Do You Hear What I Hear?
It is by far one of the worst three hours of my life every year. It’s not going to the dentist, a colonoscopy, or even spending time with the in-laws (who happen to be wonderful people). It’s watching MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMA). I know what you’re thinking, "why would I willingly subject myself to three hours of torture instead of watching literally anything else (or nothing at all)"? Because it’s important to me to know what our teenagers are watching and listening to. And even though it’s not really your job to know, you should probably be paying attention to it too.
This year’s VMA is August 27 and is being hosted by Katy Perry, who happens to be a pastor’s kid and a role model for a lot of young girls. Unfortunately, she also happens to embody a lot of what we don’t want our teenager girls to be. None the less, she is probably a “safe” host for MTV and likely won’t be nearly as bad as Miley Cyrus was in 2015. Miley was so bad that year that they ditched the host all together in 2016. Some of the big names that are going to be on stage preforming include Pink, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, The Weeknd, and Ed Sheeren. If you don’t recognize one of those names, ask a teen if they do and see how quickly they can name a song from them. You see, even though I try to stay up to date on teen pop culture, I have no idea who some of the artists are. I’ve never heard of Logic, Khalid, or Post Malone until today when I looked at the VMA line up. They literally have billions of views on youtube and I had never even heard of them. But I asked a teen if they had heard of them and they said of course. They are surrounded by this stuff all the time, where I just pick up little bits here and there.
And that’s why it’s so important for parents to try to stay connected to what their kids are connected to. Not because you actually like hip hop but because your kid does and you love your kid. There are countless studies about how music affects the listener, but even beyond the psychology there is an important spiritual aspect that we need to pay attention to. One of the performers has a song called “Wild”. His official music video has over 300 million views on youtube which means there’s a good chance your kid has heard this song. I didn’t know that it was Khalid but I’ve heard it on the radio before. These are some of the lyrics from the third verse.
Ayy, ugh, ugh, I heard that p***y for the taking
I heard it got these other n****s goin' crazy
Yeah, I treat you like a lady, lady
F**k you 'til you're burned out, cremation (burned out)
Make it cream, yeah, Wu-Tang, Wu-Tang
Throw that a** back, bouquet, bouquet
My guess is this isn’t exactly what you want your kid to listen to, but have you ever had a conversation with them about it? One of the things you’ll hear me say a lot is that you need to have open and honest conversations with your kid about phones, social media, music, movies, and all other sorts of technology. They will hear stuff like this eventually, whether it’s now while they’re still young or when they move out of your house and get to figure it out on their own. It’s so important for you to help them walk through the process of figuring out how to handle and think about what they put into their system. Don’t just ban an artist because you heard me bash on them. Listen to their music with your kid and then ask them how it portrays women, or what feelings it brings up in them. Ask them why they like that song or that artist and help them find other artists that they can still relate to.
The tricky part is just because someone says they are a Christian doesn't make their music wholesome. Kendrick Lamar is a “christian” rapper, but if you pay attention to his lyrics and how he portrays himself you might not be keen on letting your kids listen to him. But have those conversations with your kids because even as adults we struggle with what we should an shouldn't subject ourselves to, it's devastating that we let them wrestle with those same challenges on their own.
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here
Wear Sunscreen!
In one of the most famous graduation speeches we heard the words...
“Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘98: Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.”
I didn’t graduate in 98, but I've heard the speech, and the song, and read the newspaper article it was stolen from enough times that you would think I know that I should wear sunscreen. But Monday while floating down the Blackwater with the teens I did not wear enough sunscreen. The results? The worst sunburn I've had since I was a kid.
Wear sunscreen is one of the most stupidly simple pieces of advice you could ever give, and yet I still managed to forget it and it hurts. But it reminds me a lot of Jesus’s words. When asked what the greatest commandments were he said love God and love your neighbor. I may have shortened it a bit more but it’s also a stupidly simple message. If we want to be like Jesus we only need to love God and love people. And yet no matter how many times I’ve heard that, read it, or heard other people talk about it I still don’t love God the way I’m supposed to and I don’t love people like God does. The results? Lots of hurts.
If I was a little more philosophical I could probably point out all the ways that not loving others actually hurts me instead, but it’s not supposed to be about me to begin with. What I do know is that not loving others definitely hurts those I don’t love. And by not loving God with my everything I do myself harm. And while it doesn’t physically hurt God, it’s got to be incredibly painful for him to watch his beloved creation rebel against him when he knows we were meant for so much more.
So my advice is to wear sunscreen, because sun burns hurt, and love God and your neighbors, because sunscreen doesn’t work in hell.
