The Decline of Christianity and the Rise of the Pastor/Priests in America is built on the rock solid foundation laid by E. Gibbons History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It focuses on the historical subversion of Christianity and with that as a sledgehammer it smashes into the middle-class-on-up American evangelical leadership that serves as a lapdog to concentrations of corporate and political power. The Decline of Christianity demands first, above everything else, honesty. That the pastor/priests admit before God, conscience, and congregation that their lives have had nothing at all to do with New Testament Christianity, and because of that Americas evangelicals remain either poisoned or famished. Yet inspite of the nauseating conformity of religious leadership, the book remarks upon Americas more authentic expressions of servant leadership. It moves with the Biblical tide, that leniency is given for those who earnestly desire it, propelling one into the restlessness of faith (Luther), having remorse/confession/repentence as good shepherds.
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John was born in Seaside, Oregon, but was raised in an uppermiddle class neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. He spent twelve years participating in house churches among the ‘dangerous classes’ in Los Angeles, Denver, and Washington D.C. before departing in 1991 to do mission work in developing nations. He earned his theology degree from Fuller Seminary in 1981. A side job of teaching English has provided the means to take part in home fellowships around the globe, which continues to this day. He married Katarzyna Dajer in 2004, settling in Poland for eight months a year. Upon returning to America he still does street preaching against nuclear weapons, avarice, environmental exploitation, and the church’s subservience to concentrated corporate/political power, personally rebuking megachurch pastors. Heavily influenced by Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, and Gibbon he remains polemical, citing the prophets (a better Hebrew translation would be intellectual dissidents) and the early church as his principal examples.