man.of.depravity

Part One: The Danger of Reading About Porn

Here are some scary statistics:

• The average age of first exposure to commercial pornography is 12.5
• Over 50% of teenagers between 15-19 say they have had oral sex.
• 42% of guys and 33% of girls say they’ve had intercourse.
• While 27% of teens say they’ve been sexually intimate, only 15% of parents believe their children have gone beyond kissing.

Porn is no longer an industry of driving to the store with the blinders on the windows and the fence around the parking lot. It is easily accessible over the internet. It is easy to find web cams of women and men all over the world. Everytime I get on the computer I am playing with fire. While I may use the internet for some very great things, the internet is full of pornography.

Michael Leahy proposes that we live in a sex addicted society. He isn’t talking about it in loose terms. He believes many people in our world need psychiatric help for the issue. While no scholar has named sex addiction a mental disorder, many estimates have the number of those affected in the US alone at around 20 million. Wow! So why do those stats correlate with porn. Using porn leads to sex addiction says Leahy.

I love Leahy’s 4 step cycle of addiction. I think applies to pornography, sex addiction, and any addiction.

1. Preoccupation
2. Ritualization
3. Compulsive behavior
4. Despair

If I’m honest I battle an addiction to 2 things: Web 2.0 (Facebook, YouTube, blogging, etc.) and sports. I have to take serious measures to keep those things in check. What I love about this 4 step process is that it fits any addiction. I can walk through that cycle in every area of my life to see if I am addicted. It certainly isn’t fun, but I know God wants me to only be addicted to Him (hopefully that doesn’t read as cheesy as it sounds).

Part One- Review

Part Two- Politics and the Internet

Part Three- The Old Guard of Conservative Christianity

Today we’re going to finish the series by getting into one of the biggest issues for Christian voters: abortion. I completely understand how sensitive this issues is and am welcome to dialoguing through the contact box and over email if comments are too public with this. I will do my very best to be sensitive to the various views on these issues. Please keep your comments uplifting to one another.

Conservative estimates say that 18% of evangelical women have abortions every year. I took my glasses off to read that twice. The information comes from the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform in Lake Forest, California.

Nancy Hird, of Moody Magazine says, “I think there is more pressure for Christians to abort than in secular society. In secular society there is not a lot of shame involved about sleeping with your boyfriend or in having a child out of wedlock.”

Let that sink in. Something is wrong with the picture Nancy presented. There is a strong disconnect. Somehow many Christians have not been able to teach their message in love. We are losing a generation of women because these women do not feel comfortable going to church because their sin is greater in many eyes, because they “killed a baby”. I can’t tell you how much it pains me that we throw arrows from the highest mountain top we have no business being on. And I’m not even saying Pro-Life is wrong, I’m simply saying that its never the stance that is rejected, it is the way the stance is presented. We, as believers, have done a very poor job of presenting our case in love.

Ford says, “Pro-choice women miss that sense of deep conviction when all they hear in the media is that the religious right wants to take away their right to decide what to do with their own bodies. Likewise, pro-life women miss the deep convictions of some pro-choice women about what they see as interference in their personal lives.”

As abortion and politics collide I think we see that partisanship obscures the problems faced by women, fathers who played no role in the choice, and medical workers.

What are some ways that we can bypass politics and still deal with abortion in a Godly way?

Marcia Ford’s blog

Buy the book

Part One- Review of the book

I think the crux behind independent voters is that they believe there are more than two sides to most discussions, more than two voices that need to be heard, and more than two solutions to all problems.

The power of blogging and the internet has changed the way politicians campaign and win and lose elections. The internet has given independents a party of their own. It has given them a voice just as loud as the 2 traditional parties.

• In the 2006 elections Jim Webb won over incumbent George Allen through a blogging campaign called “Draft Webb”, through a YouTube video with Allen having a “macaca” comment, and a video of Allen’s staffers taking out a Webb supporter.
• 60 million people used the internet to look up information regarding the 2006 election.

What does this all mean? The internet provides a communication that is no longer from the mountain top on down. It empowers the powerless and has given redemption to many of the marginalized. More people are heard, and more people are able to speak to the world.

