Why the Evangelical Church is Declining

Candy bar with Jesus name

Outlining how the superficiality and the anti-intellectualism of the Evangelical movement are causing a significant decline in membership and the remedy for it.

Churches from numerous types of backgrounds see that their numbers are dropping and are quickly upgrading their style of worship. Other solutions are renovating the church foyer into coffee shops, pressing people into the small weekly groups, producing appealing dramas, or spending on new personnel and equipment to better communicate through the web, apps, video and other burgeoning technologies. These approaches help, but there is something far more profound going on.

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Book Review: The Swerve

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an excellently well written book that combines both history and storytelling.

It is a scintillating work of historical fiction that is equal to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Greenblatt’s book revolves around the life and times of a fifteenth century Florentine/Roman scholar and one time secretary to the Pope, Poggio Bracciolini, and his discovery of a lost poem entitled De Rerum Natura by the first century BC poet Titus Lucretius Carus.

The Swerve strings together the complex weave of religion, society, corruption, greed, immorality, Greek philosophy, war, the lives of monasteries, monks, and libraries to tell the story. This narrative is structured by following Poggio Bracciolini in his pursuits. The Book revolves around Poggio finding this poem which was unknown to civilization for a number of centuries.

He believes that the discovery of this poem written by Lucretius was a cornerstone in the development of humanism and the reshaping of what is now become the modern world.

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The Apostolic Faith Newspaper on the Azusa Street Revival

apostolic faith newspaper 1906

The following is a digital copy of the first page from The Apostolic Faith newspaper, Volume 1, No. 1, 1906, which covered the events of the Azusa Street revival.

The Azusa Street revival began in Los Angeles, California in 1906. It was one of the most significant Pentecostal expressions in the 20th century and a cornerstone that generated the expansionism of Pentecostal ideology throughout the world. The Apostolic Faith was their official newspaper.

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Pentecostals and Israel

The connection between Pentecostals, Christian Zionism, Judaism and the State of Israel.