Hello and welcome to a Roll to Disbelieve movie review! Today’s botched cinema roll is Let There Be Light, a 2017 production featuring Kevin Sorbo as an atheist strawman.
But one evangelism technique comes to us from both progressive and evangelical Christians. Today, let me show you show you the Christians who profess great curiosity about the god we’ve rejected. And then we’ll see how this tactic actually works for them.
WELL. The best-laid plans and all that! I found something to lead us up to J.D. Greear’s skidmark of a post from last week. Y’all need to see this first–if only to prepare yourselves. It seems that evangelical leaders have come up with yet another way to sabotage their young Read more
Today, I’ll show you what Beach Reach is, some of its history, and why it’s a perfect example of the SBC’s goals and shortcomings.
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!
Christian evangelists act, in a very real sense, as salespeople of their ideology. And they are not making a lot of sales these days. They can’t even keep the few customers they still have! So evangelical churn has become a serious problem–not just for evangelicals, either. Not long ago, we talked about a Christian who thought he’d figured out a brand-new sales tactic. In that post, I touched on the two tactics Christian salespeople typically use. Today, I’ll expand a little more on the first of them, confrontational evangelism–and why it fails, and why Christians can’t stop using it regardless.
The marketers in broken systems have this unfortunate tendency to sell two different and diametrically opposed things to potential consumers. It’s not just a Christian thing; it happens in most broken systems. People in them don’t see that they’re doing it, and the people they’re selling to may not even realize that’s why they distrust the sellers and reject their product. But it happens all the same.
In comments last time we met up, we learned about yet another set of those guesses, all presented as amazing new ideas that would totally work to convert people without backfiring and making evangelicals look like pickup-artist creeps.
Normally you’d think that inaccuracies in Christians’ perception of others is just their problem. But their cultural flaws have a tendency of creating headaches for other people, too, not just for themselves. While they’re making strawmen about non-Christians and wrestling with their fictional creations, they’re getting an entirely wrong idea of what we’re really like and why we reject their claims and sales attempts. Today I want to talk about why Christians misrepresent us so often.
Christians often pull out the stops when they discover that one of us has left the fold. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown at us to read, watch, or listen to. We get invited to “casual dinners” that turn into full-blown interventions. We can’t even visit a friend’s house without discovering a church friend there to try once more to “just talk to us” to “make sure we’ve really thought about this.” And then, once we think we’ve weathered all of it, along comes just one more Christian into the fray, often totally convinced that “God” told him or her to say some particular thing to us.