Obviously the internet and Web 2.0 (blogging, Facebook) has changed the way the world communicates and understands power and opinion. No longer do I only get information from the evening news or the morning newspaper…I get it all day long from friends and bloggers. And the it is the internet that has allowed independents to be the people who will elect the next President.

Has the internet changed how you deal with politics?

I just recently finished reading My Beautiful Idol by Pete Gall. The book is in the same vein as Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. This makes it tough, because Miller’s book is one of the most popular Christian books of the last 10 years. So Gall’s book will be compared to a book that is simply something untouchable. So let me start with this…Gall’s book is not Blue Like Jazz.

They call this genre “spiritual memoir.” I don’t love this genre, but it does make for a solid read. Pete has lived a full life, even at his young age, and this really comes through in the book. I was grabbed from the beginning because I could relate with Pete’s feelings of purposelessness while he was making lots of money in the business world of Chicago. After leaving that scene, Pete heads into the world of uncertainty in Colorado, while working for various churches and organizations, and even attending seminary for a while. I would say the whole book flows out of Pete’s lack of purpose for life during his time in Chicago. That is a message and a feeling we can all relate to.

A theme that permeates the entire book is what “idols” are. We often think of idols as material possessions but I love where Gall goes with this. The idol is never an object, it is always something behind the thing. He calls his idols comfort, a relationship, and many other feelings and ideological attachments.

This book wasn’t easy for me to flow with. That is just part of the nature of books within the memoir genre. They are as disjointed as anyone’s life, including mine. I think this style really jives with non-linear thinkers. Me, being a very linear thinking person, had a hard time with him going all over the place (believe me, he does). However, I this can be a good read for those scattered thinkers. Gall says things that force you to think and does it the lens of his life, which is just as confusing as yours.

Many of you might question Pete’s message but his honesty and true authenticity ring true in each chapter. Pete says that to achieve authenticity we must forsake “our deepest sin and our love for our most beautiful idol: to be our own god.”

Pete seems to have discovered something by the end of the book because he says: “We all want to be loved, and we all want to be seen, and we all hate being made invisible by the agendas and social regulations of people and structures that don’t see us for who we are. We want to express who we are, and to be loved through those definitions…”

Parts One, Two, and Three.

Who Stole My Church? by Gordon MacDonald.

As I think back on the book, there are a couple of moments that stick out to me as huge turning points for the group. One was diving through the Scripture I talked about in part 3, and another is when the youth band joins the group for a discussion on music. Let me remind you that the youth band is full of high schoolers and they are going to meet with 50 and 60 year olds (not easy for either group to do).

A few weeks before this meeting Gordon had talked about Isaac Watts, a famous writer of a lot of hymns (Jesus Shall Reign, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Joy to the World). Everyone in the older group proclaimed their love for a number of the songs written by him. Gordon told about how Watts was frustrated with the music in church during the early 1700s and how his father supported the vision he had for a new kind of music in the church. Watts introduced instruments to church music, they were previously considered worldly and many churches in New England would not sing his music and it tore many congregations a part. Most of the people in the group could not imagine it. The music they loved, was once the theme for a worship war. I think establishing this helped the discovery group to be open to what the youth band had to say.

As the meeting began with the youth team began, they shared some of the things they didn’t understand about the way the older generation does music in church.

• Why were they so serious and never happy?
• They are always too busy being frustrated with the music that they never worshiped.
• There is no excitement in the singing.
• A lot of the words in the songs don’t make sense.
• The style of music is nothing close to what people listen to during the week.

Both groups talked about these things for a while. It forced the older group to think about why their favorite music wouldn’t make sense to someone younger. It also forced the younger group to think about how they could incorporate some “traditional” songs in their sets in a fresh way (a week after the meeting, the youth band led Come Thou Fount with a more upbeat feel).

That meeting ended with an embrace between the generations. I have to doubt whether that is really realistic, but the fact that two totally different age groups were able to share their music frustrations with one another is a step that most churches don’t ever take. I wonder whose job it is to reach out…should older or younger people reach out to the other first? I struggle with this a lot.

I’ve been a part of music in church for a while at different churches. I have never, ever had someone older than 50 reach out to me to discuss worship and my thoughts on music in church. The older generation loves to complain about us young people and I love to complain about how stubborn older people are with music…BUT neither side ever reaches out to the other. Until this changes, the divide between the two groups will continue to grow.