Okay, so my wife tagged me to do this random things list on my blog.

Once you’ve been ‘tagged’ you have to write a blog of ten weird/random facts/habits/goals about yourself. At the end choose ten people to be tagged, listing their names and WHY you chose them.

Here’s my list:

1. I once worked at a public television station. They had employees who dressed up like a purple dinosaur. It was a scary place to work.
2. When I was a teenager, the last thing I wanted to be was a Christian, let alone one of those born again ones. Now I’m a pastor.
3. My regular reading list of periodicals is somewhat eclectic. It includes Your Church, Leadership Journal, Relevant Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Time Magazine, and 2600 (The Hacker Quarterly).
4. I have been diagnosed with ADHD, along with Hyperfocus, which is an autistic-spectrum disorder. Results? I twitch. A lot. And I have a hard time communicating my torrential brainstorms to others in a coherent and useful way.
5. My first job was selling cellular phones and other retail electronics at RadioShack. It was awesome.
6. I love books.
7. I’d like to complete an MDiv degree, and some sort of doctorate as well.
8. I tend to be a cynic and and a grump. Mark Driscoll says that Irish people have two emotions, angry and asleep. I see the truth of that statement evidenced in my own life.
9. I wasn’t a great person before I came to Christ (immediately prior to college). Now, since I’m pastoring in my home town, conversations with old acquaintances are often quite uncomfortable, but I still love having them.
10. Having children of my own has changed my understanding of God the Father in amazing, healing ways.

Now… I’m supposed to tag ten more people. But I’m not going to. I’m just going to tag Calvin, Mandy, and Earl, since they are the only regular readers I have!

I listen to a lot of theological, social, and political commentary on my iPod. One theme I keep hearing, especially among Christian commentators, is that today’s kids aren’t expected to “grow up” the same way they used to be. There are two trends I’ve seen in our culture, or at least highlighted by commentators, but I’ve never seen the two trends discussed together as related topics.

The first tend I keep hearing about is for men to continue being boys even into physical and chronological adulthood. You can blame it on a lack of fathers. You can blame it on video games. You can blame it on poor discipline. Blame it on whatever you want, but we’re being told that more and more twenty-something males are taking on less and less responsibility. We’re told they all stay indoors and play their PlayStation 3’s, watch Family Guy DVDs, and get pizza delivery to their homes (read: mom’s basement) all day.

I don’t know if this is true nationwide or not. I do see a lot of twenty-something’s in my area who are just slackers, but that may just be human nature. When many of my peers, especially those from high school, find out that I’ll be 25 next month, have been married for almost four years, have two kids, and am a bi- (or soon, tri-) vocational pastor, I get the same blank stare I see in the catatonic psychiatric patients in the IMHU at the local hospital. And I’m not an overachiever. Any of you who read this blog and know me personally know that I have a bad tendency to be a slacker.

The second tend I hear about, is for girls to be hyper-sexualized into incredibly young “women.” Now that 8-year olds are buying (they have more money than me?!) makeup, and shopping for bras and thongs at Victoria’s Secret, we have an entire generation of single-digit “women”. Barbie is one thing, but the culture and message presented by the newer doll toys for these kids is amazing. Take a look at the Bratz line, and then tell me Princess Barbie isn’t a wholesome toy for our post-post-post-postmodern (which iteration are we now?) culture. There are one or two little girls in my church who fit into this category. It breaks my heart. They are boy crazy even before puberty, using appearance and flirtation to get attention.

So, combine the two trends together, and what do you get? Start with thirty-year-old women who have been “adult” for twenty years and have the spiritual, emotional, and even physical scars from decades of trying to get male attention. Then add thirty-year-old men who are just waking up from their pre-teen years, who have been emotionally disconnected and disinterested in any meaningful pursuits, except that of spiritual, emotional, and physical pleasure. Mix in a theoretical fifteen-year social development gap, and bake for a year and a half. Recipe yields one nuclear-level relationship meltdown, two people who have significantly different priorities and values fail to integrate into one cohesive unit.

Clearly, there is considerable room for debate in these issues, and some may not even agree with the statement that women are “growing up too quick” and men are “growing up too slow”. However, I think there may be some truth to those statements, and the implications are interesting, and scary.

When I was in Bible College, multiple guys failed out because they were busy playing Halo to go to class, sleep, or eat. Some of those same guys got married to very career- and ministry-oriented women. As with any marriage, as two become one, stress and tension ensued. I don’t know if any of these folks have divorced, but statistics show that the church doesn’t do any better than the world in the realm of marital success, so I am sure the juvenile habits have caused issues in some of those marriages.

Maybe I’m wrong, but if these social trends are true, in a general sense, is it any wonder so many relationships, and marriages in particular, end in failure?

Will the church stand up to redeem and reform the roles of boys and girls, men and women, in culture? (And I’m not even talking about gender roles as it applies to offices in the church, headship, and all the rest, though that may well be the next related topic one would address).

And if all history moves in pendulum swings, from one extreme to another, will my son Elijah, and my daughter Moriah, be part of a more socially conservative generation that will over-stress gender roles to the point of oppression, and become puritanical in regards to entertainment?

