Just a quick video from Francis Chan – it’s time for Christians to get off the bench and do something.
Archive - April, 2009
Pulpit Peeves, pt. 1
Ed Stetzer posted a blog several months ago about things he was tired of hearing said from the pulpit. Of course, being a pastor, church planting guru and traveling to many churches every year, he’s heard a lot. Me, I’m not a pastor, but I’ve been in church my whole life so I decided it’s time to make a list of things I’m sick of hearing, from a lay-person’s view. So over the next several days I’ll be posting different things that I’ve heard pastors, church leaders, evangelists and others say that, in my opinion, just aren’t very smart.
Up first: blaming TV/music/internet/video game/etc. for the condition of our society.
Are there movies that go too far?
Yes.
Same for the internet, music and video games. But I’m tired of hearing people say things like “the entertainment industry is to blame” yet they never once ask “Where are the parents?”. I went to see The Last House On the Left and The Haunting In Connecticut last week. At Last House I saw a woman with a child that was clearly very young; couldn’t have been older than 10. In The Haunting a mother brought her two young sons – the oldest looked about 6 or 7. Now, The Haunting In Connecticut wasn’t that bad (got a PG-13 rating), but it was still too much for two children under the age of 8. On the other hand, The Last House On the Left was too much for some of the adults in the theatre, much less a child. Seriously? A teenage girl is raped, people are brutally murdered and a man’s head is cooked in a microwave. Yeah, that’s a family movie for you. So before you start preaching that Halo 3 is training our children how to kill, maybe you should go after parents, both the ones that allow their children to watch things they shouldn’t and those that don’t pay attention to what their kids are watching and listening to.
I mean, has society been numbed by what is shown in movies, on the nightly news, on various websites and in video games? Sure. And I won’t make any excuses for what I watch or listen to but the difference here is I’m a grown man. I can make my own decisions. However, when I have children there is no way they will be playing video games like GTA or watching movies like Last House.
In my opinion, one of our society’s biggest problems is that too many parents either don’t care what their kids watch/listen to, or else they have a false assumption that their children can handle images and lyrics that are adult in nature. I don’t care if your ten year old is “mature for his age”; he’s still TEN!!!!
Same thing with the internet. I know too many parents who let their kids go in their room, shut the door and get online. First off, if you think your kids aren’t smart enough to work around content filters, think again. Secondly, porn isn’t the only problem; internet predators are just as big of a problem.
Any thoughts on any of this?
What Is Church?
On Good Friday I had the opportunity to partake in a service at Mars Hill Church in Seattle via their website.
The following night I watched an Easter service from LifeChurch.tv; Sunday I could have watched that service again or I could have “gone to church” at over a dozen other churches via the internet. When this technology became available several years ago, many churches advertised it as “services on demand”; a supplement to normal church attendance. Nowadays most churches have followed LifeChurch.tv’s lead and are referring to it as church online or an online campus.
This begs the question, what is church? Not the universal church, but the thing that the author of Hebrews was referring to when he told us not to neglect coming together (Hebrews 10:24-25). Over the last few hundred years Christians have come to define that scripture as meeting on Sunday morning (or more often) in a specific building (coincidentally called “church”) and following a specific service format that, despite the differences between denominations, is pretty similar regardless of where you go.
Does the church have to meet in a “church building”?
Do we have to meet on Sunday?
Do we have to follow a specific (traditional) format? (e.g. welcome, 2 fast songs, 1 slow song, offering, message)
Can you attend church online and still honor the scriptures by assembling with other Christians in small groups, Bible study, etc.?
Depravity
I was watching WWE RAW Monday night and saw something that actually made me throw up in my mouth a bit. Not something in the actual show, but a commercial. I actually had to rewind it and watch it again to make sure what I had seen and heard was actually there. The commercial was advertising a new online dating service. Sounds okay enough, right? Except the dating service is for married people who want to cheat. I won’t put the link here because they aren’t even worth the free advertisement on my site, but I did visit their site to see if it was legit. They’re advertising everything from one night stands to extramarital relationships.
C’mon!
Seriously?
I know our world is getting progressively worse and there are many other dating sites out there that are questionable at best, but now we’ve got one that actually encourages cheating?
And we wonder why the divorce rate in the United States is over 50%.
Also, before anyone puts blame anywhere, USA is responsible for the commercial time-slots. They are the ones who sell them, so WWE has no choice in what companies advertise during their broadcasts, which sucks for them since they recently lowered their rating from TV-14 to TV-PG.
