Hummer as the Clue to Why Futbol Will Never Surpass Football in the USA

So I've delighted in World Cup soccer as much or more than the average American over the past several days. But one moment crystallized for me why soccer will never get traction in the average American heart.

I was tuning in to a late-afternoon game. The horns were blowing happily (you either love those things or you hate them, I personally find them delightful). The commentator had a cool British accent. And he was preparing us for the game to come.

As he did so, he referenced the game that had just concluded: "If you missed the earlier game, it was a thrilling 1-1 tie."

Stop it right there. In American English the words "thrilling" and "tie" do not belong in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence. An American football coach once said that getting a tie is like kissing your sister. He spoke on behalf of Americans everywhere.

Americans hate ties. It's why hockey ratings are just below the QVC Home Shopping Network.

Americans need clarity: one winner, one loser. It's why we invented the Hummer.

Before the Hummer, it was unclear which road vehicle would crush the other in a WWF-style cage-match. Hummer invented, case closed. Ninety-percent of Americans slept much better once the Hummer was safely on the road--the rest of them were worried about small things like fossil-fuel consumption and ozone depletion. Silly tree-huggers.

And so, until soccer can figure out a way to move beyond "thrilling ties" it will remain a quaint after-thought....no amount of horn-blowing or cool British accents can overcome that feeling of kissing one's sister.

Implants, Reductions, and Asking Better Questions

Somewhere along the way I learned from someone that the key to wisdom was not so much having all the right answers as much as asking the right questions.

The leaders in just about any industry are leaders partly because they know a lot of stuff, but mostly because they're asking the better questions to drive their quest for knowledge in the right direction.

When I find someone (or something) that helps me to ask better questions, that's a great gift. And so I point you, good readers, to Mollie Ziegler Hemingway's article from Christianity today Is Cosmetic Surgery Immoral?

Here's a teaser from the article...

I'm one of those people who frown on cosmetic surgery. Ever since I realized my friends were getting nose jobs for their 16th birthdays, I felt that body modification was somehow cheating. And when I see aging celebrities with lips that look like they belong on a duck, I actually cringe....

Ethicist Leon Kass talks about the "wisdom of repugnance," the idea that our revulsion indicates an intuitive understanding that something is morally awry. Indeed, Michael Jackson's and Joan Rivers's adventures under the knife seem like modern-day morality tales.

But is plastic surgery bad because it's unnatural? Shaving armpits and legs is unnatural, but you don't hear a lot of popular sentiment about how Americans are going against nature and nature's God when women buy razors.

For more, click here

Children of Dysfunction Leading in Justice

The other day my wise co-worker Jennifer Hagin noted a pattern that I thought was interesting.

In some corners of the world this student generation is being called "the justice generation." This generation of students (on the whole) is passionate not just about getting through college to get a job; they're also passionate about national and international issues of economics, race, gender, and...well...justice.

Jennifer suggested that many of the students that she has worked with over the years that have the deepest commitment to justice come from divorced or severely dysfunctional families.

These students have experienced feelings of abandonment or at the very least being overlooked and are committed to helping others who themselves might be overlooked.

This has the potential to be the redemption of pain. But it also can be detrimental to true healing.

Sometimes burying our pain by helping others is just another coping mechanism to not deal with the stuff inside of us. I've seen plenty of times in my own life where I felt it much easier to help others deal with their baggage than it was to sort through my own.

If Jennifer's right, given the ever-increasing amount of familial dysfunction the "justice generation" will only continue to grow.

Of course, seeking justice for others is just one of many possible responses to divorce and dysfunction. Others are not so productive. And there's lots of questions about what kinds of families X-ers and Millenials will themselves create, but the early returns are not terribly promising.

But it's good to see that amdist the rubble of the family landscape, there's good stuff that pokes through.

Irreligious-izing of America

Yesterday I read a story about a recent survey showing that America is becoming less and less religious. Specifically, less Christian. A couple of thoughts in response:

1. I think that the overall trend is true: Christianity is moving to the global South and East. America has only to look to Europe to see its religious future: a small band of faithful among a largely post-Christian, secular culture. I think that this might happen within the next 50 to 100 years.

