UnChristian (4)

This is one of the best analyses of the heart of the current generation of young people that I have come across:

"...Let me describe the contours and complexities of emerging generations.
In many ways, young people perceive the world in very different terms that people ever have before. For example, the lifestyles of [young people] are more diverse than those of their parents' generation, including education, career, family, values, and leisure. Young people do not want to be defined by a "normal" lifestyle. They favor a unique and personal journey. Many young people do not expect to be married or to begin a family as a young adult (if at all), though this may have been the expectation in the past.
For [young people], relationships are the driving force. Being loyal to friends is one of their highest values. They have a strong need to belong, usually to a tribe of other loyal people who know them well and appreciate them. Still, under their relational connectedness lies fierce individualism.
Even thought they esteem fair-mindedness and diversity, they are irreverent and blunt. Finding ways to express themselves and their rage is an endless pursuit. Being skeptical of leaders, products, and institutions is part of their generational coding... They do not trust things that seem too perfect, accepting that life comes with its share of messiness and off-the-wall experiences and people.
Americans of all ages are inundated with media and entertainment options. Yet [young people] consume more hours of media from more sources that do older generations. Many enjoy immensely that latest hot movie, music, website, or pop culture buzz. Technologies connect young people to information and each other - and power their self-expression and creativity - in ways older adults do not fully appreciate.
Young people engage in nearly constant search for fresh experiences and new sources of motivation. They want to try things out themselves, disdaining self-proclaimed experts nad "talking head" presentations. If something doesn't work for them, or if they are not permitted to participate in the process, they quickly move on to something that grabs them. They prefer casual and comfortable to stuffy and stilted. They view life in a nonlinear, chaotic way which means they don't mind contradiction and ambiguity. They may tell someone what that person wants to hear, but then do whatever they desire.
Spirituality is important to young adults, but many consider it just one element of a successful, eclectic life. Fewer than one of out ten young adults mention faith as their top priority, despite the fact that the vast majority of them attended a Christian church during their high school years. most young people who were involved in a church as a teenager disengage from church life and often from Christianity at some point during early adulthood, creating a deficit of young talent, energy, and leadership in many congregations."
(emphasis mine.)

Art Every Wednesday (10)

In 1994 Trent Reznor recorded the song "Hurt," and in 2002 Johnny Cash covered it. The differences in the two versions of the same song are powerful. Both songs (and music videos) stand as a testament to the power of art. Watch for the differences in images in the videos and the changes Cash makes to the lyrics of the song. As in all art, the artists worldview comes through unmistakably in these two pieces. There are wonderful things about each, and I'll leave you to find those things for yourselves, but I will say one thing I love about these videos. They are incredibly honest. Reznor's piece is a heartbreaking statement about the sadness and utter pain of life at times. It seems to ask the question "Is there any way out of despair?" suggesting that, perhaps, there is not. Cash's piece is honest in a different way. His "hurt" comes also from the mistakes of the past, but there is the glow of hope permeating throughout. Watch your emotions at the end of each video and ask yourself the question: How can these two worldviews be views of the same world?

When Reznor first heard Cash's cover this was his response:

"I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps… Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning — different, but every bit as pure."^[1]

Free Audio: Practicing the Presence of God

On ChristianAudio.com you can now download Brother Lawrence's classic writing, Practicing the Presence of God.

Art Appreciation 1000

In high school, we learned how to analyze poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Those who delved into the fine arts learned further how to evaluate music, theater, and art.

At church, pastors and sunday school teachers instruct us on how to interpret the bible. Some of us join bible studies and read books which further help us understand doctrine and theology.

Yet, during our education, it seems these two things rarely overlap. In fact, they often seem to collide. Many Christians think good, God-honoring, "Christian art" is a narrow field. With this view, one might believe that a God-honoring novel must be an allegory for a biblical story. Likewise, a "Christian" song must explicitly praise the name of God, and a godly painting must depict a cross.

In many ways this view contaminates our ability to appreciate art, which is a travesty. I think art (music, painting, theater, poetry, fiction, and much more) is the way mankind imitates God the creator. In the bible, dance, theater, music, poetry, sculpture and literature honor God. In the Pentateuch, the holy spirit inspires plans for multiple beautiful, artful works: the priests robes, the tabernacle, the brazen serpent, the arc of the covenant, and more.

The Lord cares deeply for beauty and has not limited his care for excellent art to explicitly religious material. Christ's Lordship is over all of creation, including all of art. It is okay for a Christian to enjoy the technical excellence of a painting, declare it beautiful art, and disagree with the artist's message. Why? Because the artist reflected God's love for good, beautiful creations by creating an excellent painting.

