ElaineY's Reading Rambles

This book not only voiced all my pet peeves about the evangelical church, it met my desire to have a basic understanding of the history of evangelicalism in North America.

Cole gives concise and illuminating accounts of the various movements in the last couple of hundred years to the current brand of Christianity being peddled from small-town America to urbanised, highly-technological societies like Singapore.

Evangelical Christianity is big business and the merchandise is on the shelves, ready to go, before your pastor has even prepared his sermon. Today, at breakfast, my husband mentioned, again, that our previous pastor, a noted theologian (as he is marketed during hos Disciple-Making Conferences) called Christianity a product. It was during the last conference we attended, back in 2009, IIRC, but again I was skeptical. No Christian leader would be so dumb as to call the faith a product. If he did, and the DH insists he did, then surely there would be some murmurs of criticism, wouldn't here? After all, that church (we resigned in 2012) is not part of the charismatic or prosperity gospel crowd.

But this is where Warren Cole's Smith enabled me to understand how pervasive this greed for power and money is; that no denomination, no leader, is immune.

Yet, despite the bad news, I am happier and more confident of my faith than ever. All it takes is knowing to separate church from faith; man from God.