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.
Teens and Technology
If your teenager has access to the internet in their bedroom, they are watching porn. You might be thinking to yourself that your kid would never do that. Or you might think I’m wrong, but statistics would say that I’m not.
The majority of homes in the United States have wireless internet (also known as wifi). We think it’s almost a necessity now. Roughly 80% of teenagers have a smart phone (so when you kid tells you that everyone else has a smart phone, it’s not much of an exaggeration) and if you’ve ever had to pay data overage fees you’d know that having wifi is cheaper than the fees. For that small percentage of teens who don’t have a smart phone or wifi, there is probably still a computer somewhere in the house with internet access. This means they have access to 4.2 million pornography websites that make up 12% of the entire internet.
I know none of those statistics say anything about students watching porn, but they should at least convince you that the possibility exists for them to have access to porn. But this infographic is why I can tell you that they are actually watching porn. This was based off a study done in 2008, when smart phones were just hitting the market and wifi wasn’t nearly as prevalent. And we also have to remember that this is just what people admitted to. So if you are a parent of a teenager, I sincerely hope that yours is one of the 3% of boys or 17% of girls who have never seen pornography, but the odds aren’t in your favor.
What is probably even scarier for parents is that there is also a good chance that their teenager has sexted by sending or receiving sexual images through text messaging or apps like snap chat. One article I saw recently put the number of teens who had sexted at around 54%. Most teens have no idea what the legal ramifications can be, and there are way too many stories of students ending up on the registered sex offenders list for life because of it.
There’s a book by Doug Fields and Jonathan McKee called “Should I Just Smash My Kid’s Phone?” that is an excellent resource for parents. It has sample phone contracts, discussion guides, and it’s designed to help you have conversations with teens about how to use technology in healthy ways. One of the things they share in the very beginning is a real conversation they had with a mom of three teens who didn’t allow her kids to use the internet. The oldest one, 19 years old, moved out so that he could use email, social media, youtube and all the other things he wasn’t allowed to do at home. He was figuring out the internet completely by himself, without guidelines or a framework for doing it responsibly or smartly. That is close to the worst thing possible. Banning all technology will not work. They will either sneak around you (bringing on feelings of hate, resentment, guilt, and so on) or they will get to discover everything on their own when they move out (which will mean binging on everything good and bad).
I highly encourage you to find some resources about how to set up healthy boundaries and have good conversations about using technology. However in the mean time, here are a few tips.
- Pick which hills you are willing to die on. Not every battle is worth the fallout, heart ache, and emotional toll.
- Have conversations! Don’t talk down to them. Don’t just give orders. Explain why you are doing what you’re doing. Let them ask questions. LISTEN TO WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY.
- Set up realistic boundaries. Discuss why you have those boundaries, and adjust boundaries based on maturity level. Most cell phone service providers have a version of smart limits that can shut off data usage during certain times of the day, allow only certain numbers to access the phone at certain times, and a number of other things that can be very useful to parents. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
- Sit in the front seat. Just like driving a car, realize that cell phones and technology are privileges, not inherent rights. When they learn to drive, you are in the front seat with them, showing them how to drive safely. Let them know from the beginning that you will be with them through their cell phone usage. 70% of teens already try hiding their online activities from their parents.
- Don’t be the helicopter parent, but stay connected to your kids world. You pay for the phone and the service fees, it’s not unreasonable for you to have the passwords to their phone or social media accounts. Be their friend/follower/whatever it’s called on whatever apps they are using.
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.
Blame it on the Sauce!
Everything is spaghetti’s fault. Well more specifically, it’s spaghetti sauce’s fault. You see up until the 1970’s there were very few spaghetti sauces. There was basically Prego and Ragu, each company with only one kind of spaghetti sauce, now Prego has over 40 different types of spaghetti sauce. Are you seeing the problem yet?
Probably not. But spaghetti sauce changed the world thanks to a guy named Howard Moskowitz. Howard worked for several food companies and he did product research. Companies would hire him to do taste testing with people and to discover what the perfect formula was. Most of his data was so jumbled up that he didn’t know what to do with it, and it was pretty industry standard that you didn’t get clear data from these types of things. Well Howard eventually came to the conclusion that there was no perfect sauce, but there were perfect sauces. By now you probably think I’m crazy, but people thought Howard was crazy too.
