Recently, I mentioned a startling figure making the rounds in Christian-Land: this notion that 6000-10000 churches per year close in the United States. At the time, I couldn’t find the source for the figure. Today, though, I want to dive into it and see where it comes from, if I can, and figure out if it’s accurate. Then we’ll look at what it means.
In this report, the SBC introduces us to the people they hope will totally save their bacon as a denomination. Let’s meet the EVANGELISM TASK FORCE, and learn what they’ve been doing all year!
Their behavior might seem just bizarre, but it all makes perfect sense when we understand what they really hope to achieve. Today, I’ll show you three different ways that such people act out–and why they do it. You’ll see that they’re getting exactly what they want, in that moment.
It’s been so eye-opening for me to see just how deeply and painfully these movies have affected so many people with their terrifying, traumatizing message. I’ve heard from a great many people over this past week who wanted to share how frightened they’d been by these movies. So we’re going to be looking at why these movies had the effects they did. I’ll start with a retrospective–come join me!
When it comes to fundagelical Christianity, few things make as little sense to outsiders to that culture as its collective near-obsession with all things Judaism. I’m going to start the party off by showing you the bizarre doctrinal belief of supersessionism, which explains why Christians have such a love-hate relationship with Judaism generally.
For many years, Christians have been trying to convince everyone that human beings have a “god-shaped hole” in their beings that cries out for belief in their particular god to fill it. But that’s not true. Rather, many people suffer from a god-shaped wound—created by the salespeople who want to fill it with their product.
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.
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.