Once we appreciate the beauty of a piece of artwork, I think it's always a Christian's duty to discern the worldview it portrays. This does not simply mean searching for surface level biblical content. Instead, the Christian views artwork through the gospel lens, and searches out biblical truths (both hidden and unhidden). A movie may be polluted with terribly immoral themes, but the Christian recognizes that this movie is an accurate portrayal of human brokenness because of the fall.

One caviot: it's totally foolish to pull at strings, and make a piece of artwork say something it does not say. My goal instead would be to determine the artist's message, and attempt to distinguish the truths from untruths in the artwork. I think many Christians falsely assume that there is no truth to be found in "secular" art; I believe it is rampant with beauty, and we ought search out truth and validate it!

When the body of Christ respects and engages art in authentic ways, we bridge gaps with well cultivated cultural sensitivity. This opens doors for meaningful conversations and our eyes to the evident glory of Christ all around us.

UnChristian (3)

My thanks to Nathan Tiemeyer and Every Square Inch for the following:

"More highlights from David Kinnaman’s arresting new book unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity, this time from chapter 4, “Get Saved.”

After a few introductory paragraphs, Kinnaman details a several myths associated with reaching people with the gospel that the Barna group has uncovered in their polling research. Two examples:

Myth: The best evangelism efforts are those that reach the most people at once.
Reality: “The most effective efforts to share faith are interpersonal and relationship based” (70).

Myth: Anything that brings people to Christ is worth doing.
Reality: “When you’re talking dollars, there is no price too high for a soul. But the problem isn’t just cost. In our research with some of the leading ‘mass evangelism’ efforts, we found that often these measures created three to ten times as much negative responses and positive. …Our research shows that the “collateral damage” of [strategies like these]—those whose impressions of your church and of Christianity would be more negative as a result—is significantly greater than the positive impact on those who will respond favorably to these efforts (71).

After discussing these and other misconceptions, Kinnaman turns to an observation that may come as a surprise to many Christians: “The vast majority of outsiders in the country, particularly among young generations, are actually de-churched individuals” (74). In essence, this means that most young non-Christians have had significant exposure to Christians and the church and eventually moved on. The pressing question is why.

According to Kinnaman, one important factor is that the church has given people “a superficial understanding of the gospel” and focused “only on their decision to convert” (75). While 65% of the younger generation indicate they’ve made a commitment to Christ, only 3% possess a biblical worldview—even when such a worldview is defined fairly broadly as in the study mentioned in the book. It’s a tragically low number, one that clearly indicates the American church, as a whole, is clearly dropping the ball. A faith that calls for minimal commitment, that makes very little impact in the way you think and therefore act, is a faith that is all too easy to walk away from.

I’ll close this post with one final quote from the chapter:

How deep is the faith that you convey to outsiders? What type of depth are we asking our friends and neighbors to have? A get-saved approach ignores the fact that most people in America have made an emotional connection to Jesus before; now they need much more than a one-dimensional understanding of him.

More of the same lightweight exposure to Christianity, where a decision for Christ is portrayed as simple and costless, will fail to produce lasting faith in young people. We have to decide what our measures of success will be over the next decade. Where will we be more effective—trying increase the number of young adults who make emotional commitments to Christ or facilitating significant growth in the 3 percent who have a biblical worldview (76)?"

Art Every Wednesday (9)

A blog grows up like a person, changing over time. You used to think it was cool to wear those elastic black pants every day, now you have become a man and you have put childish things behind you. It's the same with blogs. In the name of growing up we are making a change: Poem Wednesday is expanding to include lots of other forms of art other than poetry (though poetry will still make regular appearances). Look for photography, painting, literature recommendations, songs and lyrics, sculpture, and the list goes on and on. As well as actual examples of art I hope to do some apologetics for art generally and try to answer the question "Why Art?" bit by bit every week.

To make the transition as smooth as possible this week's Art Every Wednesday blends mediums. It is a painting about a myth and a poem about the painting.

"The Fall of Icarus" By Bruegel:

Musee Des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

UnChristian (2)

My thanks to Nathan Tiemeyer and Every Square Inch for the following:

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve been reading and appreciating David Kinnaman’s unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. I thought I’d take an opportunity to pass on a few of the many interesting/alarming things that have particularly caught my attention so far.

In chapter three, “Hypocritical,” Kinnaman makes the point that there is very little difference in lifestyle among those claiming to be born-again Christians* and the rest of society:

When asked to identify their activities over the last thirty days, born-again believers were just as likely to bet or gamble, to visit a pornographic website, to take something that did not belong to them, to consult a medium or psychic, to physically fight or abuse someone, to have consumed enough alcohol to be considered legally drunk, to have used an illegal, non-prescription drug, to have said something to someone who wasn’t true, to have gotten back at someone for something he or she did, and to have said mean things behind another person’s back (47). \

In addition, of those outside the church who say they personally know at least one committed Christian, only 15% say those Christians demonstrate any significant difference in lifestyle from the norm.