2. The survey finds that the biggest losers are the mainline churches: Methodists, PC-USA, United Church of Christ, the Episcopal and Lutheran churches and others. Many of these churches have drifted so far away from historically faithful Christianity that they can barely be called Christian any more. Good riddance.

And so from this perspective, I think that this shift to a less culturally "Christian Nation" is a good thing. There are fewer people living a lie. There's more integrity in saying that you don't believe something than to go through the motions of some Sunday morning ritual that is done mostly out of habit or to gain social and/or business contacts.

It also sometimes makes for easier conversations about Jesus. One evangelism specialist I talked to said that his response rates in the more secularized, less churched North is way higher than his response rates in the more culturally-churched South.

People have been inoculated in the South with a weakened form of Christianity. They know the words but have all the wrong definitions. They think they know Jesus, but they don't. They have a truncated picture of him but they don't realize it.

3. Of course, the flip side of the good thing is that there is an experience of grace even in cultural Christianity. For example, to know the ten commandments and to somewhat live by them has a blessing innately woven into it. To attempt to live life cut off from our Source and our Purpose or the operating instructions given to us has innate consequences.

4. In the end, the article notes that evangelical churches, particularly mega-churches, are the ones that buck the trend and are booming. This makes sense as the corollary to point 3 above: as people grow tired of religious stuff that means nothing (as generally exercised in the mainline church), they either leave the church or they search for the real thing.

I think that that this is a unique time for the church in America. There is so much shifting ground both within the church and in the broader culture.

Evangelical Christianity is uniquely wired to respond to these changes because we've always believed that we had a message worth communicating to the culture, no matter what the cost. It remains to be seen if we've got what it takes to deal with the incredibly complex challenges coming at us right now.

One (Christian) commentator thinks that evangelicalism in the U.S. will collapse in the next 10 years along with the mainline churches. Some of it--maybe much of it--needs to die. It'll be interesting to see how it all unfolds.

Focus

July 31st in campus-ministry world means one thing: total chaos is about to descend on my hitherto summer-time feel of a placid and settled life.

My days recently are full of e-mails and details and planning and imagining and trying to remember to pray as I do all of it. It's all about multi-tasking and juggling and keeping plates spinning and trying real hard to not let things drop.

Today, in the midst of all of that, I blocked off the whole day to re-work my chapter that I'm contributing to the new Small Group Leader's Handbook that should be out by Christmas, 2009. My re-write isn't due for a couple more weeks but I know that once things get started on campus my life will be campus events and fighting to keep family time carved out. Not much room for hand-wringing over verb tenses.

There's a funny thing that happened as I approached today: I was really dreading it. When I'm in multi-tasker mode, the thought of slowing down to actually focus on any one thing for longer than 30 seconds feels really hard.

But a funny thing happened as I sat down and went to work. I really, really enjoyed it. What a tremendous thing to actually sit down and focus on one thing for longer than 30 seconds!

I wonder if there's some broader application to how we think in a high-speed world and how we are teaching students to think in a multi-tasking, multi-media world. The long, hard work of thinking deeply about anything is not something that seems to be valued. Or maybe I'm just hanging out in all the wrong circles.

Busy, Busy, Busy...

...as you might have guessed from the length of the previous posts. But there is time for one quick thought this morning: does anyone else think that the NCAA college basketball tournament sort of epitomizes our culture? It's sprawling in it's big-ness, there's clear winners and losers, we delight in the underdog, and almost every possible advertising angle has been gobbled up by corporations trying to elbow their way into our consciousness.

Ladies and gentlemen, God bless America.

Oh, and my Tar Heels as they roll into the Final Four.

Racial Tensions

A couple of weekends ago at our Area-wide InterVarsity Emmaus conference, I had two distinctly different conversations.

