Analyzing Christianity
Lord Snow Presides #9: Ed Stetzer’s New Gig
With everything going on in Baptist-land lately, I’m just surprised he lasted this long. Lord Snow today turns his serene, leaf-green gaze toward Ed Stetzer’s job change.
Analyzing Christianity
The Power of Prayer in Christian Marketing
Last time we met up, we were talking about Christian marketing and why it sucks. Christians are required to put faith in stuff that simply isn’t true–and their magical thinking carries through to their strategies around revitalizing their brand, guaranteeing failure.
SBC Watching
Russell Moore: When the Question is ‘Are They Hateful ENOUGH?’
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.
SBC Watching
Oh Noes! The Baptism Drought Continues for the SBC!
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.
Analyzing Christianity
Thom Rainer and His Boxes of Air
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.
Analyzing Christianity
Thom Rainer and the Impertence of Communicationizing
Thom Rainer’s blog post “Seven Areas Where Pastors Have Failed at Reading Minds” is worth the read just to get a feel for how frustrated pastors in fundagelical churches are these days. It’s largely their own fault, sure, but still, that is a lot of frustration to see boiling up from the page.
Analyzing Christianity
The Adventures of Thom Rainer and the Strawman
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.
Analyzing Christianity
Through a Bubble, Darkly: 7 Things I Wish I Could Get Through To Thom Rainer
We’ve been talking lately about how, when Christians write about non-Christians, they often end up with a picture that doesn’t look terribly familiar to us–but which looks remarkably like the image of us that Christian culture paints. Today I want to dissect that picture.
From Patreon
The SBC Still Doesn’t Get Why Nobody Likes Them Anymore
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that a culture can be this blind to its own faults and problems, and yet here we are at another installment of “Heads in the Sand: Southern Baptist Edition.”
Analyzing Christianity
Oh Noes! A ‘Baptism Drought’ for the SBC!
One group of Christians, however, is finally coming to grips with their own drop in numbers. They might have the wrong explanation for it and the most nonsensical way possible of dealing with it, but they’re at least dimly aware that their denomination is starting to falter. That group is the Southern Baptist Convention, who recently declared that their denomination is facing a “baptism drought.” Today we’ll talk about why they’re facing it, and why they think they are, because those are two different things.