There is no one perfect sauce for everyone. But there are groups of people who want different things in their sauces, most of them falling into one of three categories: plain, spicy, extra chunky. This trend in the food industry has spread through almost every other industry in America. Not only do we have dozens of types of pickles, we have dozens of variations of the same computer. If I want to buy a new Mac, I have to decide between a Mac mini, a Mac pro, an iMac, macbook pro, MacBook air, just a Macbook, or the iMac pro. 7 different types of computer just from one company, not to include all the variations 21.5” screen or 27”, three different types of display, how much memory you want, how much storage, mouse or track pad or maybe both? That’s 108 different variations of just the iMac. We no longer live in a one size fits all culture.
We have fallen into a consumer driven mentality, and thanks to the spaghetti we all think we will be able to find the perfect (fill in the blank), and we carry that over to church. We think that there is a perfect church out there or we come up with a list of things we “need” in a church in order to worship God. The church, or God depending on how you look at it, have become things that we consume. People even throw around the phrase “I just wasn’t being fed there”. The big irony for me is that we are the ones who are supposed to be consumed, and it’s all about worshiping God. We’ve gotten a little backwards thanks to spaghetti.
Part of Howard’s research also figured out that people don’t really know what they want, most of the time they haven’t even experienced what they would like most. A third of Americans had no clue they loved extra chunky spaghetti sauce, so when Prego launched an extra chunky variety it changed the industry forever, making $600 million in just 10 years. They just invited people to come experience their sauce and people loved it even though they never knew they needed it. There are millions of Americans who don’t know Jesus, they don’t know they need Jesus. We just need to bring them to the table and let them experience him, or as the Bible says:
“Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.
and Make Disciples
Short term mission trips aren’t the most efficient way to tell other people about Jesus. In fact, It’s probably one of the least efficient ways that most churches participate in. Take our church’s current team to Ecuador for example, we have 10 people going who are paying roughly $1550 to go, half of which is airfare. So we are spending $15,500 for 10 people to spend a week doing a little bit of labor and leading a VBS. If we were so inclined we could probably hire construction workers and local people to do all that we would do for much less, probably around $2,000 if we were just being generous. So 80% of our cost is money that isn’t directly helping the people we say we are going to help.
This whole line of thinking has lead many churches to abandon short term mission trips, for books to be written on it including Toxic Charity, and for people to even harass those who do go on these types of trips. And I get it. I understand the frustration of seeing money that could be used to pay for a pastor’s salary for an entire year in Ecuador being used just to fly our group down there for one week.
I was fortunate enough to spend roughly 16 weeks in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina doing disaster response. We usually had over 100 people a week coming from different churches to work with our organization. In all that time we only had two groups come through that weren’t connected to the church. Both groups worked harder, longer, and frankly even better than any of the church teams. They brought with them construction workers, doctors, and other skilled workers and they were there to really make a difference. The other teams were there to be on a mission trip. What I mean by that is they followed the call to GO, but that was the end goal for them. Their good deed was going on a mission trip. The secular teams goal was to help people. Hopefully that distinction makes sense to you.
We saw hundreds of crisis care kits come through. They were gallon ziplock bags filled with all he essential toiletries and even had toys in there. We tried to pass them out, but a year after the hurricane people didn’t need that kind of help anymore, however, the kits kept coming in. We had entire rooms filled with these kits, each one probably costing between $10 and $20, so thousands of dollars were just sitting in storage while people were just trying to figure out how to get back in their home. I remember becoming bitter about those kits and thinking that if people would just send the money that they would have spent on the kits to the organization that they could hire a case worker who could do some real good. I eventually had to go back to college and left, the crisis kits were still in storage waiting for the next disaster to hit so they could be passed out, and as bitter as I was about those kits and all the other wasted things, I would do all of it over again in a heartbeat.
You see when I was on a mission trip to Mexico, I received my call into ministry while sitting on the roof of a church we were building on to. When I was in New Orleans I saw real miracles happen and my journey with God was forever changed. When I was in the Philippines for two months, I learned more about poverty, the international church, humility, and prejudices than all my college courses could ever teach me. Sure, each time I went on a mission trip I saw things that we did things wrong, or where money could have been spent better. But I have also seen people catch a spark for helping others, for giving of themselves to where it hurts to give someone else a chance of meeting Jesus... to literally saving a couple’s life because they re-roofed the wrong house.
God does more with short term mission trips than we give him credit for. He has been doing work there before the teams get there and he’ll continue to do work long after we’re gone. These trips can have such a big impact on the people who actually go that it’s worth being inefficient. It’s worth it to see them develop a heart for the lost, the widows, the orphans and the sojourners. Short term missions might even be less about the people that we go serve and more about developing the people who go into better disciples of Jesus. May God forgive us if we are wasting resources, but don’t let that excuse stop you from trying to follow his command of “Go and make disciples”.
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.