On Saturday I talked with a man who was struggling with his faith. He is extremely intelligent, a math major, and confesses to be prone to excessive critical analysis about everything. One of his struggles with faith is the feeling over hyper-emotionalism in the Christian sub-culture. This is part his struggle and partly a feeling that the people he is in class with every day would dismiss Christianity if they came to a meeting where people were singing pretty songs and lifting their hands in the dark.

Sixteen hours later I was driving back from the conference with Fred Williams. Fred is an older, wiser man who has ministered to students off and on for many, many years. He is black, and the head of all our regional black campus ministries. He is also currently doing campus work at Shaw University and St. Augustine college, both a part of the HBCU network (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). Fred had brought about a dozen Shaw and St. Aug's students to the conference and for many of them it was their first foray into white Christian world.

I'm always interested in getting Fred's perspective on issues of race and culture, so I asked him what the hardest part of the weekend was for the students he brought. He said that the hardest part for his students--and often times for him personally--is that they mostly come from southern, black churches where worship is passionate and vibrant and alive. He said that the hardest thing for a person coming from that background to enter into is the emotionally flat worship experiences of the people around them: hands in their pockets, looking off, looking bored, etc.

Two totally different cultural experiences and expressions and expectations of worship. We're trying to serve both types of students in one experience. Oi.

Clearly, this isn't simply an issue of race--there are white folks who are drawn to a more passionate worship experience and African-American folks who are drawn to a more cerebral worship experience. But in real-life, real-time, here in the South, our IV staff community trying to work through what it means to be reconciled as brothers and sisters in Christ, this is a real issue.

On paper at least, we can see how these two approaches should bless one another: love the Lord with all your mind, love the Lord with all your heart. In reality, however, these tensions are felt and experienced and chalked up to racial and cultural differences that will take a lot of work, sacrifice, and hard and honest conversations--not to mention the anointing of the Holy Spirit--to work through.

Ministry Post-Modernly

Last week I posted The Long Trip about Willow Creek's realizations that they had engaged consumers with the gospel but had not done a thorough job of moving them from consumers to disciples.

Brad Barret asked this great question (along with some other good comment-ers) that I thought was worth posting about:

What do you make of the "you-centered" approach of post-modernism? Is it too much that we go way out of our way to reach the postmodern generation (which, I guess, is you and me), that we orient most of our programs around the comforts of the attendees?

Basically what I'm getting at is that the primary message from these churches is NOT "Jesus loves you", but rather, "we want you to be comfortable here..."

I think that there's an interesting tension developing in evangelicalism. On the one hand, there's the mega-church and post-mega-church movements. Guys like Rob Bell and others who have taken Willow Creek's baby boomer, seeker-oriented model and post-modernized it a bit, made it a little less suburban and more edgy. These are the types of churches that Brad's concerned about.

Then there's the reaction against the mega-church: there's the emergent church, and other off-shoots. But there's also a small but growing number of evangelicals who are moving away from pop-main-stream evangelicalism and moving towards more traditional, high-church experiences, full of history and liturgy and ritual and tradition and mystery. There have been a number of high-profile evangelicals who have converted to Catholicism over the past couple of years. And my own church and the movement of evangelicals to the Anglican tradition is booming.

So basically, there's folks who are really feelin' what Brad's concerned about. They're Christians who are concerned about the you-centered-ness of some of our churches. And so they're moving to a more high-church experience with more emphasis on the mystery; the vertical as opposed to the horizontal. And of course there are others who are taking what Willow Creek started and developing it for the next generation.

I believe strongly that we have to have both arms of the evangelical church to survive the shift to post-modernity. What has made and kept evangelicalism vibrant and alive in the U.S. is our tradition of re-inventing our ministry without losing fundamental and essential elements of Christendom. We might not even agree on all of what those are (Scripture, a conversion narrative of some sort, salvation in Christ by faith alone are a few core principles), but they're a part of our evangelical ethos nonetheless.

The urgency of the need to find ways to communicate the gospel to each successive generation because something is legitimately at stake if we don't has compelled us to re-think our forms in some radically good ways in the past twenty to thirty years.

