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Archive for the ‘Christian Culture’ Category

How to Talk to Your Kids About “The Prince of Persia”

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, Talking To Kids About Movies, tagged , , , on June 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Prince of Persia (2010) is based on a 1989 video game, so the obvious audience for the film is young teens—probably boys more than girls. Parents and grandparents who take their kids and grandkids will not be embarrassed or bored.

You will probably find it a diminished, postmodern Indiana Jones film, by which I mean lots of humor, snakes, whips, a beautiful but slightly treacherous girl, and supernatural weapons of mass destruction. Jake Gyllenhaal is not Harrison Ford, but Ben Kingsley makes a great villain and Alfred Molina has some very funny lines. The ostrich races are a great touch.

As you drive home from the film with the minivan full of kids, here are some conversation starters that might help the kids think about the film both intelligently and spiritually.  Remember, these are conversation topics, not lecture topics—oops, got a little preachy, didn’t I J!

  1. You don’t have to be born a prince to be a prince! Dastan was a street kid with nothing but a strong sense of justice and right. Then he was an adopted kid with lots of stuff, but no power or future. He continued to stand out and become the best of the brothers because of his courage and his character. Kids don’t all start out equal; many start with huge disadvantages, but all can become people who others look up to, people who do good and not evil.
  2. Beauty can be used for good or evil! This is a great topic for boys and girls both. The princess had great beauty which gave her both opportunity and power.  She had to make many choices of whether to use it for good causes that helped others or just for her own benefit. And sometimes her beauty got her into trouble. Beauty can’t be the goal; beauty is just a tool to be used for good or bad.
  3. Good people have bad things happen to them. Dastan did not try to kill his father, but he is blamed for it and has to run. The city of Alamut is conquered even though it had not rebelled. Life is not fair, so the only real question is what you do when you are treated unfairly.
  4. Stand up for what you believe to be right. In real life you don’t get a do-over! In the film Dastan knows from the beginning that attacking the city is wrong, but he lacks the self-confidence to speak up against his older brothers. In the film, he gets a second chance, but in real life that rarely happens. Teach your children to be strong and courageous and to not be afraid. Stand up and speak up for what is right—all the time.

If your teens are a little older and would like something really challenging, ask them if they know  the prince of Persia story in the Bible. Then when you get home, point them to Daniel 10 and let them think about the role of angels in spiritual warfare.  You won’t have the answers to all of their questions, but it’s a great chapter to open our eyes to the unseen realities of the world we live in as well.

Prince of Persia is a typical Disney film, very clean with just a touch of violence to rate it for older children. And by the way, don’t miss the small political jabs in references to taxes and WMDs.

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Can Boomers Redeem Themselves in Our Churches?

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 19, 2010| 1 Comment »

I was in Abilene, Texas, yesterday for a conference with those who minister to retirees in our churches. The group was not large, but it was quite interesting. Much of the program was really sharing what churches are doing as they begin to realize not only the challenges of a graying population, but the potential for the kingdom.

Here are a few of the facts that drove ministers to this conference and should drive every church into re-thinking and re-visioning its ministry with members aged 55 and above.

  • In 2000, Baby Boomers (born between 1946-60) made up 28% of the U.S. population. In 2020 it will be 36%.
  • Boomers own 77% of all financial assets in the United States. They also account for 80% of luxury travel.
  • Boomers believe old age to start between 72-78. (They will not join any group with the word senior in it nor any other of our cute euphemisms.)
  • Boomers intend to stay active. Here is what Newsweek (2/16/2010) reported, “These days, baby boomers don’t see retirement as a withdrawal from activity but as a new adventure. Many seniors will travel, volunteer, consult, and remain active, in addition to leaving some afternoons free for golfing and spending time with grandchildren. “It is a generation that is far more comfortable and even addicted in some ways to change and newness and adventures,” says Dychtwald. “They are going to pioneer a lifestyle where people reinvent themselves again and again and again.”

If you want to think about how this applies to your congregation, then think about how your membership would look if 35-40% of your members were 65 or older.  This is where all of our congregations are headed—if we are not there already.

