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Can These Churches Live?

Can These Churches Live?

In which I search for a perfect simile in Part Three of my unexpected series on The Great Dechurching.

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Anne Kennedy
Aug 31, 2023
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Can These Churches Live?
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The Tree Cutting continues apace. I keep trying to console myself with the extra modicum of light falling upon all the saplings we didn’t find time to dig up this summer, meaning to get to them “tomorrow.” I suppose the new plan must be to leave them to grow in their slow, silent way until they reach the glory of their fallen elders.

silhouette of kneeling man
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Also, for those of you who prayed about my extremely vague request, thank you! All our problems aren’t completely solved, but everything might be okay.

And finally, I didn’t mean to spend the whole week talking about The Great Dechurching, but I did finally finish the book last night, and I have a few more disparate thoughts before I settle down to my formal review for CRJ. As usual, I wish I had time to pick over every little irritation, but if I did that I would drive everyone mad, including myself. So instead I will just draw out the most obvious annoyances, and maybe “circle back” to other smaller issues as I remember them in the future.

My first complaint is a plaintive, general one about the state of all things. I recently listened to Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, (can’t remember if I said anything about it at the time but you should all go read or listen to it) and, in the closing pages of The Great Dechurching, I couldn’t help but remark on the difference in assumption and style between two books that might well have been classed together. In fact, if the writers of The Great Dechurching were given the opportunity to transmogrify into Louise Perry I bet they would do it in a heartbeat. Her style is so elegantly fluid. She has to be the platonic ideal of what an evangelical means when he whispers “winsome.”

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