CRN.Info and Analysis

Profile:
Name: Ken Silva (sometimes uses “Reverend”, “Rev.” or “Pastor” as a title)
Age: Unknown
Location: Claremont, NH
Profession: Multiple. Ken works part time at Stevens High School, and is the pastor of the Connecticut River Baptist Church, a small house-church in Claremont.

Notes:

• Ken is the ‘president’ of Aprising Ministries, a website that houses his “miss-ives”, critical of anything and everything he dislikes in the modern church, which can be summed up as ‘most everything’. While he likes to use this title when addressing those who are not familiar with him, it really means that he’s the only guy from his Bible study with a blog.
• Ken is rather self-conscious about his lack of ability to cogently and coherently defend his opinions, so he hides behind a number of tactics to cloud the issue and/or make it appear he has more authority/foundation for his aberrant views:
• Over-use of “qualified” titles for himself (”Ordained Pastor of the SBC” - even though he has driven off more people than currently attend his Bible Study house church, through a warped interpretation of John 6; “President of Aprising Ministries” - i.e. king of his blog; “Spiritual Adviser of Slice of Laodicea” - i.e. contributor to another watchblog; etc.)
• Over-use of quoting dead theologians. Both the “dead” and “theologian” descriptors are important: 1) “Dead,” so they can’t refute him saying they would be in complete agreement with him; 2) “Theologian” (as opposed to “scholar”), so he can rely on opinion bolstering him, rather than historical fact - which often does not.
• Like rock-groupies, Ken likes to name drop and give the appearance of ‘inside support’. The key example is that he like to say that he has ’studied under the tutelage of Dr. Walter Martin’, when - as Ken admitted in a radio interview - his only experience with Dr. Martin was listening to audio tapes of the good doctor, beginning four years after his death.
• In classic self-conscious form, when first questioned by someone, he starts by questioning their motives for questioning him and then casts his doubt on the salvation of the questioner. If they persist in their queries, he next pulls rank (”do you know I’m an ordained pastor?”), followed by sanctimonious pronouncements of “sorrow” (”maybe someday, you’ll see what you’re doing here…”), and finally condemning of the questioner to outer darkness via Romans 16:17 and Titus 3:10-11 (after all, he couldn’t be wrong or divisive, could he?)
• Quoting of verses that could only legitimately be used with Christine/Pauline authority, for the purpose of calling into question the motives/salvation of those who dare to question his conclusions. (Matthew 22:29 and John 7:24 are a few of his favorites) While he will deny he actually believes he has such authority, he continues to act in a manner that does not square with his words.
• When questioned on his broad generalizations or on the faulty reasoning in his ‘miss-ives’, rather than answer in a forthright manner, he just points back to his website and tells the questioner to go find the answer there (when it was the deficiency in that website which initially spurred the question).
• Ken exhibits a severe lack of logical skills, primarily utilizing the straw man logical fallacy. Typically, the way he does this is by saying “A said X, by which he really meant Y. Therefore since Y is heretical, A is a heretic.” Often, he nests multiple straw men together, adding in contextomy, ad hominem, and false dichotomy to cloud the pot. Eventually, because of his “no-comments” policy and the Slice commenting policy, he will try to use ‘proof by assertion‘, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
• In his writing, Ken has become so overly amused with his self-developed esoteric lexionary, that his articles seem to be half-composed of these virtually meaningless phrases. Examples of this are “Ecumenical Church of Deceit”, “Hollow Men of the Emergent”, “Spell of Bell”, “Apostate Church of Rome”, ad nauseum. His writing style also takes on an affected 1800’s-style tone a la John Edwards, which tends to make it seem even more disconnected from reality.
• Ken’s writing is also unable to maintain any sense of objectivity, due to the overuse of vitriolic labels applied to names of individuals and churches. Fortunately, this has the affect of discrediting his writing, rather than giving it any edge of authority.
• In a rather ironic twist, Ken has recently found himself railing against the SBC, but because he “needs” the illusion of authority granted by their ordination, he cannot drop his affiliation from the organization.

Quotes

[Ken's spiritually objective thoughts from this thread] I know I for one won’t rest until I help see that Rob Bell is “cut off” and “severed” from infecting the Body of Christ any further with his apostate psuedo-Christianity.

[From a Slice Podcast, we learn that Ken's word is God's word] There were times I’m writing these articles and I literally turned to the Lord, as if He was standing there, and I said ‘Lord, I didn’t know that. I could not have written that sentence.’ I say that time and time again. I take no credit for this. I’m one of the few who’ll tell you that.

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