Back in 1987, a Time magazine reporter asked then Vice President Bush about his strategic plan for our nation’s future. Bush famously responded, “Oh, that vision thing!”
If you engage in Christian leadership for any length of time, you are going to have people problems. Put 10 or 15 adults together and try to provide pastoral care for them and what you might discover is that there will probably be one couple (at least) whose marriage is on the rocks, a few people who hate their jobs, a single mom with three kids struggling to hold things together. You will almost certainly have in your group a few people who make commitments and then think nothing of breaking them without any notice. Someone might make a commitment to do childcare or to bring snacks and then simply don’t show up. In the average group of adults there will be at least one exceptionally needy or disruptive member. There might also be several people who have significant issues of addiction or emotional problems – depression, anxiety, and the like.
There is an abundance of evidence that the golden age of children experienced by Baby Boomers is not only over, but that we have moved into the age of the radical devaluation of children in America. Consider the following:
Over the past decade Vineyard Columbus has sent many disaster relief teams to different parts of the globe to respond to earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and epidemics. In 2005-2006, three Vineyard Columbus medical teams went to Indonesia to respond to three different crises - first, a tsunami in January 2005, second, an earthquake six months later, and third, another earthquake in April 2006. These teams established a community health clinic and served in mobile health clinics at several refugee camps. They treated over a thousand people and partnered with other relief agencies to provide clean water as well as emergency food aid.
Imagine you are Rip Van Winkle and you fell asleep on November 21, 1963 (the eve of JFK's assassination) and woke up 50 years later in the year 2013. You would find yourself not only living at a different date, but living in a different world. The top-rated program in 1963 was The Beverly Hillbillies with a rating of 34.9 meaning that 34.9% of all American homes with a television were watching it. All of the top 31 shows had a rating of at least 20. By way of comparison, the #1 show is the 2010 season, American Idol, had a rating of 9.1. (Ozzie and Harriett, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke were also massively popular in 1963).
There is nothing that has contributed more to my overall spiritual growth and my lifelong learning than my reading of Scripture and great books! I have regularly been asked by people, "What would you recommend that I read?" So I decided to take a shot at trying to provide some book recommendations in a variety of areas. But as the writer of Ecclesiastes says: "Beyond this, my son [and daughter], be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body." (Ecclesiastes 12:12)I would add, maybe, but it's a good weariness!
I recently read a book titled Desiring the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith, who is a philosophy professor at Calvin College in Michigan. The book was largely about what it means to be a human being, something that is not at all obvious.
The newspaper reported that there are 2.6 billion Christmas cards mailed during the Christmas season. Some businesses take in over half of their annual retail business in the month preceding Christmas. Just try to find a parking spot at one of the local malls and you quickly realize how many people depend on Christmas for their livelihoods.
Like Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, Thanksgiving offers an important rhythm in our year to practice something essential to human happiness - in Thanksgiving's case, gratitude!
Back in 1971, about 300 young adults and their babies left the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in brightly colored old school buses and tie-dyed shirts. They crisscrossed the country looking for a perfect place to create a utopian community. Five months later they landed in Summertown, Tennessee, the poorest county in the state. These young adults called their experiment in communal living simply “The Farm.” They jokingly referred to themselves as the “Technicolor Amish.”