I have posts coming on both my recent trip to Afghanistan as well as a follow up to the video on how McCain and Obama each answered Rick Warren’s question about evil.
In the meantime, I wanted to draw your attention to some great work some friends have been doing. Kara Powell and Brad Griffin have been helping to lead Fuller’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry, which is now the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI). This is a tremendous research based resource for all those involved with or those who care about teenagers. I was lucky enough to have contributed two articles to their work, “A Theology of Culture for Your Ministry: Is “The World” Friend, Foe, or Something Else?” and “The Other Side of At-Risk: Freeing Youth From Suburban Oppression.” Anyway, they have completely revamped their site and you should go have a look.
My brother clued me in to 2 good sites today.
This one will let you opt-out of a lot of the junk mail you receive and this one will send you free daily email tips for living more sustainably.
Why? Because stuff like this should make us really nervous about the enormity of our consumption (pretty fantastic art as well).
Enjoy!
“I was able to see a number of friends with whom I had live so intimately begin to lose their faith following college. That sounds dramatic, and I don’t mean it in the way you might initially read it: I don’t mean they lost the content of their belief system or became apostate doctrinally. I mean that upon leaving college and entering the world of twentieth-century suburban Christianity, they lost their way of life. They entered a way of life that was compartmentalized, disintegrated, individualistic, sub-cultured, ghettoized, programmed and purpose-driven.”
This was as true for me as it has ever been for any of my friends. Having had the freedom to remove myself from this for a time, to study and reflect, has, I beleive, given me a unique perspective on just how subtle this sort of co-option can be. With Todd, I feel a discontent deep within – wanting the rhythm and course of my life to be determined by the power of the gospel and not the power of the culture in which I live. Todd offers a few good suggestions at the end of his post regarding some of the personal implications. My longing, however (not that Todd doesn’t have this longing, check out his church community, The Well), pushes this beyond this to the desire to align myself with a community which feels this discontent and stands convicted that they most embody an alternative lifestyle, to be an alternative community.
On a related note, an article I wrote for Fuller’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry, The Other Side of At-Risk: Freeing Youth from Suburban Oppression, was selected to appear in Fuller’s global publicaltion, Theology News & Notes. You can check it out here.
A new edition of Fuller’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry e-zine came out today and they chose to include an article I wrote, “A Theology of Culture for Your Ministry: Is “The World” Friend, Foe, or Something Else?” A big thanks to Brad Griffin, Kara Powell and others who helped in the editing process. It’s a much better article because of their help. I’ll be adding it to the goodies section on my blog soon (currently I have a cloud of all my delicious tags as well as some of the stuff I’ve written if you’re interested in either).