In his 2018 blog post, he warned his readers that American churches were cruising toward a ‘tipping point.’ Today, let me show you what Thom Rainer meant by that — and how his song-and-dance patter has changed since then.
Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, I showed you a 2014 book by Thom Rainer, Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive. As the title indicates, the book describes how evangelical churches wither away and die — and how to prevent that from happening to the reader’s own Read more
In essence, ‘Autopsy’ demands that evangelical churches become something besides what they are and always have been: gratification stations for the self-declared chosen elite ambassadors of King American-Jesus Superman.
Thom Rainer just retired from LifeWay. Immediately afterward, he plunged full-time into his new old hustle. That hustle will benefit exactly one person: himself. I’ll show you what he’s up to and why it won’t help Christianity at all–and why he probably won’t care either way.
Today, I offer up a recent blog post from none other than Thom Rainer, one of the biggest names of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). He wrote about how pastors should handle anonymous complaints. And y’all, his post reveals one of the most serious disconnects in the minds of authoritarian Christian leaders–and maybe even gives us a hint about why their churches have been doing so poorly for so long.
Today, we’ve got a new essay from Thom Rainer to consider. In it, he expresses his sense of optimism about his religion’s fortunes this year. Let’s see why he feels so optimistic–and see if we can suss out if these are good reasons to feel optimistic.
Come join me for a weird ride through Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) politics, infighting, and a strange show of defensiveness from one of their biggest names, Thom Rainer. Today, Lord Snow Presides over yet another SBC attempt to make catastrophic failure sound like incoming victories galore.
While we wait for the big Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) 2018 Annual Report, I thought it’d be fun to look at how their two nominees for the SBC presidency proposed to fix their decline. We can take a lesson from their example–but I don’t think they can.
Russell Moore, one of the current presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), is discovering what life is like for people who dissent from the tribe’s opinions–and I don’t think he likes it. Today we’ll see that schadenfreude is a dish best served with a side order of birth-control pills.
Certainly, we shouldn’t be surprised that Christians, having finally figured out just how bad the situation is for them, are finally swinging around to trying to fix things. But a funny thing happens when very criticism-averse people try to solve big, sweeping, systemic problems with their group: they start coming up with reasons for those problems that bear no resemblance to reality.