Caught between the devil of a church model that many evangelical leaders openly criticize and the deep blue sea of an empty youth ministry, evangelical youth ministers have little choice.
Authoritarian Christian leaders really do not like dissenters, do they? Today, let’s check out why.
Eventually, one after another, various Christians have become completely positive that they know exactly how to save their religion from utter irrelevance. A recent New York Times op-ed post represents only the most recent of the tribe’s guesses about how to do it with evangelicalism. Today, let me show you some of the previous guesses. Then, let’s check out this most recent one. And then, let’s explore why it won’t work either–and why it can’t.
In West Virginia, public school students found themselves in the middle of a midday evangelical revival on school grounds. There is absolutely no way this should have happened or been allowed, and yet it was. But there’s a reason why it was, of course. Evangelicals are fighting for every single thing that’s important to them: dominance, cultural power, numbers, everything. And they know that victory will come to the side that owns the hearts and minds of today’s children.
Whenever things go hideously wrong in any evangelical group, evangelicals tend to think that The Big Problem Here was a lack of accountability. Had proper accountability existed in their group, nothing bad would have happened because nothing bad could have happened without someone noticing it and addressing it. Scandals, in particular, happen because whoever caused that scandal drifted away from their accountabilibuddies.
Tim Keller’s claims about ‘original Christianity’ are quite common in his end of the religion. Here’s why.
On the way minus side, this initiative could result in someone getting stalked. But there is at least a plus side: The flocks still hate personal evangelism. An app that prods and pushes them to do stuff won’t make them like it more.
Evangelical leaders’ attention was always fated to shift from Millennials to Gen Z. Millennials utterly failed to secure a turnaround in the tribe’s fortunes. So now those leaders look to Gen Z to save their bacon.
The natural inclinations of awful people tend to be awful. And such people can make an innocent visit to a neighborhood church into a horror story those guests will remember for years.
The evangelicals I knew back then thought fundamentalists were dangerous zealots and wingnuts who’d missed the entire point of Christianity in their mad dash to theological super-correctness. Meanwhile, fundamentalists thought evangelicals were lukewarm weaklings who couldn’t handle the real deal of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ — and thus would fold and accept the Mark of the Beast the moment the Endtimes began in earnest.