Cookbook Christianity

This post is from the defunct blog “Dying Church”

The people I spoke with showed extreme antipathy toward formulas and "packaged" Christianity. In their experience, it was downright misleading to try to reduce spiritual growth to a handful of steps. Likewise, they rejected as simplistic any attempts to explain complex truths through proof-texts and clever diagrams. Almost every time they spoke about the various prescriptions they had been given, their voices lapsed into sarcasm. They had tried what they regarded as "cookbook Christianity" and it failed miserably. (William Hendricks, Exit Interviews p. 261)