Take a look at the Christian church in Europe for what happens when we stop doing this. The ministry situation in most of Europe is basically a complete re-start and it happened in one generation, maybe a generation and a half. This is what happens when we dig in our heels and say "this is how we've always done it." The mistake there is to think that those forms were somehow un-affected by cultural norms and expectations (in this case usually modernism as opposed to post-modernism) and so "that's how it ought to be." The fact is, modernism was no more amenable to the gospel than post-modernism is. It's just different battles we have to fight.

The culture and consumer engagement churches like Willow Creek force much of evangelical culture to at least consider how they're relating to the broader, un-churched world. I think that this is a really, really good thing...even if it there are some poor applications of it along the way.

Doubt and Faith

So even if you don't know a thing about philosophy (or get queasy just thinking about the subject) you've probably heard the credo "I think therefore I am." This was put forth by a guy named Descartes. His goal was to answer the critics of religion who claimed that faith was not rational. So he began his work by doubting everything and then building from his own reason to the life of faith and the existence of God--he wanted to especially exclude revelation (i.e. Scriptures).

In doing this exercise, Descartes unwittingly put doubt at the center of knowledge. And thus began the enthronement of doubt as the supreme arbiter of truth.

This has taken deep root in our culture. The cynical smirk is the fixture of our t.v. and movie heroes. If an idea or concept can be doubted, it is presumed, then that must be the most true thing about that thing. Doubt has the trump card. Faith or belief is foolish if it can be proven that there is possibility for some sort of doubt about what you believe in.

This of course, simply leaves us paralyzed to do much of anything. All of life requires faith commitments. Even the belief that doubting and skepticism is a more realistic way of viewing the world is itself the product of faith commitments.

But what if doubt and skepticism isn't automatically a more "realistic" way of looking at our world? What if doubt isn't the primary premise of how we should understand how the world works? What if doubt is simply one way to understand the world and faith is an equally viable way of understanding the world? What if doubt wields unfortunate power over us in such a way that it robs us of the ability to see much of anything clearly? How would it change things if doubt and faith were given equal footing and credibility in the explanation of the cosmos?

For the Christian trying to grapple with a deeply pluralistic and skeptical culture on the one hand and the Scriptures on the other, this is a critical question. Doubt is an important part of the life of any and every believer. And there are times when those doubts close in on you and seem to choke out any certainty of anything having to do with God. This is simply part of the journey into Life, for reasons that God has seen fit to ordain.

But that does not mean that doubt gets the last word. Life does. Faith does. Hope does. Hope wins. But we seem to be fixated on doubt and skepticism in place of faith, hope, and love. Hang around people who doubt everything--not a whole lot of fun, actually. Radical skepticism as a lifestyle breeds the fruit of existential angst that leads to death. There is no joy in it. What proof do we have of skepticism and doubt being a more congruent way to understand our world? All it leads to is sorrow.

And so our culture spins more and more deeply into its' own self-made despair, doubting everything, even its' own existence, as it free-falls into hopelessness.

"First Years" for the Sake of the Gospel

The scene was Friday night of New Student Retreat. It was 10:30. We were starting an hour late. I had spent the previous four hours trying to sort through groceries for each beach villa where the students were staying--it had been a chaotic mess, it was my fault for not organizing it a little bit better, and I was grumpy about it. And tired.

I was trying to kick off the retreat with a high-energy, excited welcome and cheesy get-to-know you intro game. As part of the game, students were to introduce themselves and tell basic info--"even what year in school you are, since not all of you are freshmen."

During the chaos of the game, one of my more liberally-minded upper-class women passed by me and said, "Hey Alex! 'First years!'" She was trying to get me to replace the old-school term "freshmen" with the new, politically-correct word, "first years."

What I wanted to say at that moment of tired grumpiness was, "Screw that politically correct crap! I'm calling them freshmen if I want to!" I think that's what the Scriptures mean by life "in the flesh."

Fortunately the Spirit caught me up and I paused for a moment. Regardless of whether or not I wanted to change my language personally, what if that would actually make a difference for a new student in the community? What if by simply using "first years" in place of "freshmen" I built a bridge of trust for the gospel and for the Lord Jesus to cross into someone's life in a new way?

