The God of Truth:

Introduction

I am alone and unwelcome in American churches.

Why is that?

Two phenomena afflict the American -- and increasingly, the international -- church. I am not the first to notice them, nor to offer an explanation, but none of the explanations and proffered cures do a very good job of it. They don't even see these phenomena as related. If you don't understand the single underlying cause for these two situations, you cannot fix the problem.

Anybody can walk into almost any church on Sunday morning and immediately see that there are more women than men, often more than twice as many. There were women in the New Testament church, but not nearly so prominent as now. This is a fundamental difference, which provokes all sorts of explanations and attempts at cure or accommodation, pretty much all of them wrong-headed. We can do better than that.

Anybody can walk into any scientific or technology conference or science department in a secular university and find more men than women -- although not always in such large numbers as the disparity in the churches. What is in large numbers is the preponderance of atheists and non-religious practitioners, usually in far greater proportion than the population at large in America.

These two phenomena are related by the well-defined personality types described by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. The American churches are hostile to the kind of people who become scientists and technologists. We can come, but only by pretending or acting like somebody other than God made us to be. It's like trying to evangelize Africans by telling them to bleach their skin.

The problem is not merely science and technology, but it is more obvious and pronounced in those fields than in other male-dominated industries. It really has nothing to do with gender at all, except that there is a significant gender discrimination in one MBTI dimension, and that one dimension also selects technology and science on the one hand, and the Christian religion as practiced in America on the other.

The most curious facet of this discrimination is that it is not to be found in the Bible, the founding document of the American church and the standard to which all of the most vibrant American churches appeal for their authority.

Why is that?

This treatise briefly explores the Biblical support for the different MBTI indicators, with a particular emphasis on the Thinker/Feeler dimension, then looks at how the Christian churches in America have strayed from their Biblical roots in this category, and have thus systematically excluded Thinkers from their midst. Finally we look at some ways this problem might be rectified.

My deepest hope is to encourage American churches to welcome and evangelize the other half of the population without unnecessarily alienating the existing membership. I believe we can do this by returning to the gospel originally preached by Jesus and his Apostles and by giving the God of Truth the prominance He has in the Bible we all still read.
 

Chapters:

Introduction
MBTI
Values and Affirmation
Science vs Religion
Girly Churches
The God of Truth
The Gospel of Truth
Purpose
Loving God
Loving My Neighbor
Forgiving [this needs revision]
Implications
Birthdays
Appendix: Mark
Appendix: Romans

This is a work in process. I welcome comments.

If you are reading this, that proves you are not a spambot, but you need to pay attention or I won't know it. If your "sender" does not look like a person's name, you must use a relevant 1- or 2-word subject, preferably one of those offered to you in my email link (here and elsewhere). Otherwise it gets deleted without me seeing it. Senders with credible names, I look at the subject, but it still must be relevant, not an obvious sales pitch. Blame the liars and thieves (aka spammers).

Tom Pittman
Copyright  2008
Rev. 2014 January 28