Evangelical Garbage

“Old man ranting” -seminary professor

“Twisted thinking” -Baptist pastor

“Just what I’ve been thinking” -man in the pew

The reviews are in! The “average folk” of evangelicalism will agree with this book. The leaders and vision-casters and dream-makers of evangelicalism will hate it. This book will make you mad at times, sad at other times, and hopefully give voice to your concerns.

The author has often written and spoken about the dangers of evangelicalism, its cousin ecumenicalism, and its parent, the church-growth movement. In this hard-hitting book, he spells out the confusion of the evangelical movement. And even more, he points out the manipulative manner of the movement, and the danger it posses to your family, your church, and your community.

If you are comfortable with things as they now stand in local churches, skip this book. If you are looking to put words to your frustrations about the direction of Christian ministry in the United States and much of the western world, then this may be the book for you.

Rev. Reads reviews Evangelical Garbage:

An excerpt-

The book is, according to its author, “an equal opportunity offender.”  Here is an excerpt from the introduction-

As I look back over my life, I’m all-but-convinced that we are the generation that let Christianity die.

We killed the choir. We shut down the sermon. We stopped the prayer meetings. For heaven’s sake, we don’t even have “dinner on the grounds” anymore. We let virtually everything about the church-we-grew-up-in die.

It doesn’t exist anymore.

Maybe it was because we tried to make it “fun” and “relevant” instead of Biblical and truth-based. Maybe it was because we quit soul-winning and replaced it with Saddleback Sam marketing strategies. Maybe it was because we eschewed tradition in favor of being “cutting edge.” Maybe it was because we removed all our distinctions to become ecumenically all-the-same. Maybe it was because we never let our children know what it was like to know their pastor, to have lunch with him after Sunday service, or to ask him for prayer over an upcoming stressful event. Maybe it was because we sent our kids to youth camp that included nightly rock concerts after a day of revelry. In doing so we trained them in thinking that life was one-big-youth-camp. Maybe it was because we rejected buildings that looked like church in order to remove any offense, replacing it with an office-building-black-box of ugliness. After this we kept going, removing anything offensive in song, sermon, or service.

We became nothing useful. Nothing at all. So much so that most of our young adults don’t even need the church when it comes time to get married (the wedding venue costs thousands but looks much nicer…often like an old church). The church is useless to the next generation.

And in one generation, the church died.

Kindle version available here.