\u2022 If you were reading Hal Lindsey\u2019s Rapture-mania best-sellers back in the \u201970s and \u201980s, then you\u2019re not as young as you used to be. In fact, you\u2019re now far older than those books insisted you\u2019d ever<\/em> be.<\/p>\n The same could be said of the millions of American Christians who devoured the World\u2019s Worst Books in the 1990s. Anyone who believed those books was being taught that there was no future<\/em> \u2014 no way they or the world would still be around in the distant future of 2022. This rarely comes up as a factor in all the discussion of \u201cthe rise of the Nones\u201d and the fretting about Millennials leavingthechurchindroves. But how could it not be a factor in that?<\/p>\n And but so, if you are a one-time Hal Lindsey reader still living here on this late great planet, then Andrew Logan would like to talk to hear your story<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 Acts 6:1-7<\/a><\/p>\n Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, \u201cCritical Race Theory is a bigger threat to the church than racism itself.<\/a>\u201d And the disciples expelled the woke Hellenists from their midst and the number of disciples decreased greatly in Jerusalem and everyone agreed to never mention Pentecost ever again. The End.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2022 Snark aside, the actual text of Acts 6:1-7 \u2014 in which the first deacons were appointed to correct the cultural injustice already infecting the young not-yet-a-church community \u2014 is pretty awesome.<\/p>\n Except, that is, for the bit where an unnamed spokesman for the disciples says this: \u201cIt is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.\u201d That had to be Peter, right? Because there\u2019s kind of a motif woven through the first half of Acts involving Peter being embarrassingly slow to come around to understand what Pentecost means involving tables and who gets to sit at them and who should be waiting on them. Imagining that waiting on tables somehow entails \u201cneglecting the word of God\u201d is exactly the kind of thing that Peter would have said before getting chewed out by Paul and finally set straight by a rooftop vision directly from God.<\/p>\n I like to think that part of the reason that newly appointed deacon Philip hightailed it to Samaria was that he didn\u2019t quite trust himself not to tell Peter et. al. what they could do with the suggestion that \u201cwaiting on tables\u201d for hungry and outcast widows was somehow a distraction<\/em> from \u201cthe word of God.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2022\/02\/LateGreat-193x300.jpeg\")
<\/a>When the adults at my Lindsey-loving fundamentalist church and private Christian school insisted that we kids read and study Lindsey\u2019s books back then, I don\u2019t think any of them thought through how truly, deeply effed up<\/em> it was for them to be telling the entire youth group that we shouldn\u2019t expect to still be living here on the Late Great Planet Earth by age 30 \u2014 and that there was certainly no chance we\u2019d ever live to see our 40s or 50s.<\/p>\n