A Very Short Linkathon!
I don’t have the time or energy this week…so here’s a couple notable things I saw…
I did this just to feature this brilliant piece from Russell Moore…
The uproar over the Lee Greenwood bible…
The “gospel” of Shari Tenpenny…
Christian nationalists and vaccine opposition…
Social media is taking a toll on your soul…
The case against vaccine passports…
The work of the Lord in the life of a believer…
Pastor will sign exemption for vaccine…for a donation…
When biblical truths are ratioed…
The consequence of claiming the sufficiency of scripture for inconsolable things…
More later…maybe…
The first article by Russell Moore hits the nail right on the head. I was a member of an evangelical church for a long time – 30 years. I began to see more and more every day that seemed a little “off” to me, or irresponsible, or hypocritical, but I stayed on in that church for many more years than I should have be cause I thought “no church is perfect” and because there were good and genuine Christians attending there. All along I am reading my Bible, growing as a Christian and doing my own Bible studie on subjects that interest me, or from books that Calvary Chapel ignored. At some point I realised that quite simply, This Church Does Not Reflect The Heart of God and I Am Not Seeing Jesus At This Church. It was a sudden, and very concrete realization. It was then that I left my church, Calvary Chapel,after over 30 years and never looked back. It was exactly as Russell Moore described it – I felt that I was a more serious Christian believer than they were, with all of the hypocrisy, cover ups, nepotism and Pharisee-like behavior I witnessed, not to mention the political, wordly views they espoused.
“Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away because she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different – and jarring – model of a disillusioned evangelical. We see young evangelicals walking away not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what it teaches. This secularization comes not from scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism. ”
Straight fire from Moore…
“What if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.”
That’s the truth…
Michael,
Excellent article by Russell Moore. Here is one that is eerily prescient that he wrote back in 2010 when Glen Beck was the darling of the Evangelical Right and his efforts to “turn America back to God and away from those godless lefties”:
https://www.russellmoore.com/2010/08/29/god-the-gospel-and-glenn-beck/
Needless to say, their embrace of Glen Beck was just a preview of the dumpster fire that was Trump…
Scanned Russell Moore’s article
Good link! ! !
How often i heard it said years ago “Our Faith (real Christianity) is NOT a religion” and certainly not a club ….
Thanks, Michael
“The church will survive – even here in America – but, along the way, a lot of fifteen-year-olds will be hurt. ”
I loved the Moore article, but with one caveat… It is an America-centric view. What he observed in the article was very similar to what I observed in the UK and other parts of Europe in the 1980s and in the space of just 40 years, most of western Europe and the UK are essentially post-Christian. It is different here in the US where religious/Christian language has been maintained, but the substance of Christian faith has been largely abandoned. Offered “the show” or “the reality” we prefer the show… It points to a post-Christian society, nonetheless.
I visited a mega church back east a few years ago, because I knew some of the people and I happened to be in town for a conference. At this church, there was a lot of robust enthusiasm for the worship service, with hands raised and eyes closed. But as I got to talk to some of these folks at the meal at a restaurant following, I learned that none of these people had the habit of thanking the Lord for the food before we ate, not even in their homes, they said. Some seemed unaware that this was something Christians did. They thought they might give it a try. Their lives seemed completely random to me. I do not doubt their sincere love of God, I absolutely don’t, but it’s going to take more than a professional-level worship team production every Sunday to keep these young people in the faith. They have not been taught any disciplines. But they were cheerful, I’ll say that for them!
Michael,
Speaking of brilliant pieces, here is one from David French:
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/did-donald-trump-make-the-church