Most of us tend to think churches are dying if all we see is gray hair in the pews. As Boomers re-invent the retirement years, however, church leaders must re-vision the potential for good that retired Boomers have for the kingdom.  For instance:

If Boomers are going to travel and remain active, they need to be challenged to revision their retirement as the time for a new mission, a new faith adventure! Re-read the above paragraph from Newsweek and apply it to Christian retirees. What can your church do to focus this energy and wanderlust for God?   LST has seen a huge boom already in retired Christians going on short-term mission projects.

If Boomers own so much of the purchasing power in the U.S., they need to be challenged to be generous. You may be suppressing a cynical laugh at this, but let me suggest that instead of targeting the cash in their bank accounts, appeal to them to use their legacy, i.e., their estate, as an extraordinary resource for the kingdom.

And here is perhaps one of the most significant unknown factors that I can share with you:  the Millenials (1980-2000) have much more respect for Age than we Boomers did for those before us. The next 25 years are a great opportunity for multi-generational synergy.  We have an opportunity to escape things like worship wars that are driven primarily by generational differences, and, instead, see whole families—extended families, led by the grandparents sometimes—serving God in active and generous ways.  The Millennials like the old and the Boomers want to relate to the young because they don’t think of themselves as old!  What can you do with that phenomenon??

God knows we Boomers as a group have brought a lot of sin into the world. Perhaps these next twenty-five years are our opportunity for redemption.  Wise church leaders will take advantage of this.

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Thoughts About Pepperdine

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 8, 2010| 6 Comments »

If you are one of the people who have never thought well of Pepperdine, well, shame on you!  Let me tell you about Pepperdine University from my experiences with it.

Yes, Pepperdine has one of the most beautiful campus settings of any university in the nation. That’s what people see on the surface. And, yes, Pepperdine has a national reputation, being mentioned in the same breath with much larger, private universities, a reputation which it no doubt deserves. But this is not what I want to tell you about.  I want to tell you about the well-being of the Christian faith at Pepperdine, specifically with regard to its relationship to churches of Christ.

Pepperdine is a place where you can send your child to school and they will be taught by people of faith. Our three children and two of their spouses graduated from Pepperdine in the late 90s. While they were students, their faith was tested, their faith grew, and their faith was affirmed.  One was an English major, one a history major, one a biology major, one in sports medicine, and one was a religion major. Some were members of fraternities, one played collegiate sports, some were active in the campus ministry, and others were not particularly.  All of them graduated with a stronger commitment to serving God in better ways because of Pepperdine people who inspired them.  Even that occasional faculty member who does not share our faith tradition and who challenged my children were an opportunity for them to prove their faith. They learned not to be afraid.

Pepperdine actively seeks to serve churches of Christ with whom it has always had a strong relationship. We have just finished the Bible Lectures at Pepperdine—and it was a spiritual feast. The gathering of thousands on the campus each year is a highlight for Christians from across the country.  At these lectures, the best speakers/teachers in our fellowship gather. Classes are offered from 8am to 10pm, almost non-stop and the only bad thing is, so many are addressing issues, questions, methods, challenges, and ideas among our churches that it is impossible to be everywhere at once.

The evening venues are filled with a capella singing groups from throughout the country—and they are always packed. Next week, Pepperdine hosts one of the most unique conferences in the country, called “Ascending Voice” which is a celebration of a capella music from many traditions.

Conferences and opportunities are offered to California ministers, to families who want to grow in faith. Pepperdine just opened a Center for Restoration Studies, which is a repository for rare and valuable Restoration Movement pictures and documents. You really do not have to mine the Pepperdine website very much to find lots of events specifically for building up and serving Christians.

The very openness of the conversation at Pepperdine and the fact that a small percentage of its undergraduate students are from our fellowship make it suspect to some. My children thrived here as Christians for these very reasons. They found a real world environment that did not artificially protect them, but rather helped them learn to live as ambassadors for Christ in a way that did not alienate those they were living among. Sounds like the first century, doesn’t it, when the earliest Christians lived in favor in their community.

