My dad used to tell a corny joke from the pulpit: I'm so pre-millennial I won't even let my kids eat Post Toasties. (For non-Americans, Post is brand of breakfast cereal.)

Pre and post millennialism are competing strands of eschatology (end-times prophecy beliefs) in popular forms of Protestant Christianity. The Pre crowd is the one most people have heard of, with the Rapture set to sweep true Christians directly to heaven, followed by a period of tribulation led by the Antichrist, followed by a final war between God and Satan, and then a thousand years (millennium) of peace as Jesus rules the Earth, before it's destroyed and a new Heaven and new Earth are created.

This is the vision of end times pushed by Hal Lindsay of "The Late Great Planet Earth" fame and popularized by a series of movies. He repackaged or modified most of it from a couple early to mid 20th century preachers who themselves built on earlier works. You won't, to the surprise of many Evangelical Christians, find most of it in the Bible.

The Post-Millenial crowd offer their own very different, equally wacky assurances of how the world will end, and they feud rather bitterly with the Pre guys about that.

All that to note that this preacher chooses to make his vision of end-of- the-world prophesies a critical part of his identity. So is it surprising he holds other wack-a-doo beliefs?

Well... color me less than astonished.