The Church often sends a subtle, dangerous message that it exists only to meet all Millennials’ needs.
When the Church has extended all its resources to indulge one generation, they’ll leave the next behind. What happens when Millennials’ hair turns gray and the Church realizes it must reach out to the next generation instead?
- Clarity on the gospel of grace
- Christ-centered preaching
- Theologically informed public worship
- Hospitable people
- Church discipline
- Mercy for the poor
- Concern for the lost
In my estimation this blindness is the biggest problem with the sorts of reactionary drinking I described above. When you come out of a stifling, guilt-ridden evangelical past drinking is so emotionally and theologically liberating. It’s a deep and visceral breaking free. And in the flood of those positive feelings–that first drink is sort of an Emancipation Proclamation from a troubled, Puritanical past–the risks and dangers associated with drinking, for yourself and for others, can become eclipsed.
Here’s the lie: that our worth as humans is dependent on what any other human says, does or thinks. That a hyper-sexualized culture of men addicted to the entanglement of pornography and objectification and the women trying hopelessly to please those men by altering their bodies and therefore their minds, should have any say about the true value of a human soul.
Twitter (and social media in general) is a breeding ground for those lies. We do our best to put our best foot forward, comparing our foot with other people’s feet, internally wondering who’s foot is better and what everyone else thinks about my foot. All the while, forgetting, these are feet we’re talking about!
Impactful Leaders are Offline Influencers
I am not saying that pastors should not be on social media. That would be hypocritical of me, since I’m on Twitter and Facebook, and write a blog. But I am saying that those arenas must not be the primary (or even secondary) place where you focus your energy, because those arenas are not where you will make your biggest impact.
Women Are More Unhappy Than Ever
In fact, though women have historically had higher self-reported levels of happiness than men, today women are “reporting happiness levels” that are “even lower than those of men.” (Men’s happiness has dropped, too, but not as much as women’s.) Now, happiness is notoriously difficult to study – as I noted a few years back when I wrote about progressive women and unhappiness for Slate – but the findings are nonetheless noteworthy. Though women have made gains in every area over the past 35 years – from education to their place in the work force – these gains do not appear, by the study’s measures, to translate into actual contentment.
Atheist ‘mega-churches’ look for nonbelievers
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released a study last year that found 20 percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an increase from 15 percent in the last five years. Pew researchers stressed, however, that the category also encompassed majorities of people who said they believed in God but had no ties with organized religion and people who consider themselves “spiritual” but not “religious.”
Sunday Assembly — whose motto is Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More — taps into that universe of people who left their faith but now miss the community church provided, said Phil Zuckerman, a professor of secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.
The Letter Is Dead, Long Live the Letter
Although much of his argument is premised on these romanticized rewards that stem from the letter’s traditional form — arguments not entirely convincing beyond the automatic sentimentality of nostalgia — Garfield makes his strongest point perhaps inadvertently, in an aside, discussing the letters of 14th-century scholar Petrarch, which used to run over a thousand words. Those letters, Garfield notes, were “not only readable but still worth reading” — and therein lies the bittersweet mesmerism of the letter as a cultural genre: With the ease and rapidity of email, how much of our textual exchanges actually end up being truly worth reading? Rereading?