Has Pepperdine presented itself on every occasion appropriately; have any of our Christian universities? Are there faculty members who cross lines? Do some of the students do things that offend our sense of right and wrong?  Aren’t we just asking if it is full of people, some Christian, who don’t always do the right thing?

I love Christian education. I graduated from Ft. Worth Christian High School and from Harding University; I taught twenty-four years for Oklahoma Christian University. Over the years, LST has had much to do with Lipscomb, ACU, York, OVU, and many of the Christian colleges. I am proud that Pepperdine University is tended and supported by our fellowship.

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APRIL 19, 1995: The Oklahoma City Bombing

Posted in Christian Culture, Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 19, 2010| 1 Comment »

Fifteen years ago today, I was standing in my office at Oklahoma Christian when one of my colleagues rushed in and said, “A bomb just exploded downtown!”  I thought, “That’s interesting,“  imagining something like a small letter bomb or something that blows up an office, set by some disgruntled employee.

Of course, within minutes the reports started coming of what was until 2001 the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil in modern times.  Now fifteen years later, the country has experienced worse, so it is easy to forget what we learned from Oklahoma City.  Here are a few of my thoughts:

  • Home-grown, flag-waving extremists are just as dangerous as foreign jihadists. Immediately following the bombing, reports of Arab-looking suspects were all over the news; the real bomber, however, was born in New York of Irish Catholic parents, voted “most promising computer programmer” at his high school, a decorated veteran of the first Gulf War, and an outspoken anti-tax, pro-gun, anti-government proponent.  The current extreme political rhetoric and hyper-polarization frightens me!
  • The use of war metaphors does not justify killing innocent people. McVeigh declared war on the federal government, so killing kindergarten children in the Murrah Building was for him an unhappy, but acceptable consequence of his military objective. Neither as individuals nor as countries should we be confused about the morality of killing innocent people for our own benefit.
  • Average people are amazingly good and amazingly brave in a crisis. Immediately following the bombing, police and medical personnel rushed towards the bomb site. One of our church members was among the first police officers to arrive; he crawled into the rubble to pull out a baby covered in ash—but alive.  Vendors brought bottled water, sandwiches, blankets, medical supplies; people of all sorts came to help however they could.  Students at OC with just minimal training in first aid rushed to the scene, wanting to do something to help.  I’m not sure I have ever experienced a greater sense of community.
  • Everyone is damaged; the world is diminished by such acts of violence. Our friend the police officer was so traumatized by what he saw and experienced in the first hour after the bombing that he spent months –maybe longer—seeking help and attempting to recover.  Not only the families of the victims, but the friends of the families of the victims, and the relief workers, and those who narrowly missed being victims just by “chance,” and the man who rented the delivery truck, and people who sell fertilizer, and everyone who works in a government building who goes to work every day, the whole community has been damaged. There are no armies, no federal agencies, no screening devices, nothing that can restore this world to wholeness. We can only forget–which we will with time.

But Christians must live in certain hope, participating with God to transform this world from being a bombed-out shell to a place where swords have been beaten into plowshares and lions lie down with lambs. What we can’t forget is that we belong to the Prince of Peace!

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The Game of Death

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, tagged , , on April 16, 2010| 2 Comments »

On the drive to work this morning, I listened to a radio commercial for a fire ant treatment that made me cringe. In a typically ironic way, the voice was warning fire ants to prepare for excruciating pain, horrifying deaths, mass murder, and violence beyond compare.  Now I’m no friend of fire ants, but something about this commercial offended me greatly. It seemed the emotional appeal of the commercial was to a violent, sadistic pleasure that someone believes is common enough among people to sell their product.

Then I remembered a report in March on a French documentary called Le Jeu De La Mort (The Game of Death) that explored the same idea.  Eighty participants were recruited for what they believed to be a TV game show. With gala décor and typically sexy host and hostesses, these “contestants” were asked to inflict electrical shocks to another contestant when a wrong answer was given.  The intensity of the shocks increased until the tortured contestant quit screaming and simply went limp—died—maybe.  The tortured contestant was an actor and no real shocks were administered, but the eighty contestants did not know this until afterwards.

