Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! I hope you were blessed with a beautiful day. I'll leave you with a little JJ Peterson as Santa.

Relevant…

I've been thinking a lot lately about this new generation. I've been thinking about how out of touch they are. Sure they're more connected than any generation before them. At first I thought I was a part of this generation, but from my own experience and reflection, I've realized that people about my age (a year or two in either direction) were merely a transition point. We aren't necessarily Gen X and we aren't truly a part of the current generation of teens and young adults. I realize I'm not that old, 24, but my new position in Hemet has really caused me to delve deeply into the current generation of students.

    I realize, also, that it's probably the youth pastor in me that sees this generation and sees a group of people that's disconnected not only from their family and each other, but sadly from the church as well. Sure there's a hunger in a lot of them for the things of heaven, but there's an apathy that I've never seen before; apathy for Christ, apathy for the church. They show up and leave, they sit and text while someone tries to lead them to the throne of Christ, they talk and laugh. This goes on not only at church but in school. I think that it stems from apathy at home. Parents are having to work more and more, so they're burnt out when it comes time to dealing with their children and their needs. Because they're burnt out, most of the time kids get away with murder. It's something that can be seen in a number of places, the two most troubling being school and church.

    I just finished listening to a seminar from Youth Specialties by Mark Helsel, and he made a point that hit me. Everything we do needs to be authentic and excellent. Authenticity is something that this generation is longing for. They long for someone to be authentic with them. The other idea is the idea of excellence. To put it bluntly today's generation demands excellence. How many great shows have been canceled because of the demand for excellence? One season that's supposedly subpar can cancel an entire series. In a world of excellence, is the church attempting to be excellent, or is the church content being subpar? Is the church content with second, third or even fourth place? Yeah I'll go to church if I have nothing better to do? Francis Schaffer said that "The Christian Life itself should be the greatest work of Art." We need to create environments with authenticity and excellence so that people come in and let their guards down, to suspend their disbelief, to suspend their disbelief in Christianity for 2 hours, or however long, so that they see the gospel.

    Jesus understood that ideology. He painted the picture of His kingdom in such a way that people could understand what he was trying to communicate by helping them to suspend their disbelief. He used metaphor and allegory so that people could truly see who he was and the message he preached. If our goal is to be like Christ, then we have to break the mold. We have to be relevant. If we're not relevant, we're doomed.