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i Believe the Burnout Generation

There has been lots of discussion about Anne Helen Petersen’s  article “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” on BuzzFeed.

I have read and listened to some great responses and would like to weigh in to the conversation.

I was a worked with youth from 1996-2016 and saw a severe amount of change. I have also picked up some new tools as an academic that I hope will be helpful.

Millennial  generation is burned out. We should believe them.

3 insights to help move the conversation along.

  1. media culture and image
  2. consumerism and branding
  3. formed by our upbringing

Here is a short video. I would love to hear from you.

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Maybe Fasting Isn’t For Today

This post generated quite a bit of conversation over at HBC. If you want to be encouraged, wander over there and read the amazing comments.

Growing up in a holiness tradition, there was no discipline I held in as high regard as I did fasting. Fasting seemed like the most serious, sacrificial thing could do without going overseas to be a missionary. Fasting was the top of the mountain for people who were really serious about following God.

Admittedly, this perspective may have been colored by being a growing teenage boy. Regardless, it did seem super-spiritual to me at the time.

After High School I got filled with God’s Spirit and called to ministry. Fasting became a discipline that I integrated into my life and training for ministry. It bore good and deep fruit in me and through the years I have encouraged others to integrate fasting into their spiritual disciplines.

I began to lose my confidence in fasting early on in youth ministry. In my first year at a new church, the annual 30-Hour Famine came up on the calendar and all of the youth groups in town participated with gusto. It was a really big deal. I had never heard of it before but we planned the all-nighter events, did the fund raising, and got the supplies for the morning’s pig-out breakfast for when it was all over.

Sometimes you need an extreme example of something along the continuum to expose the flaws you could not perceive when things were more moderate or manageable. The 30 Hour Famine was that event for me.

I have kept track over the 18 years since that event and here are the 5 reasons that I am leery to recommend fasting as a spiritual discipline in the 21st century:

1. We have both an Anorexia and an Obesity epidemic in this country. Both at the same time! This is especially true in our youth. This signals to me that we have an serious food issue that fasting would only serve to inflame.setting-sun

2. Most of us are disconnected from our food supply and the land it is produced on. We have a brand-new-in-history level of separation from where our food comes from. What has happened to farming in the past century added to our consumer habits in the West and you have an epic case of dis-location.

3. We have image issues. We see our reflection in mirrors so many times a day that it would make the saints of century’s past head’s spin! We have security cameras, fashion magazines and selfies on Facebook. Our kids are videotaped nearly non-stop – including when napping!  We think about ourselves and how we look A) all the time  B) in ways that folks from centuries past did not even know was possible. Fasting is not helpful in that scenario. It is just fuel on the fire.

4. We are aware of other people around the world more than ever before. Between the nightly news, social media, and visits from missionaries presenting their pictures and stories we have unprecedented access to the lives and living conditions of people around the world. I’m not sure how fasting works in that context when other people are starving.

5. In a capitalist structure, I’m not sure having kids fast as a fund-raiser for 30 hours, then gorge themselves on pancakes, eggs and sausage at Denny’s is sending the right message.

SO when you put this all together,  I’m not sure fasting has a place in such a chaotic environment. It seems like one of those things that worked in the past – especially in agrarian societies where you could look out the window and see crops and you knew the name of the person who harvested what was sitting on your table that evening.

I would love to hear your thoughts – whether you agree or not.   -Bo

This post in part of an ongoing series on reclaiming spiritual disciplines for the 21st century. You can read the Ancient-Future Faith one here. 

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John 14:6 simply isn’t about other religions

I love John 14:6. I take so much encouragement from it and it challenges me deeply.

I love John 14:6 but I do not like what many today are doing with it: hiding behind it as a catch-all explanation for other religions...

Here is what I love about the passage and the three things I don’t like that people do with the passage:

What I love – this is a disciples invitation. It happens within a story, it is in dialogue that Jesus’ famous sentence “I am the way, the truth, and the life”. It comes in response to a very specific question. Here is the thing – the question is not “What about other religions?” The question was a disciples’ question about following.

Three things people do that scare me – My first concern is that people only quote John 14:6 and not John 14:1-5 or even 14:7. They have ripped this one sentence out of its narrative context and acted like it emerged in a vacuum. This is never a good sign. In fact, the only way this famous sentence of Jesus works as an answer to the question ‘What about other religions?’ is if you isolate it from the rest of the story and place it in a vacuum.

The second concern is that our inherited (non-Hebrew) concern with substance and our language’s (non-Hebrew) lack of relational emphasis really handicaps us when reading the scriptures. I have to explain to people all the time that when Jesus calls God ‘Father’ he is speaking relationally – he related to God as one relates to one’s pappa (or abba). He is not saying that god IS ontologically a Father. Language about God is not univocal, it is equivocal. Or, if you prefer, as Nancey Murphy points out, language is not representative of God, it is expressive. Language does not represent God is a 1:1 ratio – it is merely expressive of some aspect or nature of God.

