Last time we met up, I showed you an evangelical who very solidly considered faith and belief as choices people can decide to make. In the end, that evangelical decided that he’d choose faith and belief. As reasoning, he presented a strawman version of life without Christianity. After considering this Read more
It feels like I’ve known about Carey Nieuwhof for ages and ages now. He haunts the Christ-o-sphere offering panicky evangelical pastors surefire tips about making their churches grow again. Such advice represents the newest post-Christian-America cottage industry, it seems. Though he has written perhaps hundreds of blog posts discussing church Read more
Endtimes believers tend to have very short memories for their own predictions. But today’s example was surprising, even by their very expansive standards. Today, we’ll trace an interesting shift in how Endtimes hucksters sell their products to worried evangelicals. (Some evangelicals prefer to write the term as separate words: the Read more
When evangelical leaders tell their flocks to Jesus harder, they’re not just hoping to fix declines in membership and cultural power. They’re also hoping the flocks will use that non-solution to fix serious mental illnesses—like depression. Today, I’ll show you how they think this process should work, why it never Read more
Two headlines at Christian Post reveal evangelicals’ usual strategy for dealing with decline—demands for evangelicals to Jesus harder. If they’ll just do that, these two columnists assure their readers, then all those silly little declines will vanish into the mists of memory. But it ain’t so. Today, we’ll talk about Read more
Let’s look at what it means to Jesus harder, and then let’s explore why fundagelicals keep latching onto this idea as the way to save their tribe from irrelevance.
That tribe cannot and will not change its collective opinions about marriage and family. That’s why it’s so much easier for its Mark Ballenger types to dump all this emotional ego-searching on the people who can’t fit into that life script.
Jesus-ing harder doesn’t fix anything. It just keeps Christians chasing a dragon they can never actually catch, then blaming themselves for never catching it.
By the time I joined evangelicalism (in the mid-1980s), I learned to feel downright guilty for not injecting enough Jesus-ification into my life. I couldn’t just read a fantasy novel for the sake of it, go to a movie, or enjoy music that didn’t mention Jesus even once.
Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we checked out a Christian essay describing spiritual drought. That’s the feeling Christians get when they just don’t feel connected or filled-up by their god. At any given time, huge numbers of Christians feel this way. And obviously, that’s a problem. After all, their marketing says Read more