Our Way Or Their Way?

The thing I find most interesting about clusters is how thoroughly this phenomenon affects the student community. In fact, in the high schools I have visited, there is no longer any such thing as a "student community."

Unfortunately, the adults who are trying to reach and help teens have not awakened to this new social reality. To the contrary, all the services and systems that churches, social workers, the theraputic community, and others have developed to serve midadolescents are lost in a time warpo that assumes some kind of cohesive school community, but this kind of community is rapidly vanishing or already gone.

Coaches still rely on a students' willingness and ability to work as a team, with mixed success. And in the world of Christian youth work, churches and parachurch organizations try to bring young people from a wide variety of schools and clusters into big groups they call fellowship. Adults' intentions may be good, but their assumptions about teens' social lives are outmoded. therefore the programs and services they devise to serve kids do not adequately address the changes in how youth relate to one another. As a result, young people are once again offered up on the altar of an adult agenda at the cost of their personal sense of safety.

Let me state it more plainly. Many times today's teenagers are thrown together in false relationships by well-meaning adults who think kids connect with one another just like they used to in the good old days. Most teens will try to cooperate with adults by fulfilling the ill-fitting roles we have assigned them. This outward obedience and conformity will ultimately fail to reach kids where they are, because, for many teens, how they appear on the outside is far differemt from the driving sence of place and home they crave on the inside.

We need to realize that the intense loyalty and commitment young people exhibit toward their clusters are manifestations of their quest to fill the gaping holes in their hearts that are cause by their sense of abandonment. even while operating in intimate and exclusive social relationships, kids are still lonely. Somehow the cluster is not all that it is advertised to be. Should we expose this vulnerability? I don't think so. Rather we should seek ways to play a greater role in kids' lives by simply being there for them. Instead of proclaiming our agenda or giving kids our list of critiques of their world, we should come alongside them and help them find the safety net they are seeking through their clusters.

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excerpt from Chap Clark's "When Kids Hurt - Help For Adults Navigating The Adolescent Maze"

All Consuming Thesis and Internship

UPDATE:

Just a quick note to let all my loyal readers know I haven't abandoned this blog I am just neck deep in school. I'm finishing up my thesis on human behavior and preparing for an internship that will likely take over my life for the next year. Hopefully after the new year I will be able to write a little more than I have the last few months.

In the meantime, enjoy this holiday. Keep it simple. Love deeply. Live passionately. Allow yourself to be changed by the season.

Peace to you and yours.

Chris

The Church and Aldous Huxley

The following is from the forward to the classic novel "Amusing Ourselves To Death" by Neil Postman.

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We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful American sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of imformation. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in "Brave New World" revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's most infinite appetite for distractions." in "1984", Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In a "Brave New World", they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

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Is it possible that the same Huxleyian vision is being played out in our (American) Christian experience as well? Are we just amusing ourselves to death?

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

This might sound pessimistic, but it just doesn't seem as if we're (the Church) is getting anything done. I don't see a lot of love or compassion, and rarely do we read about the church reaching into the human gutter of sin and puling people out. Just a lot of sanctimonious speech and self-righteous indignation, all wrapped up in great marketing and advertising. There's a whole lot of talk but not a whole lot of action.

Too harsh? Maybe. But the seeming lack of everything really bums me out. Yet in some sick way it puts a smile on my face. I take some kind of weird pleasure in knowing that the church is tanking, at least in its current form.

I'm sick of the what what I've heard called the, "Value Meal Theology". You may not know this, but pastors all over the country are choosing their sermons and lessons from the spiritual-message buffets cooked up by a few of the leading megachurches.

Pastors are closing the door on the creative force of the Holy Spirit within their own community in favor of Value Meal Theology. Why create something new when you can use another pastor's words, along with his well-established marketing teams, great hair products, and cool, untucked shirts? If he looks good and sounds good, then I can imitate him and I'll be good. Why let the inspiration of the Holy Spirit drive the message to the people in your own church when you can get a yearlong subscription to a great, feel-good, give-and-get program wrapped up with a bow, guaranteeing bigger and better results for your church? Never mind challenging yourself in the Word of God when you can shut yourself down on all fronts with another guy's message. After all, if you're having trouble increasing the numbers, go for what works.

I'm sick of pastors with planes, pastors with record deals, pastors with bodyguards, pastors who offer time alone with them (for a fee), pastors with head shots.

What happened to pastors with sexual-sin problems? Bring back Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. At least we knew what we were getting. I'm sick of not seeing Jesus in the pulpit. Instead, many of us are getting a weaselly, feel-good message veiled with Scripture, so people won't run from the ten-million-dollar building.

I'm sick of it! And yet...happy. I'm happy because something is on the horizon, and it's not offering the five keys to spiritual freedom. It's a mad army of disciples who are just like us: sick and tired of the shepherds who only talk to their flock and don't tend it. Alcoholics Anonymous refers to the apathy as being "sick and tired of being sick and tired".

I know a lot of this rhetoric will fall on deaf ears. For some of you, this doesn't apply - you have or are an awesome pastor who truly desires to hear God and follow him. For others, you're hunkered down in your beliefs and aren't going to hear this, no matter what I say.

It's almost too cliche to roll out a verse, but it's a necessity we need to glue to our lives.

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men. "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. Let your light shine, so they can see your good deeds and praise the Father.

Matthew 5:13-16 (NIV)

I'm advocating work: not speeches, not sermons, not four-hour weekend workshops. Just work.

Dear Children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

1 John 3:18 (NIV)

Matthew got it. John got it. Get up and do something. I don't care what it is. Just take some action. The rule should be "Do anything short of sin".