The third concern is that in John 14:6 Jesus could not possibly have been talking about Muslims. He had never met a Muslim (as Islam didn’t exist yet) and therefore could not have been talking about them. In fact, once one comes to terms with this reality, one has to question whether Jesus would have even know about Buddhists or Hindus either. No, Jesus had probably never encountered them and certainly wasn’t referring to other religions in John 14:6.

(Unless of course you are retroactively ascribing attributes … at which point you are going to have to explain why you chose this one over other preferable ones.)

This sentence was uttered:

  • in conversation with his disciples
  • in response to a very specific question
  • as an invitation to his disciples
  • to relate to God as Jesus related to God

Where the problem seems to lie: When people miss the relational language (come to the Father as related to God), remove the sentence from its narrative context (as if it emerged in a vacuum) and assume that Jesus was referring to things he couldn’t possibly have known about … then irony sets in.

The ironic thing is that quoting John 14:6 as a stand alone explanation – without receiving it as a disciples invitation – one may actually be doing the exact opposite with that passage as Jesus was asking one to do: follow his way.

Having said all of that: Maybe Prophet Isa was talking about Muslims in John 14:6. Maybe he was saying that if they want to relate to God as he did – that they could only do so by walking his way and following his life.  In fact,  if you take away the univocal  calling God Father (ontologically) and see it as expressive (or equivocal) of relating to God as one relates to a loving father … you would remove the biggest obstacle Islam has to Jesus – namely that the Quran tells Muslims not to say that ‘God has children’.

You may think that I am way off here – but until we:

  1. stop quoting John 14:6 in a vacuum
  2. stop thinking that Jesus was talking about other religions
  3. stop thinking that Jesus’ Father language is univocal (instead of relational)

We won’t even be able to have the conversation and explore the possibility.

 

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Women: Images & Identity

Last week I read a fantastic post by Julie Clawson. I wrote a post asking her some questions. She responded and so did Carol Howard Merritt.  Then Rachel Held Evans gave it ‘Conversation of the Week’ in the coveted Sunday Superlatives!   These 3 women great authors and speakers. I feel privilege to have them as dialogue partners! Here are some highlights:

Background: I love going to the movies. As a student, I usually only go the theatre on Summer break (blockbuster action films + air-conditioning = awesome) and on Winter break (tired brain + Christmas money = fantastic).

Last week I saw two movies and was quite intrigued by a pattern that I noticed during the trailers: women being tough guys. The three trailers were for Underworld: Awakening with Kate Beckinsdale, Haywire with Gina Carano (both action films) and The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher.

I have read enough feminist literature to know that there is a principle (which Thatcher made famous) that “In a man’s world …” a women often has to out ‘man’ the guys in order to break into the boys club and be taken seriously.

In a system where we have been socially conditioned to see certain behaviors and attributes as ‘leadership’ or ‘strength’ – or in the church as ‘anointing’ – then women must over-do it in order to overcome the intrinsic biases and gain credibility in a system geared to evaluate by masculine expectations. (people point to Joyce Meyer as a Christian example)

This is a real problem.

THEN I was reading your blog this week and you bring up the Lego Ads making their way around Facebook and tie it into both modesty and obesity. As a youth pastor I have read everything from Reviving Ophelia to Queen Bees and Wannabes ,that explains why girls treat each other the way that they do, and I recognize that there are deep underlying issues. Let’s be honest, these deep issues will not be solved by quoting some Bible verses or ‘going back to the way things were in the Bible’.

So here are my questions: 

1. What do we do with the karate-chopping drop-kicking gun-shooting heroines of violence on the silver screen these days? On one hand, it is nice to women getting these big-deal leading roles in major films… on the other hand, are they real portrayals of women-ness or is it the bad kind of mimicry –  like ‘Girls Gone Wild’ as a picture of sexual liberation or power.

 

2. Are there any resources that you can point me to for Image and Identity? Your blog post on the Lego issue is really sticking with me.

3. As a youth pastor, how would you suggest I navigate the (rapidly) developing sexuality without repression while steering clear of moral permissiveness?  Any thoughts?

Julie Clawson:  Bo brings up some really good questions to which there are no easy cut and dry answers. I ranted/blogged about this general topic a few years ago, but the issues still exist, and perhaps are even intensified. On one hand, I would start by pointing out that just because a woman is an action hero, tough as nails, or possess traditional leadership qualities doesn’t mean she is acting like a man. That could simply be just who she is and she should be given space to be herself without being judged. But at the same time, I agree that it is a widespread cultural issue that women often feel like they must put on the persona of men in order to succeed. Our culture doesn’t know how to handle women who are strong, intelligent, and assertive.  Continue reading “Women: Images & Identity” →

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