Category Archives: History

At my last church, one of my fellow elders liked to introduce hymns with the back-story of those who had written them. You may be familiar with some of them.

I occasionally wonder how isolated communities of ancient (and sometimes rather esoteric) Christian denominations have survived under the servitude of Islam since the incursion of the Arabs many centuries ago. Supernatural perseverance aside, what factors prevent such populations simply capitulating to the dominant religion, with all the cultural advantages, and fading away over the generations? What makes a twentieth generation Egyptian pig farmer, denied education because he is a Coptic Christian, carry on?

In researching my recent posts on charismatic theology, contemporary Christian worship music and so on, I came across the fact that yet another serious sex scandal has hit the New Apostolic Reformation movement, this time involving the International House of Prayer in Kansas City and its leadership. Whatever else this shows it demonstrates that holding the (claimed) longest prayer meeting in history, not counting Count Zinzendorf’s famed Moravian one, doesn’t of itself guarantee the integrity of a ministry: as in most things spiritual, as well as in the world, the devil is in the detail.

Christian Nationalism is a slippery term, which seems mainly to have been coined by the progressive left to implicate Christian support for Donald Trump (both amongst Evangelicals and traditional Catholics) in imaginary attempts to impose a theocratic tyranny. Pope Francis has condemned it as a desertion of the gospel for ideology, but it would seem that his own ideology aligns pretty closely with that of the secular left, supporting multiculturalism, mass immigration and liberal re-definition of the faith itself.

My conclusion from the thought experiment in the last post is that what we actually see in the Church nowadays is more consistent with Pentecostal/Charismatic theology being profoundly mistaken than with its being correct. I base this on the fact that after, 120 years, the churches are not settled comfortably into Charismatic doctrine and practice, but are still chasing the rainbow and wondering why they never reach its end. The extreme example of this is, of course, the Word of Faith variants promising to bring heaven down to earth in ever more dramatic ways, but instead producing a pattern of financial acquisitiveness and irregularity, spiritual and sexual abuse, blatantly false … Continue reading →

If you’re a member of one of the hyper-charismatic megachurches, the very idea of applying critical thinking to the theology around spiritual gifts and related matters is anathema, as it implies a lack of the faith that enables believers to heal any and every disease as Jesus did – except that they never can. Even the super-apostles have to fake leg lengthening on an industrial scale to inflate the numbers.

I’ve not written much about the Israel-Gaza conflict, my excuse being that it’s a complicated matter. But that is really an excuse – the real reason is that unlike most of the other components of the Omnicrisis, this issue has divided people along rather different fault-lines, and it has been confusing to see people whose opinions one generally trusts taking diametrically opposite tacks from each other. I find this uniqueness significant.