Advice for 20-Year-Olds

Men like Jordan Peterson have a huge following of young people, often young men. In church circles, we can sometimes think that young people are all godless hedonists who are uninterested in the bigger questions of reality. The Peterson phenomenon suggests otherwise. What are they doing that we aren’t? I’m sure sharper minds than mine have considered this question, but I suspect one reason is that they are offering practical strategies for living a virtuous life. Consider the following short clip.

What strikes me firstly is his willingness to challenge young men without resorting to demeaning and haranguing them as if they are failures. In the church our young men can often be looked down on as ‘hopeless’ and needing to get their act together. Here is a man who is like a loving father encouraging a son to man-up in a winning way. He is giving excellent advice that comports with a biblical view of masculinity and the dominion mandate.

Secondly, he’s not afraid to challenge cultural norms. He rightly points out that marriage is more fulfilling than a career. He says, “You’re not going to find something more valuable in your life than a committed relationship with someone that you love that sustains itself across time and that in all likelihood produces children. That’s life. And there may be people for whom avoiding that is the better route, but those people are very rare, and you need a real reason to assume that you are one of those people.” In the church we have more or less taken on the cultural norm of elevating career above marriage by the way we assume that our children should not consider marriage until after they have completed studying and got career sorted.

Obviously, there is more to be said here. We would disagree that familial relationships are the most important thing in life. Christ is our all in all. Yet getting on with getting married is in general a helpful truth provided this is conducted with wisdom and maturity. The truth is that the pattern of marrying and being given in marriage and raising families is normative in the Christian age. While the celibate life is a valid and God-honouring calling for some, we may be in danger of denigrating the normal pattern for growing the church through a godly offspring as well as the normal pattern for avoiding sexual immorality, and the normal pattern God uses for strengthening society and culture and preventing societal decay. Yes work and vocation is important, but family is more important.

Pop Culture and the Church

Over time, I have become more and more dissatisfied with what I see in the modern evangelical church scene. One of the issues I struggle with is its desire to be relevant. It has embraced a sort of evangelical pop culture. This has led to some tragic developments.

We all know there’s something incongruous about an older woman trying to dress like she’s still a ‘hot young thing’. We find it troubling when an older man has not developed gravitas but acts like a clown. I wonder if the same applies to the Church of God.

As a child, I grew up going to church with my parents. Things were formal. People wore their Sunday best. The minister wore a suit. There were periods of silence and reflection. We sang hymns – songs that were sometimes hundreds of years old. The old organ had a few bad notes, and the organists were often no virtuosos, but my heart soared as all around me sung with gusto lyrics millions around the world for centuries had sung. Communion felt like a very solemn and reverent occasion. The period of quiet while it took place seemed to last forever. I felt a sense of awe. This time and place was special, and I was a part of something that stretched millennia. There were jarring moments in the service. A responsive reading for instance, where I, even as a small boy participated with children through to octagenarians. I sat with my parents and felt part of the great body of Christ.

Now, when I attend my church the atmosphere is completely different. The preachers are attired in semi-casual. The vibe is friendly. The language is simple, and the service leaders remind me of over-enthusiastic energiser bunnies trying to drum up enthusiasm in the congregation. Everything is apparently ‘super exciting’. There is no time for reflection, for any moments when there is no speaking from the front are filled in with music. The Lord’s Supper is conducted at break-neck speed. We sing a constantly changing repertoire of modern evangelopop, mostly with banal lyrics set to mind-numbingly boring music. The musicians are more gifted than the ones in my childhood, but I feel unmoved. Nor it seems are many of the people around me, for the singing seems half-hearted aside from the odd young woman raising her hands. I feel like a spectator of a slick performance. My children are taken out mid-way through service so that they can be taught in an ‘age-appropriate’ manner, which by the sounds of it involves low expectations, ill-disciplined children and fun. I feel vaguely uneasy about this and wonder how this is connecting my children culturally to our forefathers in the faith.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot my church is doing right. They love God’s Word. They care for the lost. And in the trends I mentioned above, they are far better than many other evangelical churches. I’ve been in one evangelical church where we sang a song with exceptionally trite lyrics while we were encouraged by the song leaders to jump around with our finger-pointing in the air until we (actually I point-blank refused) had done a complete 360. This was repeated. Multiple times. On the opposite extreme, we have other more formal and traditional churches. Often the gospel is absent in the sermons (thank goodness for the liturgy of the Anglican church in these cases), and the youngest members are in their 50s. They are dying churches. So yes, better a church that is living, preaching the gospel and growing.

