Category: DOC Thoughts
Christian Civility: The Test of Intra-Faith Relations
How is your civility? Do you play nice with Christians with which you disagree? It would test my patience to deal with a group from the Westboro Baptist church in Topeka if I ran across them protesting at a funeral. My inner 12 year old would lobby me to toss a water ballon into their midst. As I have aged I’ve learned it might be better to simply kneel and pray that God is actually gracious. I’ve done this on two other instances and was asked to leave the property after explaining the content of my prayer. It seems my intercessory prayer was not welcome.
Here is a post from The Huffington Post by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. It speaks to a social gospel of Christian civility as disagreeing Christians deal with one another. A paragraph or two and a link to the article follows.
Christian Civility: The Test of Intra-Faith Relations
January 18, 2011Inter-faith dialogue is hard, but intra-faith can be harder. Every Christian claims Jesus, so essential questions of how we understand Jesus, his earthly ministry, the meaning of the crucifixion, the nature of his call upon our lives (questions to which a non-Christian is largely indifferent) become the grounds of our essential debate and, literally, a matter of life and death. When we encounter a Christian who thinks and believes differently, we experience that difference as an attack on the principles upon which we have built our lives and as a betrayal to the faith. This feeling only increases when you add in politics. In recent elections, both sides of the political aisle found inspiration and legitimization from Christian constituencies. Political debates often adopted theological rhetoric, and religious leaders adopted political strategies. The result has been a “winner take all” attitude with Christian groups being particularly brutal toward one another.
Christian Civility does not mean that we won’t disagree. There is a difference between incivility and disagreement. Incivility breaks down communication and ruptures God’s kingdom, but disagreement between Christians is inevitable — and even productive. One example is the disagreement between Christian leaders around the Civil Rights Movement in America. Many Christians were encouraging Martin Luther King, Jr. to temper his demands, to slow down his movement and to not create so much tension or disagreement. MLK responded in his now famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail: “But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” Like MLK Jr., all of us benefit from clarity about where we stand. A call for civility is not a call for lack of conviction, rather it is about remaining engaged with those with whom we disagree in the hopes that we might somehow continue to move forward together forging new consensus as we go. The Civil Rights Movement is one example of civil tension that led Christians to a more authentic faith.
Tech & Youth Ministry
I can remember when I thought having a set of two-way radios would be really helpful on a youth trip. The first time I rented a set of commercial walkie-talkies was in 1992 for a youth group musical tour when I served at Beargrass Christian Church in Louisville. I never went on another trip without having walkie-talkies. I can also remember the first cell phone that I had. It was a “bag phone” 
that could only be used in my car. Not only was there a monthly fee but it also cost .25 cents a minute to use it after making just 10 calls during a month. Technology has drastically changed since my first full-time youth ministry gig in 1991 and most of the time it has made the pragmatics of doing youth ministry easier. But, just as technology has helped those who plan and participate in youth ministry it has also brought challenges. Helping parents understand what their children and youth can connect to is an ongoing task just as tough as helping young people understand that once you have a digital footprint there is nothing you can do to erase it. Are you old enough to remember the threatening tone from a teacher, mentor, or parent: “You know things like this will go on your permanent record and follow you the rest of your life.” In a hard copy world I doubt that would have happened though for a time I believed it. In the digital world it most certainly happens. One photo uploaded to Facebook, Myspace, or anywhere else for that matter just created a digital footprint that will be accessible by someone long after you have closed your subscription or deleted the image.
Technology has made it easier to communicate and connect with a person or a group of people, but it has also made actual communication (face to face relationships) harder. What technology has granted through speed it has also taken interpersonal relationship skills from many youth. I often remind adults that youth are not that much different than they were growing up. Youth deal with the same basic issues no matter the tech age: peer pressure, finding acceptance, community and identity, what is the meaning of my life, sex, drugs, alcohol, and (fill in the music that makes your teeth itch here). But, youth also deal with parents today that are living vicariously through their kids too much. Parents that have forgotten that their job is NOT to be a BFF, nor insisting that their child is always right and a teacher or institution always wrong when conflict happens. Grade inflation and teaching to the test has left many children behind because they don’t have any idea what their capable of nor their limitations. These lessons are harder to learn the older you get and particularly harder without having accountable benchmarks as a guide.
Technology is “using” us to sell a feeling, connection, spirituality, or experiences that are based in marketing a fantasy (Guitar Hero is a prime example) instead of solving communal problems. I don’t have anything against entertainment or games. I spent lots of time and quarters at the video arcade and even worked at one for a bit in high school. I saw the original Tron in the theater and enjoy movies. But it seems that we have become a culture obsessed with entertainment as a salve for exponential and uncontrollable change. Maybe it has always been this way. This is the challenge for youth ministry in this new decade of the 21st century. How can technology be used to deepen relationships, connections to other cultures, spirituality, and the exchange of ideas rather than be a balm for the sin-sick soul?
Below are the opening words from an article from The Daily Beast predicting innovations in 2011. Some of these will make youth ministry (and ministry in general) easier and harder as we retreat to our digitally gated communities rather than explore our world or seek out new life and ways of living in equal and peaceful civilization. We are living in a time of Star Trek gadgets seeking the boldness to depart from old scripts of ways of believing or behaving as people of faith, no faith, ideology and sharing this planet. May God bless us all to figure it out so apocalyptic literature and film can remain escapism entertainment.
21 Tech Predictions for 2011
by Weber and Ries | The Daily BeastImagine going back to the start of 2010 and sitting wherever you are right now. At that point in time, tablet lovers had yet to smear their greasy fingers over the impeccable screen of Apple’s now-revolutionary iPad. Three-D televisions were but a glimmer in high-end consumers’ eyes. And Xbox had yet to unveil its Kinect, a cutting-edge gaming console that uses a video camera to track its player’s every move.
If this year is any indication, 2011 will prove to be yet another year of intense technological innovations. Will the smartphone soon replace the wallet? Will we be professing our deepest secrets to robot shrinks? Will Steve Jobs rule the publishing world?
To help chart these stormy waters, The Daily Beast lists 21 technological innovations we predict will happen in 2011—from the probable to the not-so-likely.