What if I surrendered my "right" to say whatever the heck I wanted to and instead bent over backward to remove any hindrances to the gospel so that it might be heard and received with great joy? What if this is what it means for me to serve my students, obviously especially the women in my chapter (who comprise something like 65-70% of our community) right now in real-time?

So I'm trying out "first years" for the sake of the gospel. Honestly, sometimes I'm still tempted to be really ticked off about it. My heart is still in the process of changing. But Paul talked about becoming all things to all people in order that some might be saved. For him, he forsake home, traditions, comforts, and ultimately his life. If all it means for me is to swap out one biased-sounding word for a more neutral one, is that so much for me to lay down?

Giving Atheists Their Due

Several months ago I wrote a paper discussing various approaches to discussing the gospel with students at UNC. I noted that the campus is full of activists, so it was important for Christians to talk about issues of justice and mercy as central to the Christian understanding of making the world right. I noted that while we've done plenty that we need to apologize for throughout history (see Crusades, The) we've also got plenty to be proud of: Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, William Wilberforce. It's no coincidence that most of the greatest activists throughout history have been Christians.

One reader that I shared my paper with objected that this was a weak argument. She pointed me to an article by a man named Peter Singer who is a somewhat famous (and controversial) ethicist. His article is about charitable giving by rich folks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and why they should give. Tucked in the middle of his article is this bit:

Interestingly, neither Gates nor Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning” than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie, famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact. It means that in one sense, Gates and Buffett are probably less self-interested in their charity than someone like Mother Teresa, who as a pious Roman Catholic believed in reward and punishment in the afterlife.

We'll talk some today about the generosity of atheists and tomorrow about the whole idea of reward--and the self-interest of Mother Teresa.

Singer, like most of us, is somewhat selective in his illustrations. By all means, Christians are not the only ones who give and give generously to any number of causes. Praise God that this is so. It is a mercy of God that he would use all types of people, even and especially those that do not believe in Him, to enact his redemptive purposes on earth.

However, it is certainly mis-leading to paint the portrait of the generous atheist/agnostic being disproportionately beneficial to the world. Carried to a logical but slightly over-stated position, the idea here would be if only more atheists had more money and power, they'd give generously without all this selfish reward-in-heaven stuff.

As the twentieth-century came to a close it was oft-repeated among historians that the twentieth century was (altogether now) "the bloodiest century in history." Let's talk about the wonders of atheism as a contribution to this turn of events. Stalin's devout atheism led to more deaths than Hitler's Germany did. Chairman Mao also did more than his fair share. Hitler, while he was baptized as a Christian, based his Nazi Germany on Nietzche's philosophy--certainly no friend of Christianity!

In fact, we can take Singer's argument and turn it on its' head. Atheists historically are barely a blip on the radar in terms of historical population. And yet they are single-handedly responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of the most savage killings in all of history.

Or maybe the moral of the story is this: give atheists plenty of money, just don't give them military or political power.

Living out the Gospel in Real Time

The gospel changes everything. This is the strong conviction of all the New Testament writers. That the living God giving us life in his name is the Big Story that gives fullness of life to all of our stories.

And so you get these passages where we're exhorted to "take every thought captive" and "whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord." The point here is not an abstract dogma that we assent to conceptually. It is not a series of rituals or religious exercises that we do occasionally then leave on the shelf.

The work of discipleship is living out this new reality in real-time. That is, everything about our lives and how we interact with the world is understood through the lens of the Christ-with-us reality: driving a car, taking astronomy, raising kids, going to the grocery store, working in cube world.

This is spelled out in a number of different ways in the New Testament:

1. "Jesus is Lord" is not an one of many "lordship" options being offered in the world. When the apostles made this claim in Acts it was in direct opposition to "Caesar is Lord." For the apostles, saying "Jesus is Lord" was roughly the same thing as saying "Bush is president." It is a statement of fact, not opinion. Of course it may be disagreed with, but it cannot be brushed off as merely what works for one person. Either Bush is president or he is not. Either Jesus is Lord or he is not.

