You mean that someone actually converted because they wanted the truth?

Almost no church growth strategies of which I am aware take the search for truth as a serious point of encounter with those we seek to reach. We are taught to treat others as infants driven by desires and needs to which we must continually respond if they are to come to our church. Churches aren’t given spiritual calcium to strengthen backbones but are treated like nervous parents who continually are in an anxious fret about whether or not their children like them.

My wife commented to me that more and more TV programs are building themes around bratty kids who intimdate their parents and are spoiled above imagining. Our culture is getting the point – our kids aren’t growing up. There is an epidemic of entitlement, self-centeredness and contempt for work and sacrifice.

iMonk posts a relevant blog. Here is a portion of it.

Christian and Roman Catholic convert Heather King got a major write-up at Amy Welborn’s blog. Amy says Heather’s memoir Redeemed is a must read, so I’d say that settles it.

But in the comments of that post I found this quote from an interview with Heather King. That sound you are about to hear is the current crop of cross-avoiding, Osteen-esque evangelicals clearing their throats and slinking down in their seats like the sniveling Gospel-avoiders they are.
Tod asks: And I’m interested to know why the Catholic faith was your path in particular? Why not, for example, a Protestant sect, or Buddhism, or even Islam? What was it about Catholicism that called out to you particularly?

Heather: I can say that when I began my quest I didn’t shop around for a church where I felt “comfortable” or where the people necessarily looked or dressed like me, or where I was going to hear things that were safe or familiar or politically correct. I was seeking the truth. I was looking for a church that would tell me the truth. I was concerned about the state of my soul, which I believed to be a matter of life and death. Catholicism was the only church that addressed that, as a matter of life and death: addressed it directly, continually, truthfully, without stinting or flinching. The cross in a Catholic church has a body on it. Right up front, right above the altar, is the message that subconsciously haunts us: someday, we’re going to die. Right up front, loud and clear, is the human condition: suffering, torment, conflict. As I say in Redeemed, the first time I went to Mass and really “saw” that body on the crucifix, I realized Christ isn’t saying that we need to suffer more; he’s acknowledging the suffering we’re already in. And I suppose on some level in that moment I “got” as much as I ever will, or as it’s possible to “get”—which is that God loves us so much he incarnated himself as man, he came down and pitched his tent among us to teach us how to come awake, to accompany us on the journey, to show what it looks like and what happens to you when you live in total integrity. Eventually, one way or another, they’ll kill you—which is why hardly anyone ever dares to live in total integrity.

No graceful exit for Brett Favre

Haven’t we seen this before? Some people don’t seem to get the “it’s over” message and hang on until everyone is miserable. It didn’t have to be this way!!! Now Favre is going to be remembered, not for his football skills, but for his erratic need to be needed. No one is going to be able to get on with life until Favre brings enough misery that people get tired of having “Favre Fluenza.”

Who really ever leaves with class? Their numbers are few. But the few who do capture something for themselves that their careers alone couldn’t give them – immortality. Those who step away at the top of their game, read the tea leaves, say thank you and disappear are the real winners in our celebrity culture. But fame and attention are the cocaine of the soul – anything for another high.

John the Baptist managed his exit from center stage pretty well. “He must increase and I must decrease” he said of the Christ whose way John had come to prepare. Not bad, John. Not bad. Along the way I have had the opportunity to watch many who came up to this fork in the road. Most didn’t handle it well. Actually, most is the not the word. Almost nobody would be the better phrasing.

From now on when I see Favre play, if he does, I will only be thinking of a career in decline. It could have been better than that, Brett. I could have been better.