Give to the poor. Feed the hungry. Evangelize on a city street. Help a kid who has cancer. Join the fight against pornography. Share some time with the elderly. Love your neighbor. Play with and teach a little kids. Make yourself available to a teenager who needs a mentor. Paint a house. Fix someone's car. Talk to a homosexual about his or her faith. Pull a drunk out of the gutter, and give him something to eat. Give the homeless guy a place to crash. Bring a hooker to church. Spend the afternoon talking to an inmate at the local jail.

You get the idea. Bottom line: GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND DO SOMETHING!

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inspired by Starving Jesus by Gross and Mahon

It's all relative to the size of your steeple...

Most contemporary Christians mistakenly view the church building as a necessary part of worship. Therefore, they never question the need to financially support a building and its maintenance.

The church edifice demands a vast infusion of money. In the United States alone, real estate owned by institutional churches today is worth over $230 billion. Church building debt, service, and maintenance consumes about 18 percent of the $50 to $60 billion tithed to churches annually. Point: Contemporary Christians are spending astronomical amounts of money on their buildings.

All the traditional reasons put forth for "needing" a church building collapse under careful scrutiny. We so easily forget that the early Christians turned the world upside down without them (see Acts 17:6). They grew rapidly for three hundred years without the help (or hindrance) of church buildings.

In the business world, overhead kills. Overhead is what gets added to the "real" work a business does for its clients. Overhead pays for the buildings, the pencils, and the accounting staff. Furthermore, church buildings (as well as salaried pastors and staff) require very large ongoing expenses rather than onetime outlays. These budget busters take their cut out of a church's monetary giving not just today, but next month, next year, and so on.

Contrast the overhead of a traditional church, which includes salaried staff and church buildings, with the overhead of say a house church. Rather than such overhead siphoning off 50 to 85 percent of the house church's monetary giving, its operating costs amount to a small percentage of the budget, freeing more than 95 percent of its shared money for delivering real services like ministry, mission, and outreach to the world.

Most of us are completely unaware of what we lost as Christians when we began erecting places devoted exclusively for worship. The Christian faith was born in believer's homes, yet every Sunday morning, scores of Christians sit in a building with pagan origins that is based upon pagan philosophy.

There does not exist a shred of biblical support for the church building. Yet scores of Christians pay good money each year to sanctify their brick and stone. By doing so, they have supported an artificial setting where they are lulled into passivity and prevented from being natural or intimate with other believers.

We have become victims of our past. We have been fathered by Constantine who gave us the prestigious status of owning a building. We have been blinded by the Romans and Greeks who force upon us their hierarchically structured basilicas. We have been taken by the Goths who imposed upon us their Platonic architecture. We have been hijacked by the Egyptians and Babylonians who gave us our sacred steeples. We have been swindled by the Athenians who impose on us their Doric columns.

Somehow we have been taught to feel holier when we are in "the house of God" and have inherited a pathological dependency upon an edifice to carry out our worship to God. At bottom, the church building has taught us badly about what church is and what it does. The building is an architectural denial of the priesthood of all believers. It is a contradiction of the very nature of ekklesia - which is a countercultural community. The church building impedes our understanding and experience that the church is Christ's functioning body that lives and breathes under His direct headship.

It is high time we Christians wake up to the fact that we are being neither biblical nor spiritual by supporting church buildings. And we are doing great damage to the message of the New Testament (not the Old Testament that is often referred to when talking about Christian building projects) by calling man-made building "churches". If every Christian on the planet would never call a building a church again, this alone would create a revolution in our faith.

John Newton rightly said, "Let not him who worships under a steeple condemn him who worships under a chimney." With that in mind, what biblical, spiritual, or historical authority does any Christian have to gather under a steeple in the first place?

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excerpt from Pagan Christianity by George Barna and Frank Viola
Acts 2:46; 20:20; Romans 16:3,5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15; Philomen 2

5 Reasons Why...Neil Diamond Will Always Rock...Softly

Posted Wed Jun 25, 2008 10:59pm PDT by Gil Kaufman in GetBack

1) He's Seen 100 Million Faces...And Rocked Them All

Diamond's sold more than 100 million albums over the past 40+ years, but the bespangled man they call The Basher notched his first #1 in May of 2008 with his second Rick Rubin-produced return to form, Home Before Dark.

2) All the Cool Kids Are Obsessed With Him

He might seem square to you, but some of the coolest people you know have total man crushes on him. Cases in point: Quentin Tarantino used a cover of “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” in Pulp Fiction, Johnny Cash covered “Solitary Man,” and hip French DJ duo Justice walk onstage to the strains of “Sweet Caroline.” Oh, and he performed at The Band’s Last Waltz.

3) Caroline-a on Our Minds, All the Time

Speaking of good ole “Sweet Caroline,” everyone you know has warbled that one at the karaoke bar at some point in their lives. Including you. Don’t bother trying to deny it. Plus, it’s the theme song to the Red Sox Nation, which totally rocks.

4) He Nearly Became The Original Eice, Eice Baby

Diamond was thisclose to picking the big pimpin’ stage name Eice Cherry at the start of his career. It was between that and Noah Kaminsky. But the man they call the Diamond Cutter and the Jewish Elvis was actually born Neil (ahem, Leslie) Diamond, which is the greatest stage name. . .ever. Well, except for the Leslie part.

5) Even If You Hate Him, You Still Kind Of Like Him

He’s the subject of one of the greatest comedic put-downs/compliments in film history, courtesy of the 1991 Bill Murray phobia laugher, What About Bob? In that film, Murray’s character states why he’s divorced explaining: “There are two types of people in the world: those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t.

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