I hope not. Redemption is great, but over-reaction may be worse than what we have now.

A few moments ago, the major news agencies showed video of the Governor of New York State, Eliot Spitzer, announcing that he had been linked by federal wiretaps to involvement in a high-class prostitution ring.

Spitzer is the governor of my state, and while I’ve never been a big fan of his, I fear that people Christians will choose to respond to this situation in what I feel would be an incorrect way.

Should he resign? Yes, I think so. Conservative leaders are already calling for that. But that shouldn’t be the Christian’s focus.

The Christian’s focus should be on prayer. We don’t need to condemn and demonize Spitzer. We need to pray for Albany, that the state government won’t functionally implode due to one man’s sin becoming a political a three-ring-circus. And we need to pray for the state, that a new generation of leaders with a God-honoring sense of morality would rise up. Most specifically, we need to pray for the man, and for his family. Spitzer is married, and has three daughters. Outside of his own guilt, the consequences of his sin will be highest for these four women.

Please understand that we must not think ourselves any better than this fallen man. Spitzer stated in his announcement: “…I have disappointed, and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself.” Romans 3:23 says “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (ESV). If we cannot live up to our own expectations, how will we live up to the standards of a perfect and holy God?

The answer is by Grace, through Faith, in Jesus Christ.

Please join me in praying for New York, and for the Spitzer family.

Have you ever noticed that people say they don’t like labels? “Don’t pigeon-hole me!” “I’m more complex than your label!” “Calvinist or Arminian? I don’t play that game!”

Clearly, people are indeed complex. We each have intellectual convictions and personal identity constructs that won’t always fit snugly into the confines of a metaphorical box. We’re all unique, just like everyone else, and no one better affix a label to us, because we’re just too darn different to be grouped with “those people!”

The thing is, it’s all talk. We do like labels. The creation and use of identifying terminology is simply a part of the human experience, and that’s okay. Labels help us to make logical order of our universe. Just like on Sesame Street, labels allow us to process information, and determine that “one of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong!”

Even God uses labels, and sometimes he has his people use them too. He had Adam name the newly created animals in Genesis 2. They weren’t nothin’ till he called ‘em! Later, God called his chosen people “Israel”, and set them apart from the rest of humanity. Today’s followers of Jesus Christ are called “the church”, “the Bride of Christ”, “Christians”, and a gajillion other labels, some of them applied by God, and others applied by people.

Within the church, we love to throw labels around; perhaps even more so than those outside the church. Here are some examples: Calvinist and Arminian, charismatic and cessationist, covenantal and dispensational, Baptist and Methodist, emerging and emergent, relevant and traditional. There are plenty of other examples as well.

Let’s look at pop-culture for a moment. On Facebook and Myspace people join interest and affinity groups for the purpose of social connection. Musicians, gamers, bibliophiles, democrats, republicans, and the LGBT community all have groups one can join and thus label oneself as affiliated with those subcultures. We put graphics on our blogs and profiles the way we put, stickers on our notebooks in gradeschool.

Less digitally, we sometimes wear certain brands or types of clothes as a visual label of who we are. Sean John for those in the hip-hop culture, Carhart for workmen (and Linkin Park), Columbia for outdoor sporting enthusiasts, Wrangler for cowboys (yeehaw!), BigDog for fat guys like me, and ThinkGeek for, well, geeks. It goes on and on, and it’s not just limited to clothes. We buy coffee at certain places. What does the difference between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts say about a person? We get food from certain places, enjoy certain genres of entertainment, and support certain political ideologies. All of these can serve as or lead to labels.

The second I apply the labels “Calvinist” “charismatic” and “Baptist” to myself, I’ve alienated a large section of American culture, both in and out of the church. However, I’ve applied those labels to myself, so it’s “okay”, and I’ll have to deal with the consequences. If someone were to come along and call me a “fundamentalist” it might bug me a bit. If someone were to call me a “heretic” (and mean it, as recently happened) I’d certainly take issue with it. (As an aside, all comments on this post calling me a fundamentalist or a heretic will face immediate and forceful retaliation! ;-))

As I think through this, I’ve come to the following conclusions. Labels help us figure out who we (and others) are, which can be a really good thing. However, labels also open up the possibility for the polarization of people based upon perceived differences. I think people naturally give themselves labels, even unintentionally. However, what we really rebel against is when other people assign certain labels to us. I think this is due to a fear of discrimination. People want labels, perhaps even need labels. We just don’t want others to label us, because then we lose the perception of control over our self-identity.

The problem is, if a label is accurate, it’s accurate. Right? Somebody pick holes in my thoughts, please!

The Southern Baptist Texan has an article stating that Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is likely to be nominated for the post of President of the Southern Baptist Convention, when the SBC holds their Annual Meeting in June.

Dr. Mohler is currently President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He also a nationally syndicated radio host and blogger. I enjoy his radio program, despite disagreeing with some of the conclusions he draws at times.

I am not a Southern Baptist (I am affiliated with CBMNE and CBAmerica), so I really can’t comment on whether or not he would make a good SBC President, though he seems like a good option to me. However, given the current climate in the SBC regarding Reformed theology, I would think he’d be a controversial figure. Do any of you readers have any thoughts?