words of wisdom

Sometimes someone expresses something I think much clearer than I ever could. My wife is reading "How Children Raise Parents" by Dan Allender, who is president of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. He says the following "...here is the insanity. Many parents say they want to protect their children from the horrors of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of this receding and decadent era, and yet they show far more concern for their stock portfolios, their standing at church, and their waistline than the matters of hunger, AIDS, bigotry, sexism, white-collar crime, and the growing hatred and violence in homes, families, churches, and society. We are in an age not only of inanity but also insanity." (55) I could not agree more. I see this as I teach popular culture to high school students. Parents are hyper-concerned about the content of the media that their children consume. They are particularly concerned about specific content, such as sexuality and language. What they are almost never concerned about is what the presence of the content in pop culture, nor its popularity in American society, reflects about reality. It is at this point that we fail to engage in other issues such as the ones listed by Dr. Allender. Shortly before he died, Francis Shaeffer admonished Christians to not worry too much about treating social symptoms, but to focus on the disease. For example, he said that we should focus not just on ending abortion, but on helping increase the value and dignity that society gives to human life. I think the fact that Dan Allender has observed this behavior as a generation-defining issue shows that we have not listened. I believe that if we would seek to be more consistent then we might be taken more seriously.