Description

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This book offers hope for today's dark world. It does so by identifying the self-debilitating illness of churches and prescribes robust medicine for their health, survival, and positive impact on our lives.

If you are part of a church, wouldn't you like it to stop living in the past? Wouldn't you like it to think and talk so you didn't have to check your brain at the door on Sunday morning? And wouldn't you like to know what it will take for your church to have intellectual integrity? And even if your church looks successful on the outside, wouldn't you like it to stop dying on the inside?

As a church person, along with everyone else, the modern, natural world of science shapes your thinking and living during the week. Then on Sundays, you enter the biblical and medieval world of the weird, enchanted forest with ghosts, demons, angels, and other supernatural creatures. To date, you have not acknowledged this deadly contradiction. Either you have not been consciously aware of it or, you have been, but you have not known what to do about it and are afraid that facing it could cost you friends, emotional security, and grief. At the same time, you suspect your church is failing in its witness to Jesus' profound good news and dying internally.

If you are an aware non-church person, whether you were raised in a church and left it, or as an outsider you have tried to find one that is real and been unsuccessful, you know that churches impact you, your family, your friends, and the worlds around you. This book assumes your life would be better if churches were more authentic and made more positive contributions to your community. It also describes the radical shakeup it will take for them to do both.

While the book generally addresses how all churches can stop killing themselves, the last of four sections deals directly with the history, bizarre beliefs, shallow gospel, and transparent contradictions of the dangerous movement known as Evangelicalism.

Some clergy and churches will use this book for study groups. Others may faint, throw up, even toss it away screaming, and then try to ban it. These folks are not to be blamed. They are to be understood, supported, and challenged to set aside their sentimental, childhood fantasies and begin to think as adults.