Sometimes I come across links and can’t keep them to myself. Especially when they serve so well to illustrate things I teach. So instead of a long lecture today, let’s see what’s going on out there in the real world.
Dave Ramsey runs a ministry, but it’s also a business. Like so many other corporate style religious organization, this cannot turn out well for the religion part. Apparently Ramsey runs his organization on fear and hatred. I am inclined to believe the article simply because I’ve run into some ugliness from Ramsey’s organization in the past. His staffers tend to be rather arrogant at times with the churches that host some of his presentations. They make unreasonable demands from folks who simply volunteered to help out, ordering them around like serfs. You come to the point when you decide this isn’t godly and there’s something very wrong behind the scenes.
On the same page where I found that one, I ran into this one where the author misses the point when describing how the Southern Baptist denomination is in decline. The analysis assumes all the nonsense you would expect from secularists. The problem with Southern Baptists is that they remain a mostly cultural expression of some slender thread of genuine religion, and to the degree it depends on that particular culture, the fervor fades when that culture dies.
One of the fundamental points behind my teaching, and particularly the book I’m working on, is that we need to find another basis for building our religion than what has been used by most Western churches, particularly American churches. The Western affinity for a particular culture drawn from the Enlightenment, and the affinity for corporate structure in churches leads to some truly hideous implementations. Most American churches are more American than church. Tying your religion to something so transitory as a single cultural milieu is asking for trouble. That most churches choose only one identifiable portion of the culture does not make them any less worldly in the main.
We could go on to discuss the Baptist obsession with presuming to make born-again disciples, but producing instead vast hordes of folks who appear spiritually stillborn. Or we could discuss the worship with all sorts of emotional drama but producing no real change in the people. The preaching and teaching are intellectually stimulating, but don’t really plug people into their spirits. They are deeply confused about what is spiritual, insisting that spiritual is just a better brand of intellect. I should know; I was one of them, a clergyman among them, for a large part of my life.
One more thing regarding a popular meme: Has anyone beside me noticed that “man up” usually translates to a demand that the man in question surrender everything that makes him a man instead of a slave? “Man to man” means setting aside all privilege and working together as equals to a mutually beneficial end.