Of the eighty contestants, only sixteen refused to inflict pain. The others followed the instructions given them and inflicted pain on the victim to the point of death.  Unbelievable!

I wanted to dismiss this as filmmaking—smoke and mirrors—but then I had a flashback to psychology classes at Harding, and with the miracle of internet, I found reference to the Milgram Obedience Experiment in the 1960s, which in a more controlled environment and with a more scientific protocol performed the same experiment in the same manner. The only real difference was that instead of a TV host telling a “contestant” what they should do, it was a “scientist” in a white jacket giving the orders at Yale.

In the 60s, sixty-two percent of the people administered electrical shocks to the victim. In 2010, over 8o percent complied.  The frightening fact is that we live in a world de-sensitized to torture and horrific violence through every form of mass media that we experience.  From Jack Bauer to anime to computer gaming to WWF, inflicting pain and suffering is as common as . . . turning on TV.

If we laugh at an innocuous commercial about insecticide, how far are we from pulling the torture switch ourselves?

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Talking With Kids About Alice #2

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, Talking To Kids About Movies on March 16, 2010| 3 Comments »

I went to Barnes and Noble on Saturday and bought a copy of Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  I grew up first reading the book, then seeing the movie, but I suspect that for my children and grandchildren, if they read the book, it will be after they see the movie—and why not? I hope our children can grow up without feeling like there is competition between these very different media.  Ice cream and strawberries are not in competition.  Anyway, I’ll let you know about the books later; for now, let’s continue looking at what to talk to kids about after seeing the current movie. 

Disney’s animated Alice was based on the first book when Alice is a very young girl and full of spunk. Tim Burton’s story finds Alice engaged to be married and torn between what she wants and what others want for her—not an unusual situation for young women.  The following ideas may be more for parents of young girls to think about and parents of older girls to talk about. Use your own judgment!

1.       “Whhhooo are you?” This, for me, is the defining question about this Alice.  Her adventure in Wonderland is all about a search for the “real” Alice.  I just heard Scott Adair at Harding University give an extraordinary lecture on our own adolescents and emerging adults, all of whom are engaged primarily in trying to figure out who they are going to be.  What would happen if we parents were to occasionally simply ask , “Who are you?”

2.       “You’ve lost your Much-ness.”  I can’t forget this moment of truth! That our culture encourages girls to lose their muchness is well documented. Strength, intelligence, independence, imagination, basic integrity are abandoned in favor of popularity, faux dependence, and physical sexuality at the expense of emotional sexuality. (If you want to read more on this, you might try the classic Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher.)

3.       Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast!  As Alice begins to define herself more clearly, she discovers strength in this adage she remembers from her father.  She begins to believe that she can do things that she previously thought were impossible. What are the “impossible” things that your kids could do if they believed they could?  Adding a sincere belief in what God could do through them would be even more defining, wouldn’t it.

4.       The Courage to say “No.”  The most important word here is probably courage, but one of the most difficult expressions of courage is saying “no” to what friends expect them to say “yes” to. Alice’s ultimate expression was rejecting her arranged marriage and launching out on her own voyage. Maybe your starter questions would be: Do you ever have to tell your friends you don’t want to do something that they want you to do with them? . . . . What do you say to them? 

I raised the question at the LST office a couple of weeks ago as to what today’s younger children confront in which they learn that because they are Christians, they will have to say no and be different from some or all of their friends. When I was a child, we had long lists of things we couldn’t do, but almost all of those taboos are gone now. Nevertheless, somewhere, somehow, kids need to learn to step out of the crowd and make strong Christian choices.  How do you teach your children to be strong?

I’d love to hear your stories of teaching, preserving, nurturing “much-ness” in your children/grandchildren.

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Oscar Is Not The Enemy!