This Lordship over all things is the story that we are invited to lean into, celebrate, live out as we think about living out the gospel in real-time. Unfortunately this is often only understood as a "cosmic police officer.". But nothing could be further from the truth. That Jesus is Lord and not Caesar or success or money or popularity or my own desires frees me from the tyranny of all those things so that I might be freed to live as I was made to live--including in healthy relationship with government, success, money, relationships, and my own desires.

2. Not only is Jesus called Lord, we are called sons and daughters of the most high God. We're saints, even when we don't feel very saintly. Our identity is no longer slaves to sin, no longer lost, no longer enemies of God, no longer orphans. We are in Christ and Christ is in us. We have been adopted as God's children. And so we are invited to live out of that in real-time as we are marginalized at work or overlooked for a position we wanted or as things don't quite go our way in a relationship. Our identity is not rooted in those things. "Our life roots are hid with Christ in God" (George MacDonald).

3. The Spirit is always at work around us to invite us to participate in His activity. There is joy in the co-working with the God of the universe. There is life in participating in this perfect story as it unfolds and brings redemption, restoration, healing and life everywhere.

And so we must begin to wake up to the God of the universe inviting us to live out of this Big Story in Real-Time. Not just slumbering from Sunday to Sunday without transformation or change. Jesus is Lord. You are his child. The Spirit is at work all around. That's our story. Let's dig in.

Trinity and Obesity and Western Culture

Last week there was a significant amount of press coverage devoted to some findings by researchers that people who hung around overweight people had a higher likelihood of being overweight themselves.

This speaks to the reality of the Trinity and the essential problem with Western Culture.

The Trinity, as I discussed last week, is the essential reality underneath our experience that all of life is relational. Everything that is, exists by virtue of a specific set of relationships: cells, brains, chairs, cell phones, the game of chess. Everything that exists exists by virtue of a specific, clear set of relationships that makes it what it is.

Including what I call "me." I'd like to think of myself as a self-made person. But that's a big, fat, humongous lie. It's the lie that Western Culture is built on that unfortunately also pervades Western Christian thought.. Rugged individualism is a foundational crack in our understanding of ourselves as a culture. We are who we are by virtue of our relationships. Obesity is just one reflection of that.

That's some of what it means to be "image-bearers" of God. We become who we are by virtue of the relationships that we are in. For better or for worse!

The Problem of "Evil"

Friday in my class we got into a fantastic conversation regarding the problem of evil. The problem wasn't that we didn't have (what we considered to be) good responses to the problem of evil. The problem is, no one is willing to call anything evil any more.

One staff from Minnesota told this story: they set up booths for students on campus to interact with spiritual and personal issues. The first day's question: "how has evil invaded your space?" They thought there would be all kinds of responses: my parents screwed me up, abuse/neglect, concern about the environment, racism or other bad experiences. They got nothing. No one was willing to call anything evil.

The next day they asked a more personal question: "what would you change about your heart?" They expected people to be more hesitant to engage, but just the opposite was true. They couldn't keep up with the numbers of people coming to the table.

I think that there's several reasons why people are hesitant to engage with "evil:"

1. It's been used as a power-grab politically and sociologically/religiously, so people are distrustful that it has any appropriate use.

2. Pluralism convinces us that our perspective is entirely socially conditioned. What we might have historically called evil was just a matter of our viewpoint. If we were Nazi's in Germany, we wouldn't have thought of Nazi Germany as evil. Christopher Columbus was a hero in Western history but certainly "evil" for native peoples. So better not to "label" anything evil at all, because we might just be operating out of social conditioning/our limited historical-cultural context.

3. No one and no thing is ever considered to be entirely evil. All people have circumstances and issues and all situations have nuances that, when seen from a different point of view, might help us to have much more sympathy for the bad thing that has occurred that we might be tempted to call "evil." The Virginia Tech shootings this past spring are a great example of something that certainly wasn't "good" but was complicated by the fact that this kid certainly had psychological and other issues going on in his life. So he wasn't "evil" and neither was this shooting. They're all victims to varying degrees.

