Saturday, November 10, 2007

The Extended Adolescence of the Evangelical Mindset
Came across this entertaining post, "To Baldly Go" by Carl Trueman at Reformation 21. He has some funny stuff about the phenomenon of hair loss and cover-up and then gets a little more pointed on youth-culture obsession among the middle-aged:
...what is it with ministers and Christian leaders who seem to feel a compulsive need to talk about youth culture all the time and to adopt the styles of self-obsessed teenagers in order to demonstrate how `relevant’ their ministries are and how hidebound everybody else’s are? Above all, the arrival among the forty-somethings of the soul patch, that absurdly redundant tuft of hair just below the bottom lip, says it all. That middle-aged ministers think that they are somehow culturally more attuned or useful because they lecture their peers about what kids do or do not believe, and because they adopt the aesthetics and style of the modern metrosexual is a bizarre and sad turn of events.
His observations:
First, in the world of today, as of yesterday, kids find old people (i.e., anyone over twenty-five) to be embarrassing and implausible...
Second, the Bible itself does not seem to put much stock in what the kids think.
Third, the gospel just is not cool.
And finally,
But the point of priorities is basic and important: don’t let your mid-life crisis determine the way you think about the gospel and the church. A hairstyle which tries to hide the ageing process is one thing, ridiculous but harmless; a theological agenda which mimics the world’s obsession with locating wisdom in the very sector of society with least experience of, and perspective on, everything is far more serious and potentially damaging.

1 comment:

Nikki said...

Well, I'm very late in responding to this, but I think you raise some good points. I, for one, have really enjoyed being a part of both a church and Bible study with such varieties of ages represented, and really believe that trend to be something that has been lost in much of the Church today. Whatever happened to the idea of gleaning wisdom from those who have more life experience than we do?