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.
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.
I’m torn between mocking them to within an inch of their lives for flouncing away, and pitying them for not understanding that our modern values of consent and liberty are exactly what will prevent their visions from ever coming true.
As part of finding our own internal validation and becoming our own support network, one of the first things we have to do is take back the personal power we’ve given away. Especially if that Christian was tangled up with one of the really authoritarian groups in the religion, this step can be one of the hardest we’ll ever take on our way toward deconversion.
I recently ran across this gobsmackingly self-deluded blog post from fundagelical group The Gospel Coalition (TGC) about why they think Christians don’t read their Bibles enough. It gave me such a fit of the giggles! After I recovered, I thought maybe I’d help them out a little by showing them why they really shouldn’t trust Christian surveys–and what the problem likely actually involves.
The biggest Protestant denomination in the United States continues to suffer serious churn in its membership, and those of us who are rooting for its failure won’t be disappointed to hear how they’re dealing with it. I recently discovered a quiet little update to one of their most surprising task force meetings.
We’ve been talking lately about the various ways that Christianity rose to power as the dominant Western religion in the 2nd to 5th centuries. But the fun couldn’t last, and now that power is declining sharply with every passing year. As Christians began losing the power to force people to comply with their demands, they also became increasingly desperate to regain that power.
It’s a collision that doesn’t need to happen, and one that no longer gives the results Christian leaders want.