I think that this shift from the problem of evil as being the central issue in religious conversation to not being on the table at all is interesting. And certainly post-modern culture has other words that serve as replacements: injustice, oppression and brokenness--these words also function in place of the word "sin" in our culture.

I wonder if these more sociological/psychological approaches are valid in and of themselves or if they can only serve as a starting point for the conversation? In other words, is it necessary to convince someone of the necessity of the existence of evil (and sin instead of just brokenness, for that matter) before we can have a reasonable conversation about the Christian faith?

Oh, and by the way, this is post number 365. Happy Birthday, Piebald Life!

The Necessity of "Father"

It is very popular now among social scientists to produce research that debunks anything resembling the necessity for the nuclear family.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the studies in these types of fields follow trends just like hem lines and pop music. What's cool to say today will be replaced in ten years. Unfortunately for the broader culture, the field of scientific study is considered to be immutable and irrefutable. So the same type of understanding that I have that pictures of me ten years ago will look pretty dumb to my kids ten years from now is not a part of how we process or understand the latest study that's summarized in a Newsweek or Time magazine article.

I have a couple of operating assumptions after working with students for eleven years. One is that their family is dysfunctional to some degree or another, whether it's an intact family or not. And here is definitely where I would agree with the current research findings: screwed up families come in all shapes and sizes: divorced, intact, extended, whatever.

The second assumption is that their family dysfunction plays some role in their personal obstacles and struggles of living joyfully in a life of faith. And the third assumption I have is that the family dysfunction that they've experienced is in large part due to their father: he was physically gone, emotionally detached, physically or emotionally abusive, hyper-controlling, or some combination of any of the above.

In light of this, there's a stream of theological reflection that would have us to do away with calling God "Father." After all, this is just left over from a paternalistic worldview that oppressed women and the word is full of baggage in our modern era. Why hang onto it any longer?

The reason is simple: people need fathers. We just do. We were made to have a good father. Most of us (including my kids) have fathers that fall well short of this need. This is appropriate. God is our Good Father, the only Truly Good Father we could possibly have and that all of us need. And so we must hold onto this intimate, relational name that God has given to us to call him, or else we foolishly throw away the very strong medicine that so many of our souls are aching for.

Wisdom of Age

A couple weeks ago I was grappling with Jerry Falwell's legacy (see the May 25th post: Falwell: Friend or Foe?) and someone left a comment that he attributed Falwell's oft-inflammatory (and in my opinion, most annoying) comments to just "being old." I disagreed with that "excuse," Billy Graham is older and is less annoying, but the comment stuck with me.

In a culture that overly-celebrates youth, it's pretty par for the course to dismiss old people as, well, just being old.

But I'm reading Proverbs these days over my bowl of cereal while trying to keep my two kids from killing one another, and the basic biblical assumption as we follow the Lord into old age is NOT that we become more cranky and less relevant. Indeed, it is quite the opposite. Proverbs assumes that as we follow the Lord into old age we become the type of people we were designed to be. That is, we become wise.

This wisdom, then, is to be a fountain of blessing to be shared in community. Both the depth of character and the experiences of age are to be shared by all as a vast resource of guidance and wise decision-making.

Our culture not only idolizes youth, but has been built around the abilities of youth. Using technology that demands a high degree of multi-tasking, for example. And so we have created a culture that builds in obsolescence not only into our technology but also into our people. Old people are increasingly marginalized in the technological society.

I can't help but wonder what kind of prices we pay (and will continue to pay for many years to come) for this way of life.

Falwell:Friend or Foe?

Earlier this week I was reading USA Today's on-line coverage of Jerry Falwell's funeral. USA Today has recently added a nifty thing to their articles: readers can comment just like on a blog. As you might imagine, Falwell's funeral drew lots and lots of comments. As you might imagine, not all of these were particularly gracious.

In the immediacy of the moment, my ire was raised and I decided to create a username and jump in order to defend Falwell. But I suddenly stopped. First off, those two words "defend Falwell" had never before been put in that order in my own mind in my entire life. And secondly, I couldn't think of anything really positive to say.

