Christians have some strange habits when it comes to prayer. Some people wouldn’t think of  eating a meal in public without holding hands and praying until the chicken nuggets are blessed but think nothing of offering to pray for someone and then never get around to it. When I was in Bible college, we ate family style around the table.  Being Bible college students we never forgot to pray for our food because, as we used to say, “Un-blessed food rots your gizzard” (I never did find out what my gizzard was).  Anyone who arrived late to the table was assured that the “food was already blessed.” We used to joke about the half-life of a food blessing. If the food were put away in the fridge would it need to be blessed again? Is it the food that is blessed or the table itself such that if someone, for instance, brought their bag lunch late, would they need to say a new prayer over their food? Silliness. Pharisaical silliness that is almost as bad as eating food without saying a blessing. These uses and abuses of prayer are our last installment in this series on the habits of highly annoying Christians. So just consider this my own version of the Screwtape Letters guide to having an annoying prayer life. Continue reading …

Some groups which could be classified as cults or abusive religious groups by Evangelicals strongly discourage thinking independently from the groups leadership. Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower Bible and Tract Society went so far in the 1980s as to run articles which boldly declared to “Avoid Independent Thinking.” Once the organization has made a decree the followers must simply hear and obey. When I teach on this I often find Evangelicals shaking their head with a sort of tsk, tsk reaction. But many Christians, it seems, are not in much better shape. Extra biblical official positions are handed down and lots of Evangelicals march in lock step. If someone dares question, they are viewed as an anti-Christ or at least back slidden in the faith.

We find this quite a bit in dealing with apologetics and false teachers. For example, in 1999 there was a great deal of hype and hoopla about Y2K. Michael Hyatt, Chuck Missler, James Dobson and many others were pronouncing the end of the world as we know. At midnight on December 31, 1999 all of the computers in the world would shut down, electricity production would cease, coffee makers would stop functioning and cars would no longer start. Back to horse and buggy days and Hyatt even suggested that his readers needed to decide how far would they be willing to go in protecting their food supplies. Kill the hungry hordes of invaders perhaps? Continue reading …

Maude calls her friend Mary on the phone and says, “You know that I never repeat gossip.”

Mary replied, “Yes, I do know that.”

Maude states brightly, “Good, then listen close because I am only going to say this once.”

One of my favorite pastors is Ray Kolbocker at Parkview Community Church in Glen Ellyn, IL. Perhaps it is because we have similar backgrounds. He grew up agnostic and I grew up atheist. We both had similar experience and view of the church. We both put it this way, “I didn’t understand the church before I was a Christian and my understanding hasn’t improved since. It is this weird club that you have to admit you are sinner to join and then for the rest of your life pretend you are not. I don’t get that.”

It is a bit of a pickle I admit. We are called to live holy lives but sometimes, perhaps often, Christians tend to feign a holiness that is not real or genuine and even find ways to mask something they are doing to give the appearance of at least sounding more spiritual than it really is. Some sin is easily identifiable, adultery, homosexuality, etc, while others, such as gossip, seem somehow more acceptable. This is what we might call “sanctified gossip” and it is practiced fairly often in a variety of ways and seems to go unnoticed, at least by the faithful. Continue reading …

I remember the conversation as if it were yesterday. A friend and I were talking and the subject of God’s judgement came up. Slightly unusual since he is an atheist and I am a Christian, but only slightly because talking with intelligent atheists about God can be both enlightening and rewarding. The gist of the conversation is that talk of a  God worthy of worship and the concept of Hell were mutually exclusive. Not that unusual an objection as these conversations go. It didn’t catch me off guard. However, my atheist friend was criticizing the hellfire and brimstone shouting matches that went on daily in the center of campus between students (and sometimes faculty) and the more vocal members of the local branch of Christendom’s more vocal and annoying Christians. We were discussing this “Turn or Burn” sort of evangelizing and my friend said something that did catch me off guard. “If the fear of Hell is the reason that I should trust God, then what moral authority does God supposedly have other than he’s bigger than me?” The question is subtle but important because it isn’t questioning the justice of Hell as much as claim that acknowledging the threat of Hell is a good reason to follow Christ.

Hmm. Continue reading …