Category Archives: Odds and Ends

Odds and Ends, People

Doing Your Best

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I wonder, have you done your best for Jesus? I know that we live under all that grace nonsense now (my, how I miss a good old-fashioned stoning!) but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a good guilt trip now and again about your works or lack thereof. Jesus is keeping score.

Did you waste a precious minute today? Did you spend ten minutes goofing off when you could have been praying? Did you need to eat at that restaurant (and leave no tract with your tip!) instead of giving the money to faith-promise missions? Obsess, my friend, obsess.

Never forget that God only values you for what you can do for Him. And by “Him” I mean me, of course. Do you have any experience driving a bus? No? What about using a toilet scrubber? Be careful or your wood, hay, and stubble will make quite the bonfire on judgment day.

You’ll never be good enough no matter how hard you try — so try harder! Have you done your best? The answer is always no. Now get back to work.

Odds and Ends

Success As A Sign Of Godliness

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It’s time now to explore another favorite fallacy from fundyland: holding up the ‘success’ of a ministry as evidence of godliness and declaring that anybody who has accomplished less is not fit to criticize.

Argue with a fundamentalist for long enough about the doctrinal and ethical problems in his favorite institution and he’ll inform you that he doesn’t want to hear anything you have to say until you’ve built your own ministry of equal size. Since most of us have never built a fundamentalist church or school (nor ever wanted to), this attempt to disqualify critics has the happy effect of leaving only about nine fundamentalists in the world qualified enough to actually point fingers at each other — which suits them just fine. It is a world where one assumes only a master chef is qualified to determine whether the meat being served in the cafeteria is rotten.

This claim that only those who have have ‘succeeded’ are allowed to speak out is a strange stance to take given that a fundamentalist preacher has no compunction about standing in front of his church of thirty-five members and blasting Rick Warren or Bill Hybels and their megachurch ministries. Surely they should wait until they’ve built their own congregation of thousands before daring to speak against them? Never mind the fact that if the role of critic can only be filled by those who have the greatest numbers, no Baptist should ever dare criticize the behemoth that is the Roman Church.

You plus God makes the majority…unless you’re speaking ill of me and mine.