The Steam Tunnel Pilot

LEAP DAY PREDICTIONS

It comes only once every four years.  For that reason—and because we weren’t yet online last New Year’s Eve—our crack staff has compiled the following list of predictions we feel will be vindicated by February 29, 2016.

 1  Purpose-Driven pastor Rick Warren will revert to doctrinal orthodoxy.

Following the failure of Warren’s new chat show, The Surah-Hundred Club, a joint venture between TBN and Al Jazeera, Warren hits rock bottom.  He humbly repents, steps down from public ministry for two years, puts himself under the discipleship of a team of godly men (dubbed “The Warren Commission” by cynics), and issues a thoroughly orthodox statement of faith and an accompanying philosophy of ministry.

Of course, we don’t really expect this to happen.  However, Mr. Warren has left no room for any useful satirical speculation.  He’s gone so far off the chart, one can only hope that, by some bizarre theological physics, he will circle back from the other direction and land back on the chart. Lord help us.  Lord help Rick Warren.  

 2   Pastor James MacDonald will announce that the Elephant Room 3 conference, scheduled for February, 2013, will be replaced by a new conference series, Albatross 1. The focus of A1 will be the casting off of the inconvenient truths of biblical Christianity.



Hey Haters.  It's time for breakfast.

   3   Digital photographic images of Elevation Church pastor and evangelical wunderkind Steven Furtick will be found to have healing prop- erties; as a second-wave to this phenomenon, people—mostly women, since they are easier to deceive—will begin to discover Furtick’s image baked into French toast and other savory items.  Expect another hagiopic from Elevation's film ministry. 

 4   Zondervan will introduce the Harry Potter Study Bible.  Come on, you knew this had to be coming.  And you thought TNIV-2010 was something?

 5    5 Pastor Ed Young, Jr., will have a promotion that does not involve rapping or being on a roof. 

It’s got to happen some time.  Just the law of averages.

  6   6—TThe American Civil Liberties Union will come to the aid of street preachers as the 9th circuit—among other courts—declares street preaching to be a hate crime, making it illegal in most of America’s larger cities. When things are so messed up that you pray a Psalm 121 prayer and help comes from the Left, you know things are really messed up.





What is wrong with this man?

 7   Mark Driscoll will experience a very public fall from grace.  Though we can’t disclose the exact nature of the faux hawk pas, we can tell you that Freudians will have a field day with “what-did-we-tell-you”–type declarations.  Non-Freudians are shocked as well.  Quips the nouthetic Jay Adams, “I take back what I said about being competent to counsel. See you later.” 
  

A brief, redemptive epilogue follows.  Pastor Mark is then approached by the cable network Cinemax about

hosting his own reality show, Pastrosterone, in which he and a group of devout Ultimate Fighting practitioners start a seminary and training institute for girly-man British evangelicals, or, as Driscoll likes to call them, the “Hardly Boys.”

  8  

 8

Thomas Nelson will release the Ipecac Study Bible.  Partially in response to Zondervan (see #4 above), the ISB is the Nashville-based publisher’s attempt to keep up with the Potters.  Says national director of marketing Lane Hapgood, “We’re just steering into the skid.”

  9   Pastor and blogger Tim Bayly will write a blog post that does not contain the verb connive, its associated adjective conniving; or the noun cowardice (and its associated adjective cowardly). Regular readers will suspect that the blog has been hacked by homosexual activists—oops, I mean “hacktivists”— oops, I mean sodomites, of course.  With love.  

 10  
 Tim Challies will relinquish his title as the World’s Most Famous Christian Blogger^®, following a young-restless-and-Reformed-furor after he links to a story from a plain-talking patriarchal web site called KeepingWomenDown.com.* 

*If you don’t get the joke, ask your hus- bands at home.  Otherwise, please be quiet.