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Subscribe to CommentsI stumbled into a concern for the environment. It’s not something I sought out. It was thrust upon me. And my interest in this topic is fueled by my concern for the gospel, which has been getting a bad name of late. For good reason. Because we pastors have allowed the gospel to become polluted by political ideology.
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Since the average age of the Ann Arbor Vineyard is 33, I do a lot of hanging out with people half my age. Ebony, who is less than half my age, citing The Fourth Turning, told me recently that we boomers have some important work to do that her generation is depending on our doing. I think she meant in the culture at large, including the church. I’ve been feeling the same thing lately. The boomers have some work to do for the sake of their children and grand-children. Hence this first of a new blog category: the boomer files. First up: we boomers better find a way to trust the institutions that cannot work unless someone finds a way to trust them just a little. The global financial crisis tells us so.
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Paul, the old guy, advises Timothy, the younger guy, to be careful about empowering “new converts” too much too fast in the leadership department because they are more prone to “conceit.” As Bob Dylan sang, “there’s a whole lot of people dying tonight, from the disease of conceit.” Defined as “a high opinion of your own qualities or abilities, especially one that is not justified.” And there’s the rub, right? When we’re young, we’re worried about our qualities and abilities. We fear that our qualities and abilities are inadequate for the pastoring task. Which means we crave confident assurance that we’re wrong about our fears regarding ourselves.
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“The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.” — Dave Barry
That is word for word perfect. And it’s the reason many, many, and might I add an increasing number of many people are keeping their distance from things like, oh, say, churches. Because they know this to be true or at least true enough, which is, to say the least, too true.
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Man, do I feel optimistic lately. Why? Because of my kids. They have a different take on the world, and it’s a take the world is due. We baby boomers have taken things as far as we can with our current Oldsmobile. Our battles lines are firmly fixed, but from their perspective, wearing thin. Now it’s time for us to listen to their take on the world as much as we’ve been yammering on about ours. Then, having listened and learned, we’ll be able to see what we’ve been through in a new light and offer, not more information (they can get it faster than we can generate it) but what they actually crave from us: wisdom, the one thing it takes time and experience and trial and error to gain.
The culture wars are boomer wars. We inherited them from our fathers who lived in a binary world of good and evil neatly separated by geographic boundaries. The evil empire was over there, far away from our fields of presumed good. I actually played cowboys and Indians assuming the cowboys were the good guys. Pick up sides and duke it out; we boomers did it every day all summer long playing baseball in the streets. May the best side win. One side fits all. Side in. Side out. Are you on our side or the side of our enemies? Neither, says this newer take on the world before us. Maybe it’s time for us boomers to sit down, shut up, and take off our shoes.
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I’ve got some thoughtful responders to this blog and it’s one of the real benefits of a blog. You toss your thoughts out there and people respond. You rethink or you go a little deeper in your thoughts, maybe you revise, maybe you come away even more convinced having heard the responses of others. One of my thoughtful responders is Clif and I want to continue from a thought Clif laid down in a comment about the Rush Limbaugh post. Clif indicated that he thinks Christians who listen to Rush regularly do a pretty good job separating the wheat from the chaff. If Clif is right, then I’m probably a little overwrought in my previous post. But I wonder about that. Because there’s a Christian I know pretty well who used to listen more than he does now to Rush, and at least in one case, he didn’t do a very good job separating the wheat from the chaff. And I have a very high regard for the perspectives and discernment of this particular Christian, him being myself.
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Been doing little print and radio interviews related to the release of Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back. It’s a good exercise because both print and radio are looking for colorful and concise little expressions of things that pop up in the book. Like the idea that we need to dig extra hard for Jesus as the treasure buried in the field of religion, owing to the current “trademark infringement on the Jesus brand”–meaning the negative public perception of Christianity among those on the outside of faith looking in. I find myself illustrating this with the popularity of Rush Limbaugh among many Christians in the United States.
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