Stuff Apostolics Like

 I was raised in church and now I am miserable. Did the Holy Ghost do this? I don't know. I was 8 years old when I spoke in tongues. A child who was trying his hardest to do the things he was told to do. All my friends received the Holy Ghost when they were five six or seven. But I was scared of lying to myself about having the Holy Ghost. So I waited until I could be sure I received it. I waited until it was true. When I was 8 I spoke in tongues and cried and felt  I was saved. They told me I was saved and they showed me a scripture to prove it and I believed it and I was happy. My pastor, he died at the age of 35. I was 14 when he died. I was still saved then. That pastor, he was funny. Loving. I miss him. I don't remember crying as hard as I did when I found out he was gone. The most wonderful man I knew at the time. The man who replaced him, I remember him too. I never knew a man who cared more about his people..... He tried his best as I grew older. ...

Introduction: Describing a room and, eventually how we're all going to hell Serious pretend time here: Let's pretend we all grew up together. Like you, me and about 200 others...Best friends! And we all grew up in the same room, under the same watchful babysitters and parents. And this room is really big. Huge  really. Also: we can't leave the room. Ever. Naturally, we grow up learning the same things. We go through the same drama and rumors and playtime together. If a fight breaks out, it's our business. If a break-up happens, we tell the break-upper that they needed to move on, and also tell the break-uppee that they deserve better. In this scenario, we are perfect socializers. In this room, we like some people. We secretly hate others. Yes it gets boring. Often overly dramatic at times. But overall, life is pretty good. Not to mention that the social circle is still relatively small enough that we still feel like everyone knows us and we know everyone,...

Editor's Comment: Special Guest Author James Wilder has a blog  where he writes his thoughts down about Christianity or culture or whatever else is on his mind. He is self-conscious about this. He shouldn't be. Today he wrote a post that really resonated with me about the denomination we grew up. I think you'll enjoy. The post is copied in full below or can be read over at his blog, here ... A new "reality" show on the TLC network, "Breaking Amish," features five young adults who have left their Amish and Mennonite communities to experience life in the Big Apple, trying to make a decision if they want to permanently leave their communities. There has been a lot of controversy about the show's "authentic" factor (surprise, surprise, a reality show that isn't "real"), but the stories told, and the concepts viewed are all eerily familiar and even accurate. The show opens each episode with some sort of wisdom quote o...

Various aspects of this post have been running through my head for some months now and I just thought I should get them out before the election. So, here it is. I'll admit that it's less polished than some of my other posts and it's not nearly as humorous, unless you take after the Horkheimer/Adorno school of comedy, where true laughter only comes from the pure horror, which in this case fits nicely. Anyway, please read and feel free to comment. Antonio Gramsci died in 1937 after nine yeas of imprisonment at the hands of Benito Mussolini's fascist government. A member of the Italian parliament and the Communist Party, Gramsci died for his opposition to the actual oppression of the National Socialists, as opposed to the farcical fear mongering of conservative pundits over President Obama's insidious plans for the America of 2016. (A helpful hint: history and common sense tells us real socialist dictators don't run for two terms or downsize the military as...

Over the past few years I’ve lost touch with a lot of people and a lot of events. Sometimes intentionally. For instance, I try not to pay attention to Music Fest, Youth Congress, General Conference, etc. Joel called me a few weeks ago and, in passing, mentioned camps, which gave me great glee in the fact that I had been oblivious to the fact that it was camp season.  It’s always the same: one shouting service, one weeping service, words of ‘prophecy’ are given, everyone eats too much and we all go home. I knew General Conference was going on last week but didn’t think much of it. I didn’t try to stream it, I stayed away from the speaking schedule, and I was blissful. But… They made it impossible for me. It’s like I’m in The Truman Show, except it’s The Glen Show and there’s some guy in a control booth somewhere saying “Ok, send in the crazy in three…two…” Act 1 A few years ago I saw a hilarious viral video of a guy who gets his f...

For those of you who don't know what this is, it's called a Meme. Memes started as pictures in chain email forwards that you used to send directly to your trash bin without opening them. It's a descendent of the early internet humor of the nineties. Think of The Dancing Baby or The Hampster Dance. These were the progenitors of memes. Basically, what a meme is is this: internet humor that not a lot of people get. The ones who do 'get' can sit on websites like 4chan or 9gag and scroll for hours, laughing incessantly and never getting bored, no matter how stupid, random, abstract or completely senseless the stuff they're looking at is. The ones who don't 'get it' just roll their eyes when they see it, and click onto the next thing. There is no sense to a meme. It's like an inside joke that all you have to do to get on the inside of is say you get it, and boom, you're in. "It's so funny!" "But why is it funny?" ...

A little listening music:   College & Electric Youth - A Real Hero by College Although you weren’t asking, I would say the four most commonly used words I heard growing up, would be ‘bitter’, ‘rebellion’, ‘’reprobate’, and ‘backslide.’ The word I hear most often about myself (as in “out-of-church-Glen”) is ‘bitter’. I don’t think that’s a secret. Clearly I’m pretty jaded. My posts aren’t exactly filled with memories of puppy dogs and rainbows. Perhaps unexpectedly, I am 100% completely ok with this label. So why would someone like be ok with this label? Well for one, it’s accurate. But there’s also more to it than that. Let me explain: I had a very, very shallow outlook as a young’n. I saw people on the fringes of my church growing up that carried the ‘rebel’ label. I saw people come around occasionally that had long since left church, and they carried the ‘backslider’ label. But the word thrown around more freely than any...