The Christian Bubble

Listen up protective parents and pastors! There is something tragic going on at our public Universities.

Christian students seem to be getting spiritually slaughtered in their classrooms and dorms.

About 2/3 of Christian teenagers will quit attending a church once they leave home and go to the big city for college (barna.org).

Why are so many Christians leaving the faith after high school?

Bayard Taylor, in his book “Blah Blah Blah”, would suggest that it is because a lot of Christian students are coming out of a bubble that we’ve put them in. We have kept our students in “safe” environments – away from culture and all other worldviews. But eventually, the high school students have to step out onto the college battlefield, and when they do, it’s not pretty.

Imagine what would happen to us physically if we walked around with a plastic bubble around us so that we would never be in danger of getting sick. What would happen if someone came up to one of us and popped our bubble? Our immune system would be exposed to multiple diseases and we could possible die!

The flue shot is another good example. When you get a flu shot, you actually are injected with something harmful so that your body can learn how to better protect itself when a bigger dose comes along in the future. By “being exposed” our defenses grow stronger.

Applying this analogy, it would make a lot of sense to let our students out of “the bubble” to be injected with a dose of culture so that they can better learn to love it and critique it. Perhaps then their spiritual immune systems would grow stronger with each “exposure” and become more ready for the spiritual battles that lay ahead.

Some practical ideas:

• Pray about sending your kid to a public high school
• Allow your kid to have non-Christian friends
• Watch popular movies and have a good discussion afterwards about the biblical themes and non-biblical themes
• Allow your kid to listen to a variety of music that isn’t produced by a Christian label
• Allow them to question the Christian faith without getting angry at them (these questions will sharpen them and you)
  

Such Thing As a Selfless Good Deed?

I just watched the Friends TV episode where Joey insists that there's no such thing as a selfless good deed and Phoebe sets out to prove him wrong.

She calls him from a pay phone and tells him that she let a bee sting her in the park so that the bee could show off how tough he was to his friends. But then Joey lets her know that the bee probably died after stinging her. Therefore, the good deed caused death.

Later on, Joey is taking calls for a charity on PBS, and Phoebe calls in making a donation, even though she hates PBS (because she sent Sesame Street a letter when she was a kid and they never wrote back). So, Joey praises her for the donation and says that it's a selfless good deed.

But, both he and Phoebe are wrong. The only reason Phoebe made that donation was to prove Joey wrong; it had nothing to do with being good-hearted.

This Friends episode really exposes the fact that many good people do good things out of selfish ambition. I admit that I do this all the time without knowing it. It is our “fallen” human nature to do good things only if we will get something in return.

I’ve heard the argument that all good people go to heaven. But this simply can’t be true because we are all guilty of doing good things for the wrong reasons. We love so that we can be loved in return. We serve so that we can be served in return.

But the God we worship and the God who conforms us to His image is always selfless.

Being selfless in His nature, “he causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matt 5:45). God, out of his infinite love, blesses both those who worship Him and those who don’t.

The ultimate sign of God’s selflessness is displayed brilliantly through Jesus. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

While we live in a world full of mixed motives, we can fix our eyes on the most selfless act ever performed – a perfect God dying for an imperfect people.

How Should Christians Approach Culture?

House-flippers are kind of like gospel-centered Christians.

A normal citizen may pass by a banged-up house on the street or tour the home from the inside, reject it, and then move on.

But the house-flippers take a more gospel-centered approach. With every house that catches their eye, they view it as redeemable.

They search for the good in a house and then identify its areas of brokenness. They affirm that the house was once a brand new house designed by a good creator. But over time, as we know, every house begins to decay. Decay is the default. So then, the house-flipper goes about the process of redeeming the house (purchasing it for themselves) and then restoring it (reversing its decaying condition).

Paul, in Acts, walks up to a spiritually decaying people, affirms their God-given desire by saying, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious”, but then goes on to tell them about the Person (Jesus) who can redeem and restore them from their broken condition.

I think most fundamentalists would order that each banged-up house be torn down immediately and I think the liberals would chain themselves to the yard trees to promote tolerance (of the house in its current condition). One group tears down the house and the other group leaves the house the way it is. Neither of these approaches is love.

Which way do you usually approach culture?