And so it leaves me at the end of the week pondering this man's legacy. On the 'friend' side, Falwell was certainly a fellow believer, a brother in Christ, and he woke up many conservative Christians who were apathetic about political issues.

On the 'foe' side, Falwell created a monster of a politically conservative Christian sub-culture that nearly demanded that the words "evangelical Christian" and "Republican" were synonymous. This was certainly not the case before his rise to prominence in the late 1980's. Conservative Christians were very instrumental in electing dark-horse Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter in the 1970's.

Falwell made waves everywhere he went. He took strong stands on significant cultural issues but often did so in ways that were alienating rather than bridge-building. The fall-out of this in my own experience has been that sometimes people on the journey towards Christian faith are worried that they'll be associated with folks like that. Or that they have to become an angry Republican in order to become a Christian.

Falwell will always be remembered for his fresh alchemy of politics and religion. From my little corner of the world as a Christian, I think that his net impact has been negative in the broader culture. But maybe one day when the curtain's pulled back and all is revealed for what it truly was, I'll see that I was very, very wrong.

What's Happening to the Boys?

Last night Kelly and I had Kelly's principal and her husband over for dinner (Kelly works at a center for homeschoolers once a week). They are phenomenal people, thoughtful, full of various interests and the type of people who are interested in you even though you aren't nearly as interesting as they are.

One topic of discussion was the decreasing numbers of males at most colleges and universities. Boys are getting left behind in the public school systems at an alarming rate. In the very near future, UNC-Chapel Hill, my alma matter and where I work, will be 70% female. That's 70%. That's crazy.

To the cynical reader this might seem only just. After all the system been biased towards boys for much of American history. But it would seem that there's got to be some way to correct historical biases without mowing down a generation or two of boys.

Being the dad of a boy now, I wonder about his schooling experience. It is not just bowing to stereotype to say that boys are generally more "kinetic" than girls are. To sit at a desk and learn is not going to be as easy for boys as it normally will be for girls. I realize that there are exceptions to this, but on the whole these things are true.

In the African-American community, educated women struggle to find "marriage-able" men because at the college and university level the numbers are anywhere from 75% to 85% female. One student confessed to us at a conference on dating and sexuality that she and her friends didn't expect to get married the way that the white women did, and that was cause for bitterness and frustration. At the rate that boys in the white community are getting lost in the education system, there might not be all that much need for forgiveness in the not-to-distant future.

The Eternal Post-Adolescence of the Two and a Half Men Mind

So one thing that's annoying during the NCAA Tourney are the commercials for the sitcome "Two and a Half Men." You've got Charlie Sheen, age 41, living this life that is for some folks the ultimate male fantasy: lots of sex, no real relationships, no real commitment to much at all.

Sociologists invented the term "post-adolescence" to describe adults (mostly males) who continue to live like children for an extended period of time. It is fearful, lazy, self-absorbed, hiding, passive, predatory, spoiled, alone. This is the description of the lead character of the number one comedy on television.

Men run and hide. It's what we do. It's why we retreat to video games and sports rather than pro-actively engage the world around us. My home and ministry worlds both function with men and women in equal partnership together. But I believe that the Scriptures call men to a certain level of initiative that is unique. I think that's because our default is mostly to be passive and lazy, it's how we cover up our fear of being exposed for being frauds.

I was talking with a student about a guy that she has a very healthy, platonic relationship with. She was concerned about a certain set of behaviors in his life, specifically when he was called upon to take significant leadership in a group project. "It's like he screamed 'please don't take me seriously.'" To which I replied, "Exactly." To be taken seriously is to risk something. To perhaps fail. If I'm lazy or just cut-up all the time, there's no real risk involved.

A fallen culture that idolizes youth will inevitably foster a love for the passion of youth and forfeit the wisdom of age. "Two and a Half Men" (and the images of male-ness that it promotes) is a case-study of the type of men that we are producing: forty-one year-olds who revel in the fact that they never learned to move past the mistakes of a twenty-one year old.