Church Voices

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
a war between the black and white,
a war between the odd and the even.

Why don’t you come on back to the war, pick up your tiny burden,
why don’t you come on back to the war, let’s all get even,
why don’t you come on back to the war, can’t you hear me speaking?
- Leonard Cohen, There is a War

There is a war between Gen X and Baby Boomers. That may be a bit overly dramatic but there is quite a bit of resentment and disdain from Gen X towards Baby Boomers, and if you don’t realize that you’re probably a Baby Boomer. Most of the information I’ve culled for this article comes from a business management/marketing perspective. Sadly, most of the synthesis of generational traits comes from people who want to sell them stuff or get them to work harder. I’ve done my best to remove this perspective.

If you expect to be a multi-generational church, at least in areas where this generational break is acute, you’re going to need to be aware of the differences in perspective.

Competition
The thing about baby boomers is that there’s a lot of ‘em. From birth they’ve been competing with each other for attention, promotions, and every other area of life. Direct competition with one another where there are clear winners and losers and hierarchies are distinctly and formally recognized. If you expect to be able to put ministries, and staff into competition against each other as a way to motivate and inspire them to their best you can forget about Gen X being on board.

CEOs
Take a look at the ecclesiastical landscape and you’ll see CEO style senior ministers abounding. Saddleback, and Willow Creek foremost and you’ll find a huge baby boomer population being lead by a single guy at the helm. This, naturally, goes back to the neatly defined hierarchy of baby boomer preferences. And you might as well put out a sign asking potential Gen X staff members to run away as quickly as they can. Xers are not going to respond to a lead dog, authoritarian very well. While you won’t see the total team mentality of a Generation Y, you will see a far more egalitarian leadership structure where each member of the team takes on an area of ministry and meet and lead as equals.

Work is life, life is work
If you take a few minutes to listen to the music produced and consumed by Gen X you’ll see a strong theme of abandonment by parents (Nirvana, Eminem, Tupac). Much of Gen X experienced their formative years as latch key children, and children of divorce due to Baby Boomers’ intense need to compete professionally. They were sacrificed for professional advancement, and they’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen to their families. If you expect your Gen X staff members and volunteers to work 80 hours a week and ignore their families you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

On the other hand, if you create a staff environment that allows Xers to blend their professional and personal lives (something that will cost you almost nothing in a church environment) you’ll end up with a staff that is incredibly passionate and self-motivated to get things done. You’ll solve the problem of staff moving on after a few years, and leaving you to start from square one.

Authority and Derision
Let me be very clear here: most of the reason for the break between these two generations is a result of Boomers not giving a crap about Gen X. Their expectation was that Gen X would be the younger version of the Baby Boomers and when that didn’t happen they reacted badly. For example, the charge that Gen X was a bunch of whining slackers stemmed mostly from Gen X not being hyper-competitive professionally and abandoning their kids to work massive hours. However, due to the massive size of the Boomer generation they haven’t needed to acquiesce to Xers, they could just pound Xers into submission by forcing petty authoritarian rules into the work place. If you’re more Boomer than Gen X then you probably think it’s silly that Xers deeply resent things like dress codes, and using MP3 players while at work. Then again, your generation is the one that came up with those rules and inflicted them on others. Businesses are starting to get the clue that little things like that matter, and so they’re loosening up the rules around them. Churches that don’t foster an environment that matches this sort of thing can forget about staff or members from Gen X.

Pro-life.

What a great word. That one word will let you be a part of a mostly political team. You can vilify the opposing team, go home at night, and not think anymore about it.

But if being pro-life doesn’t cost you anything, then you’re not really pro-life.

Recently a pastor in Atlanta made headlines by saying his church would take care of any expectant mother who needed help.

Why is this headline worthy?

Because for far too long being pro-life hasn’t cost most voters anything more than punching a voting card.

Being pro-life means that when someone is desperate, and dreading her due date you’re there not just to provide formula and diapers, but to provide friendship, and at least make that due date a little less dreadful if not joyful.

