to them all in time!
During a very painful and lonely stretch of my childhood, I did exactly what fundagelicals say everyone ought to do: I turned to Jesus. Today I’ll show you how well that worked out for me.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people were praying for Daniel’s recovery from brain cancer. He was one of the Big Name Fans in our denomination; we had ties to mission churches all over the world as well. I was one of the people who spent quite some time on her knees praying for Daniel’s recovery. Even Biff, who very rarely prayed anywhere but in church, prayed for him. We were absolutely convinced that God would heal him. Why wouldn’t he?
Communities get these ideas sometimes to live together and re-enact their ideals. It’s part of being human. But things can go hideously wrong in authoritarian groups, and I’ll show you how today.
The Christian love of bombastic testimonies creates a ‘cult of before stories’ full of believers who richly reward their biggest liars.