Posted in Christian Culture, tagged on March 8, 2010| 5 Comments »

Last night, one of my Twitter friends, who follows many of the same people I do, noted that there were no preachers tweeting during the Oscars—which is very rare when anything significant is happening!  Many, many legitimate reasons come to mind for this inattention, but the Tweet insinuated something often true of Christians, i.e., that they might not be interested in the most popular stories of our culture and time. 

Here are the reasons many Christians hate Hollywood:

  1. The majority of films depict a completely secular, godless worldview. 
  2. Some films/filmmakers are overtly anti-Christian and often resort to ridicule.
  3. Hollywood celebrities usually do not share conservative Christian moral or political values.

I myself see Hollywood, not as the enemy, rather as the reflection of the Enemy.  When you look around at your world, what do you see? I suspect that if you do not live in a church building or a Christian commune, you see a secular, godless culture, ridiculing Christian faith more than in the past, and that you do not share common values with very many people.  Hollywood zips the culture we live in down into two intensive hours—and such an intense confrontation disturbs us deeply—as it should!

Hollywood is the prophetic voice, not the First Cause of our increasingly secular and materialistic culture.  The best painters, musicians, authors, and, yes, filmmakers tend to operate from the fringe of a culture, not from the mainstream nor the lagging edge.   Years, sometimes decades are needed before mainstream society accepts as “the norm” what creative artists previously produced from the fringe.  Artists don’t create the future; they just recognize the first stages before most people do. (I recognize the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution in my thinking here.)

The numbers have not been reported, but most likely over 40 million Americans watched the Oscars this year. In 2009, Americans bought 1.42 billion movie tickets. Add to that the significant number of movies that are included in the twenty-eight hours of television weekly per capita in the U.S. and you get the feel that somebody out there is finding something they need or can identify with in these productions. Perhaps if we watched, not passively, not fearfully, but thoughtfully, we Christians might discover more connections from which to converse about Christ. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”  Ephesians 6:12 (TNIV)

Question:  Is disengagement from a decaying culture the only appropriate Christian response?

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“Flashforward”: The TV Show Made Me Think!

Posted in Christian Culture, Other, Uncategorized on March 2, 2010| 1 Comment »

My wife and I watched the whole first season of Flashforward over the last few days, and I admit being captured by it. The characters are well-developed, the actors are good, and the drama is centered on the human dilemma.  For those not familiar with it, all of the story threads revolve around how people’s lives were/are changed by a global blackout, lasting 2 minutes 17 seconds, during which time everyone saw  themselves six months later doing whatever they would be doing in those 2 minutes 17 seconds. For some it brought hope, for others despair, but for everyone the question became what to do about now.

Today as I was walking, I was thinking about the young character that has learned that he will be murdered on March 15. That led me to the question: what would I do if I knew that in thirteen days I would die? There’s no time for a Bucket List kind of response; there is no illness to usurp mind and body over these last few days as in The Notebook. What would I do if I knew that March 15 I would die suddenly?  Here are my thoughts:

Things I would not do

  • I would not panic spiritually. I would be fearful of the process of dying, but I am confident in a gracious God.
  • I would not feel “robbed” of future days; I’m a strong believer in “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Ps. 139:16)
  • I would not publish this on FB, Twitter, or a blog—that’s just me.
  • I would not join the March Madness office pool or prepare for the fantasy baseball draft.

Things I would do

  • Get my will and financial affairs in order for my wife’s sake.
  • Make appropriate arrangements for the LST ministry to minimize the effect of my sudden absence.
  •  I would once again do something proactively to mend relationships with a few people.
  • Yes, I’d probably do some kind of video for the grandkids—they are so young that they would scarcely remember me. I would not want to be maudlin, but maybe tell them stories from my life. (I have a cassette tape of my Granddad telling stories of homesteading in Arizona in first years of the 1900s, and it is much of what I remember about him.)

What would you do/not do?  Having made my lists, I have now decided that I need to take care of all of this as if my last day were right around the corner.

And by the way, if this kind of conversation makes you uncomfortable, you might try to figure out why because as Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “If not today, then tomorrow….”

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