True, relevance is important. We want people to understand the good news of Christ. However, have we overbalanced? I am not sure that we have understood the importance of difference and tradition. The Church is meant to be a light in a dark world. Darkness and light are polar opposites. Shouldn’t it be a slightly jarring exercise coming into the light? We all know the experience of being blinded when coming out into the sunshine after being in a dark room. Church ought to be that light. It ought to be different.

The Church has seen popular culture and attempted to model it in a ‘sanctified’ way. But this is a mistake. In his book Future Men, Douglas Wilson comments on Pop Culture. “Pop culture is a disposable culture for those who agree to consume it. But because cultures are meant to be handed down to subsequent generations, because cultures are meant to be preserved, a consumable culture is really an anti-culture.” Why on earth would the Church want to copy this anti-culture? We have a rich and vast heritage. One that has been bought with blood. Why would we want to toss this out the window for what is cheap and tacky for the sake of relevance?

Christianity should change and shape culture, not be moulded by it. From my experience, it all seems to be going the other way in evangelical churches. We are shaped by our informal culture into informal services of worship. We are shaped by a culture that cannot bear silence and reflection, so we eject any silence and reflection from our meetings. We are shaped by a culture that separates families, so we eject our young from worshipping with us. We are shaped by a culture that embraces egalitarianism, so we want our leaders to be on our level regular guys, and we despise anything that would make us feel awe because that would remind us that we are dust. We are shaped by a culture that despises the old and embraces novelty, so we throw out tradition and the treasures of the past. And we will have nothing to pass on to our children because we have taught them to do the same. One only prays they don’t toss out the gospel when they toss out our ‘anti-culture’ pop evangelicalism.

Idolatry and Family

Over the past few years, I’ve heard and read a troubling little concept. It runs along the lines of “we’ve got to be careful we are not idolising family.” One time I have heard this is in response to parents who spend significant amounts of money on Christian education. What intrigues me about this is that these warnings to avoid idolising family are becoming more and more common in a period of history when family seems to be less and less important even in Christian circles. It seems to me that we are as a whole less likely to idolise family than previous generations. So what’s going on?

First of all, let’s think about idolatry. What is it? Well, of course, one way of thinking about it is placing something before God. God alone is to be at the centre of our lives. He rules, and we worship him alone. Thus far so good. Nobody I know is encouraging fathers or mothers to hold their families as more important than God.

Another way to think about idolatry is disordered desires. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo wrote on this subject. He said, “Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally.” (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)

So what does this mean for the family? Yes, we can be involved in the sin of idolatry if we love family more than it ought to be loved. One example of this would be if we are not willing to give up our family for the sake of Christ. This is a very real issue for say a Muslim convert.

But I would suggest that in the Western world, we are more likely to be guilty of a disordered desire in the other direction. We are more likely to love our family less than we should. Is spending thousands of dollars a year to give your children a Christian education idolising your children? Of course not. It’s simple obedience to the king. In fact, I suspect that most reasons for not obeying God’s requirement to train our children ‘Christianly’ is rooted in some other idolatry. We have actually loved something more than family when we should have loved it less.

So the next time you hear someone talking about idolising family, ask yourself, “Why are we so prone to identifying as an idol the thing which is least likely in our cultural milieu to be one? Perhaps we do it to excuse ourselves from doing the hard work of what we ought to be doing. In this case, prioritising our families as highly as God calls us to.

Rationality and Belief

If the intellectual climate is such that, when a man comes to the crisis at which he must accept or reject Christ, his reason and imagination are not on the wrong side, then his conflict will be fought out under favourable conditions. Those who help to produce and spread such a climate are therefore doing useful work.

C.S. Lewis

Though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

Austin Farrer