Todd Pruitt, Witchfinder General
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As you can see, advance publicity is already being leaked for the new epic Alliance-sponsored biopic,Witchfinder General: The Todd
Pruitt Story. Directed by the Puppetmaster, it looks fantastic, with its scenes of violent book burnings ('Please, I'd rather you didn't use church money to buy Jesus Calling'), extreme Reformed fanaticism ('Bring that baby to the font now, wretched wench!'), and his consistent failure to reimagine the future and realize that many of his methodologies, paradigms and strategies need to change to get to the next level of ministry success ('Today I am going to be preaching on a passage in - no, not my own book but.... the Bible!').
In fact, the movie is a tale of two paradigms. One is where the church is not an act of man but a creation of God. Thus, its tools are defined by God and consist of the ordinary means of grace -- the Word read and especially preached, the sacraments, and prayer. These are the ways God has provided for growth and maturity. The other is one where the church is a corporation, where management theory, entrepreneurial gibberish, and an emphasis upon technique, built around a Pelagian anthropology, set the priorities.
A subplot, for the real film critic, is the cultural problem of niceness. As Todd pointed out yesterday, to criticise a book and to refuse to use church money (ahem -- God's money) to buy it and distribute it is not the same as banning it. If you want to read heterodoxy or heresy, use your own money, not the church's. Yet we live in a world where all criticism is increasingly seen as personal, as a judgment on somebody's worth and identity, not simply on an argument or an idea. As I commented earlier in the week, this is an obvious problem with the culture surrounding women's writing; but forms of it pervade all aspects of the evangelical world in general and pay no respect to gender.
Pruitt Story. Directed by the Puppetmaster, it looks fantastic, with its scenes of violent book burnings ('Please, I'd rather you didn't use church money to buy Jesus Calling'), extreme Reformed fanaticism ('Bring that baby to the font now, wretched wench!'), and his consistent failure to reimagine the future and realize that many of his methodologies, paradigms and strategies need to change to get to the next level of ministry success ('Today I am going to be preaching on a passage in - no, not my own book but.... the Bible!'). In fact, the movie is a tale of two paradigms. One is where the church is not an act of man but a creation of God. Thus, its tools are defined by God and consist of the ordinary means of grace -- the Word read and especially preached, the sacraments, and prayer. These are the ways God has provided for growth and maturity. The other is one where the church is a corporation, where management theory, entrepreneurial gibberish, and an emphasis upon technique, built around a Pelagian anthropology, set the priorities.
A subplot, for the real film critic, is the cultural problem of niceness. As Todd pointed out yesterday, to criticise a book and to refuse to use church money (ahem -- God's money) to buy it and distribute it is not the same as banning it. If you want to read heterodoxy or heresy, use your own money, not the church's. Yet we live in a world where all criticism is increasingly seen as personal, as a judgment on somebody's worth and identity, not simply on an argument or an idea. As I commented earlier in the week, this is an obvious problem with the culture surrounding women's writing; but forms of it pervade all aspects of the evangelical world in general and pay no respect to gender.
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