Being pro-life means you get to provide baby sitting services, advice and support to someone you didn’t know all that well to begin with, sometimes at 2 in the morning.

Being pro-life means that you don’t get to condemn, condescend or moralize against people who have sinned and are expecting a child outside of marriage, and without the financial ability to take care of themselves and you don’t get to do it in your churches, action, or political speech, because if you do, you might as well take out a bill board for Planned Parenthood.

Being pro-life means that while you might support or oppose particular political positions you don’t get to say things like “health care is not a right”. Health care directly affects whether someone has breath in their body, if you believe life is a right, then by extension health care is as well.

If you’re unwilling to do these things, then the solution is very simple, just admit to yourself that you’re not really pro-life.

From here:

One thing I haven’t given much thought to, but floats through my mind now and then is how different Christianity looks from Torah religion. I’m not talking about Law vs Freedom or anything like that, I’m talking about how Christianity, no matter where you go, is all about finely honed dogmas articulated in precise, philosophical language. I just don’t see people doing that in the Bible. They don’t even really do it that much in the New Testament, either, certainly not to the extent of arguing on just how many hypostases, essences, substances, accidents, and so on are or are not involved in something, or how precisely they are connected and interact.

This is another installment in my series on why and how Christians should be bad consumers.

While on a weekend get away I managed to watch some cable TV, which means that I managed to also watch some commercials. This one included.

Yep, another website trying to scam money for a service that’s already free. If you need excellent credit then it makes sense to worry about your credit report. The thing is, for most of us, it doesn’t really matter all that much, or if we just ignored it we’d be better off. Credit only matters if you’re planning on borrowing large sums of money. Sure, if you want to borrow money to start a small business, or buy a house, then by all means pay close attention and clean up your credit.

But, take for example this person who wrote to the consumerist to ask if it was worth it to close a credit card in exchange for a lower interest rate. She notes they have a lot of debt and this particular card won’t be paid off for five years. Her concern with closing the account is how it will affect her credit score.

In her case, who cares? If you’ve got so much debt you can’t pay off this card for a few years your credit score shouldn’t matter to you. You shouldn’t be looking to borrow more money, you should be looking to pay off debt. In fact, this particular person would probably be better served to stop paying completely, negotiate a settlement to pay off at a lower amount. Sure your credit report will get all frowny for a few years, but in the long run, you’re better off.

For some reason credit bureaus have convinced many Americans that credit scores matter, and so they have more power, and higher revenue. The reality is, that for most people, credit scores matter very little, and in fact credit in general does a lot of damage to lives.

Be a bad consumer and don’t worry about your credit score unless you need to borrow money, and if you need to borrow money every month to get by, its time to make some changes.

Postmodernism, or what I think of as politically-correct-liberal-feel-good-ism, is nothing new. Plato cited Protagoras as having said that any given thing “is to me such as it appears to me, and is to you such as it appears to you.”

Postmodernism is also just as much of a failure today as it was in Plato’s day. But that’s a pretty well-kept secret. One very concrete way to see this is through postmodern architecture (no pun intended). Consider two of the most famous postmodern building, Ohio State’s Wexner Center and MIT’s Stata Center. Regarding the former, Ravi Zacharias’s poinent question comes to mind:

I remember lecturing at Ohio State University, … my host was driving me past a new building called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts. He said, “This is America’s first postmodern building.” I was startled for a moment and I said, “What is a postmodern building?” He said, “Well, the architect said that he designed this building with no design in mind. When the architect was asked, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?’ So he has pillars that have no purpose. He has stairways that go nowhere. He has a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it.” I said, “So his argument was that if life has no purpose and design, why should the building have any design?” He said, “That is correct.” I said, “Did he do the same with the foundation?”

Regardless of the foundations, a report on the latter building is also telling:

On October 31, 2007, MIT sued architect Frank Gehry and the construction company, Skanska USA Building Inc., for “providing deficient design services and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emergency exits.”

Postmodernism is all talk and no bulk. I suspect most self-described postmoderns are attention-starved, intellectually insecure, and uncreative, because postmodernism is an attempt to over-compensate in all three areas.