Weekly Re-cap--January 20

This week was a great week for exploring generational issues in worship and otherwise! Check these out:

The New York Times has an interesting article asking whether the younger generation is more narcissistic than others. Generation Me vs You Revisited gives arguments that both support and detract from this hypothesis. What do you think?

What do you think about plasma screens in church bathrooms? Good practice? Too commercial? And is this a generational issue?

What can churches learn from American Idol? Collide magazine muses on the use of technology in church.

Over at Emerging UMC, Taylor Burton-Edwards continues to ponder the future of the UMC. This time he is exploring the "Seven Vision Pathways" established by the Council of Bishops.

What insight does Sweeney Todd give us into our lives today? Check out an interesting article from Beliefnet about how the character of Sweeney Todd tells us something about the sinful nature of humans.

How do we reach the younger generation? Carol Howard Merritt at Tribal Church suggests the secret is not marketing but storytelling.

What about liturgy? The boomers wanted to boot it, but it appears that younger generations are actually seeking it! Check out "Reviving the Liturgy" at Relevant.com.

Also over at Relevant is a powerful article (Indie-Rock Attitude) asking young adults to evaluate their attitudes toward others with different opinions and tastes than them. But I think this is something for all of us to spend some prayerful time considering!!

A related article calls on church leaders to look beyond people's preferences to reach more than one generation. Alban Institute has an article that challenges us to think intergenerationally! "'Intergenerational' as a Way of Seeing" calls on us to think about the purpose of worship first while bringing people with different preferences around a table to discuss worship.

Leaders must look at worship and other congregational practices from the perspective of purpose rather than preference. rather than asking how most people like a particular practice, leaders must learn how to explore how choosing a practice will most faithfully fulfill the purposes of the congregation.

And a final note related to preferences is an interesting little article from the Chicago Tribune reporting the results of studies that maintain that human beings are poor predictors of what's likely to make them happy.

[Harvard psychologist Daniel] Gilbert argues that our inability to make accurate predictions about what will make us happy stems from thought processes that people are more or less stuck with -- or minds are designed to see the world as it is right now, rather than from the point of view of the people we are going to become.

What do non-Christians think of the church? This is a recurring and important question for us to explore if we want to fulfill the great commission. According to a recent survey by Lifeway, they don't think much of us. And USA Today picked up on their scepticism of the church as an institution and Christians in general.

Why Emerging Churches are looking to the ancient practices of Christians

For it is sometimes by looking at the past that the present amends its dead soul, and there dawns a hope that the future will be born with new vitality.
Calvin Miller The Path of Celtic Prayer

Weekly Recap January 13

Well, the holidays are over and I'm back from my trip to New York, so it is time to get back to my normal routine. I apologize for not posting more over the past few weeks, but the majority of my reading over the past few weeks was pure fun (I highly recommend The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns).

But here are some of the articles that I found interesting over the past few weeks:

Leonard Sweet will be writing a series of articles on "The Top Ten Paradoxes That Will Rule the Future" over at Next-Wave Ezine. In this month's article, he lists the 10 paradoxes that he will explore in the next few months. They are:

1) Do little large.
2) To move up, move down.
3) Learn to fail so you can succeed.
4) Your only control is in being out of control.
5) It's more important to know what you don't know than what you know.
6) The more you think out-of-the-box, the more you need well-built boxes to think.
7) A graying globe requires greening.
8) Only locavores can globalize.
9) When fast replaces vast, go slowly with the holy.
10) Moore's Law makes Murphy's Law all the more relevant.

Over at Out of Ur, there is an interesting reflection on being a young pastor that begins with a very provocative title, Disarming the Boomers, and statement:

Let’s be honest. The distance between the Boomers and Busters isn’t just a generation gap—it’s a generation gorge. The cultural, technological, and philosophical shifts that have occurred in recent decades have given these two generations fundamentally different perspectives. Although some younger pastors have abandoned the Boomer church to launch their own communities, there are many struggling to serve side by side with the older generation.

Over at Emergent Village, Shawn Landres of Synagogue 3000 (a Jewish group with similiar goals to Emergent Village) on what Jewish reformers can learn from the Emerging Church Movement and the questions that yet remain to be answered concerning the movement.

And the Alban Institute has a great article that summarizes the seven elements of worship that characterize Christian worship regardless of style. This is a great baseline for evaluating what we do in worship.

Of course, the biggest news in generational issues over the past few weeks has been the record number of younger voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and their impact on the elections. A side issue has been the generation gap among women voters with older feminists voting for Clinton and younger ones leaning toward Obama. The whole issue came alive for me as I stood in line for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and listened to a trio of twenty-somethings discuss the election. They obviously were leaning toward Obama but my favorite commment came when one of them declared, "I'm not voting for the old Southern white guy--what's his name? Edwards? Yeah, that's him!" (And I thought Edwards was a young Southern white guy--at least compared to Huckabee, Bush, et. al.)

God Doesn't Do "Waste"

In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year's gadget and replacing it with this year's model - do we end up tempted to think of people and relationships as disposable? ... If we live in a context where we construct everything from computers to buildings to relationships on the assumption that they'll need to be replaced before long, what have we lost? ... God is involved in building to last … God doesn't give up on the material of human lives ... and God asks us to approach one another and our physical world with the same commitment ... God doesn't do 'waste' ... Rowan Williams

Check out this New Year's message from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Be sure and give it a few moments because what starts and ends as an encouragement to recycle is really about something much more important.