I've seen some folks talk about the very influential work "Pagan Christianity" by Frank Viola from 2 years ago. The Thesis of that book was that Christianity was corrupted after it was legalized, the large scale Sunday worship service that we are familiar today is a corruption that comes from Greco Roman paganism, along with buildings like the Basilica. Early Christian religious services were generally small scale affairs like what we see in the book of Acts. This kind of thinking is deeply flawed because it neglects the actual history of Judaism that came before Christianity! But never stop the facts get in the way of writing a sensationalist book to encourage the nascent house church movement and to pay your bills for the next few years!
I would say, I had a rather low opinion of this person on Christian Message boards I frequented. I considered him a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Because he was encouraging folks to leave their church and found their own house church using the materials he was selling to do so. Besides that, I also noted when I went into bookstores and looked at his books, I recognized him plagiarizing content for some of the other "Church Growth" movement books that I also had in my library in the late 90s and 2000s. And of course, that same thing happened to me, in critiquing and denouncing him and touting Classical and Eastern Orthodox theology, I actually gave him material to plagiarize for his next book!
I guess to be fair and objective years later when I checked on him, he did eventually come up with Bibliographies and begin to credit other authors for things, while in his early days he wrote things in such a way, that led his reader to believe that he originated all the ideas he wrote about. But doing so probably was smart to eventually protect himself from lawsuits, and good public relations being a kind of recognized figure in Alternative Church Postmodern Christianity.
I would say, I had a rather low opinion of this person on Christian Message boards I frequented. I considered him a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Because he was encouraging folks to leave their church and found their own house church using the materials he was selling to do so. Besides that, I also noted when I went into bookstores and looked at his books, I recognized him plagiarizing content for some of the other "Church Growth" movement books that I also had in my library in the late 90s and 2000s. And of course, that same thing happened to me, in critiquing and denouncing him and touting Classical and Eastern Orthodox theology, I actually gave him material to plagiarize for his next book!
I guess to be fair and objective years later when I checked on him, he did eventually come up with Bibliographies and begin to credit other authors for things, while in his early days he wrote things in such a way, that led his reader to believe that he originated all the ideas he wrote about. But doing so probably was smart to eventually protect himself from lawsuits, and good public relations being a kind of recognized figure in Alternative Church Postmodern Christianity.
