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.

I’ve registered for the Pastor’s Conference to be held on Tuesday, April 22nd at Davis College. Are any of you planning to attend? I’d love to meet up with old friends, or make some new ones.

I’m especially interested in seeing and interacting with the college’s new president, Dr. Dino Pedrone, who was scheduled as the “guest speaker” before his presidency was announced.

While we were at the tobyMac concert, I was involved in two conversations I thought were amusing.

In the first conversation, I found out that I’m a celebrity. I had shaved my head a day or two before, and was wearing a ball cap. My goatee is two or three inches long, and apparently, some event staff people thought I was Bart Millard of MercyMe. I had to explain to them, in all seriousness, that I am not the guy who sings “I Can Only Imagine.” They told me they could have gotten me backstage if I wanted to. Nice, eh? Maybe I should have said I wanted to go backstage anyway…

In the second conversation, I was invited to apply to be a student at Davis College, again. I was with two of my high school students, looking at the merchandise tables. One of the tables had literature from Davis, so I picked up a view book, and started looking for pictures of people I know. I saw Will Hall, Naaman Pallo, and a few others from my Davis days. The guy standing at the table asked, “Are you interested in going to Bible College?” “Absolutely not.” I replied. “Oh…Never mind.” I jokingly told him that I graduated from the school twice already, and didn’t think I wanted to do it again. He continued the conversation, asking if I enjoyed the school. I told him that I enjoyed it some days, and loathed it others; that I loved and hated my time there, and that I think that’s okay. He just stared at me, like I had eight heads.

Oh well. I thought they were amusing, anyway.

Following Calvin and Mandy, I too took the Book Quiz. My response: Huh?

You’re Brave New World!

by Aldous Huxley
With an uncanny ability for predicting the future, you are a true psychic. You can see how the world will change and illuminate the fears of future generations. In the world to come, you see the influence of the media, genetic science, drugs, and class warfare. And while all this might make you happy, you claim the right to be unhappy. While pregnancy might seem painful, test tube babies scare you most. You are obsessed with the word “pneumatic”.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Last weekend, I and the other youth leaders at North Country Fellowship, had the pleasure of taking a group of teens to Elmira, NY in order to check out the Boomin’ Beyond Measure tour, with tobyMac, Jeremy Camp, and Matthew West. Due to a severe winter storm that hit most of New York, it took us five-and-a-half hours to get to First Arena (it usually would take three), and after the concert, it took us another forty-five minutes to get to the homes we planned to stay at overnight. The church we intended to worship with had canceled their services for the next day, so I led an impromptu service in the living room of the house we had gathered at, and after a big lunch, we headed back to Carthage, with clear skies and dry roads almost the whole way.

I have to admit, tobyMac isn’t my kind of music. I’ve never before enjoyed his artistic style (though I don’t dislike hip-hop), or his attitude in his performances. I didn’t like dcTalk much either, so I guess it’s a carryover from that. Regardless, the live show was pretty good; especially the last song (no, not just because it was over), the old dcTalk hit “Jesus Freak”. Having listened to dcTalk when that album was new (and before I was a Christian), that was a lot of fun. Jeremy Camp’s set was my favorite of the three artists, and this is despite the fact that he was ill with some sort of respiratory infection, and coughed up a lung in between each song. Matthew West was decent as well. He served as a nice mellow introduction to the two headliners.

The best part of the concert, for me, was watching the youth from my church eat it all up. For many of them, it was their first concert, and I believe that most of them consider tobyMac their favorite artist. It was a great night for them, and one I doubt they will quickly forget.

I think it was a great time of community building and friendship. I took Calvin’s advice, and outlawed all digital gadgets during the trip, so the teens wouldn’t be texting their friends and spaced-out in their own little musical world. Good advice; it worked like a charm.

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!

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.

Moriah Mae Flack. Born Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 8:05 a.m. Measuring 8 lbs 1 oz, and 21 inches long. Woohoo!

Actor Heath Ledger was found dead earlier this afternoon.

I’m not the biggest fan of most of Hollywood, and don’t ever recall being truly surprised by a “celebrity tragedy” but I have to say, this one caught me off guard. I have an appreciation for Heath Ledger’s work. From The Patriot to 10 Things I Hate About You, he was truly enjoyable in a variety of different type roles. I’m looking forward to seeing his final performance, as The Joker in the upcoming Batman film.

Please join me in taking a short moment to pray for his family and friends during this hard time.

My good friend Calvin Park recently had an article published in the online edition of YouthWorker Journal. The article, Teaching Students the Torah, is very much representative of a passion that he has had since our undergrad days at Davis College.

Calvin is now Youth Pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Ipswitch, MA, and is working on his MDiv at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He also blogs at Random Bloggings.

Be sure to check out the article, and visit his blog too. And don’t ask him about the Woolrich logo.