For those who pay attention to such things, the above information isn’t exactly a new revelation. But Kinnaman notes the problem goes even deeper. Despite exhibiting behavior that is virtually indistinguishable from those around them, Christians list what Kinnaman terms “lifestyle” (i.e., “being good, doing the right thing, not sinning”) as the most commonly indicated (37%) priority of their personal faith. Not only is this sentiment, biblically speaking, putting the cart before the horse, but it also leads to a rather sobering reality. Kinnaman explains:

It’s not just our lifestyles that have gotten us into trouble; it’s the very way in which we convey the priorities of being a Christian. The most common message people hear from us is that Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations. They think of us as hypocritical because they are measuring us by our own standards (48).

And again, a few pages later:

Outsiders think of our moralizing, our condemnations, and our attempts to draw boundaries around everything. Even if these standards are accurate and biblical, they seem to be all we have to offer. And our lives are a poor advertisement for these standards. We have set the game board to register lifestyle points; then we are surprised to be trapped by our own mistakes. The truth is we have invited the hypocritical image (52).

And what is the remedy for all of this? Not only to Christians need to understand that moral change is the fruit of a transformed heart (not the other way around), but we also need to cultivate an appropriate transparency, i.e., freely but not flippantly “admitting what the Bible says about us: we are fallen people who desperately need God in our lives—every day” (55).


*As defined in the study, a “born-again” Christian is someone who “has made a personal commitment to Jesus that is still important and that the person believes he or she will go to heaven at death, because the person has confessed his or her sin and accepted Christ as Savior” (46). Kinnaman acknowledges the limitations of this description and talks later in the book about better ways to measure the depth of a person’s Christian commitment.

UnChristian (1)

My thanks to Nathan Tiemeyer and Every Square Inch for the following:

"I’ve recently begun reading a provocative new book called unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity…and Why It Matters. As the name hints, the book is an attempt to discern the perception of Christianity held America’s younger generation (primarily ages 16-29). Toward that end, David Kinnaman, unChristian’s primary author and president of the Barna Group, employs extensive survey research targeting not only “outsiders,” a group that “includes atheists, agnostics, those affiliated with a faith other than Christianity…and other unchurched adults who are not born-again Christians” (17), but also the younger population within the church.

And what does the data reveal? In the author’s words, “It’s not a pretty picture” (15).

One major conclusion of Kinnaman’s research is that the church’s problems are the result of much more than the biblically promised misunderstandings and even antipathy felt toward the Church by those outside of it. Rather, our problems have as much or more to do with our own numerous misconceptions and failings. (A conclusion, I might add, that is consistent with the distinction made in 1 Peter 3 and 4 between suffering for appropriate and inappropriate reasons.)

Though I’m only a few chapters in, I’ve been impressed so far by Kinnaman’s approach to his subject matter. He’s exhibited a commendable willingness to hold firmly to biblical truth while showing respect to those who do not endorse it. Avoiding self-righteous stone-throwing, he nevertheless doesn’t hesitate to call those of us professing to be Christians to take a good hard look at the current alarming realities associated with our beliefs and practices. He also seems careful to note when a particular viewpoint is salutary in some respect but incomplete or mistaken in another (see, e.g., his discussion of the priority Christians place on moral behavior in chapter 3). And finally, his overall analysis has demonstrated itself to be accessible but not simplistic.

More thoughts to come...but in the meantime, you might consider checking out unChristian yourself."

A Poem A Wednesday (8)

A Story the Could Be True
William Stafford

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand in the corner shivering.
The people who go by -
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?" -
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."

Bring Back the Sabbath

Judith Shulevitz writes with candor and insight about American's incessant drive to work and chronic inability to really rest in this article from the New York Times. Shulevitz understands the American heart; both why it can't rest and why it needs to learn to.

Here are two quotes from the article:

"In the Darwinian world of the New York 20-something, everything -- even socializing, reading or exercising -- felt like work or the pursuit of work by other means. [Workaholism] has become the norm, and the Sabbath, the one day in seven dedicated to rest by divine command, has become the holiday Americans are most likely never to take. Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement; we can't help admiring workaholics…We relax on the run and, in rare bursts of free time, we recreate. We choose from a dizzying array of leisure options and pursue them with an exemplary degree of professionalism and perfectionism. We rush our children from activity to activity, their days a blur of tight connections.”

“We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don't have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.” – Judith Shulevitz