Canadian Teens and TV

Some recent stats show that Canadians teens are likely watching less TV than they did a couple of years ago. One potential cause is obviously the Internet.

Other interesting findings: men 18-24 are the lowest watching TV demographic; the highest watching demographic is women over 65 at a whopping 35.6 hours! Who says that TV is for teens?

A summary is at CBC.

Phil Irish

Can't believe that I didn't think about this earlier. Phil is a great artist, a Christian who expresses his faith in ways that are open to all, believer and non-believer, and with a quality that the art world notices. No cheesy angels here. Check out his website and shows. His link is on the side bar.

Great Questions About Youth Ministry

While checking out Marko's sight I got pointed to another blog that had a series of questions about youth ministry. Check them out at Marko's Blog or the original at tall skinny kiwi. While not quite as taken with the questions as Marko, they do seem like reasonable questions. Maybe because I work in the mainline church but have a foot in the evangelical camp, it seems unfathomable to have the kind of numerical growth that either of these guys have seen in youth ministries. Anyways, here are some thoughts.

Each of us goes through a series of transitions in our life. Clearly one of the biggest is from adolescence to adulthood but the mid-life crisis is also big. When a kid accepts Jesus and develops a faith, including a hermeneutic and an implicit theology, at 16 they are doing so before they have gone through the major crisis of their life. When they get to the shift from adolescence to adulthood, they must find love, work and a philosophy of life. If the faith that they had before was not flexible then it will shatter on the pragmatics of the crisis. The job therefore of the youth worker is not discipleship in the sense that we are making a mature Christian (we never really make a mature Christian, at least with my understanding of sanctification we don't) but rather we are giving the youth the tools that they will need to reshape their faith as they go through the crisis of adolescence/adulthood. Maturity in this case is not knowing the definite answers but rather the questions that they will need to ask in order to continue to love and serve God throughout their life.

I think back to my own life and my own faith journey. I found God through Jesus in a new and exciting way when I was 16. My faith, however, went through some major changes near the end of my time in university. If the youth ministry that I found Jesus had not opened me to the major questions I was going to ask and prepared me with the tools I needed to find the answer, then I'm sure I wouldn't be the Christian I am today. Some of those tools - a community of believers: it isn't so much what I believed but who I believed it with, it was worth struggling through to find an answer because I loved my community enough to want to stick around - a faithful reading of Scripture: being able to move past proof texting to capture the story of God in motion - the expectation of ministry: as a teen I was expected to do ministry, not just go on mission trips but organize them. Maybe there were more, I'll reflect on it more later.

Humourous Ad

Someone in my congregation sent me this the other day and I just got around to listening to it this evening. I assume that it is from Alabama, which only makes it funnier.

Monster Truck Church Ad

Theodore

I know it isn't part of the thoughts that I set out to post but, I have to make a comment about the trade of Jose Theodore from the Habs this week.

It is a gamble as far as the Avs are concerned but it isn't a gamble from the Habs perspective. After all of the crap that Theodore has been through in Montreal, he needed a change of scenery. He may recapture his form in Colorado but he wouldn't have in Montreal. As well, the trade was to a Western Conference team which means that the only time the Habs would ever face him is deep in the playoffs. Good trade regardless of if he recaptures his form.

Pews

Still learning how to link things etc. from this but just read an entry on Dan Kimball's blog that was interesting. http://www.dankimball.com/vintage_faith/2006/03/what_are_these_.html

Space matters and how we arrange space makes a difference.

Two comments. First, I'm not so sure that what we associate with "house" and what first century Christians associated with "house" are the same. I've done some research on family in the first three centuries of Christianity and while there was at times an egalitarian, casual feel to it, there was more likely a nt patriarch. Just a caveat.

Second, at St. Andrew's we have pews, relatively comfortable ones, but pews never the less. Wonder what would happen if we started to play with that? Take out the middle pews so that there is freedom to do stuff in the middle? More realistically we would need to set up an alternative worship space but how do you do that with rooms so multi use?