Thom Rainer used to be the leader of Lifeway Christian Resources, the publishing and propaganda arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). When the SBC fired him/allowed him to quit honorably, he pivoted to Church Answers. He’s been there ever since, dispensing wisdom-for-hire to the frantic pastors of failing churches. His nepo-baby son Sam joins him there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.