Evangelicalism’s Obsession with Pragmatism Jumps the Shark
Posted by SitePastor in Last Days and Warnings of Apostasy
If the students ever bring 1,000 friends to a service, he wants to let one of them zap him with a Taser.Pastor Turner concedes that the first night of the “Fearless” program was mostly about creating a buzz. But all three ministers talk about the challenge of fighting for teenagers’ attention in a world where they’re swamped by video games, music videos, new media like Twitter and Facebook, and the temptations of drugs, sex and alcohol. Wyatt explains that the youth ministers have to be willing to be extreme to even register on kids’ radars. “We have to plan to get them in the door, and then trust that God is going to do what God is going to do once they’re here,” he says.
Certainly, Celebration is not the only church using these tactics. A Google search for “youth groups + fear factor” turned up multiple discussions of ways to make Christian kids vomit with games like eating chili out of a diaper, and recipes for gross concoctions. It’s a trend that doesn’t please Karen McKinney, director of the youth ministry program and an associate professor of Biblical and theological studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn. McKinney finds programs copying “Fear Factor” and other puke-inducing events to be a contradiction to the church’s message of stewardship. “What did we just teach?” she wonders rhetorically when told about the youth program. “What value is it when we know there are kids starving?… There are ways to teaching young people to be bold without wasting food.”
As an example, McKinney remembers how she was invited to speak about sexual boundaries to a teen group at a church in downtown St. Paul. After brief introductions, she broke the 12 students into two groups and told them they were going to play strip Pictionary. For every round lost, the losing group would have to take off an item of clothing. Before they even started, she says she could hear a 13- year-old girl say under her breath, “This is wrong.” But she said the group went through three rounds before the 13-year-old stood up and said, “I thought the topic was boundaries. We should not be playing this game.” McKinney then asked the other students if they also thought the game was wrong and why they didn’t voice those concerns. “They got the message loud and clear what it means to stand up when it comes to crossing these kinds of boundaries,” she says. Licking peanut butter off somebody’s armpit, she observes, crosses those boundaries without drawing valuable lessons for the Celebration students. “It’s just totally inappropriate,” she says.
Pastor Wyatt doesn’t agree. “Whatever we’re doing, it’s working. We saved 35 young people that night. That’s 35 teenagers saved from drugs, saved from abortion, saved from premarital sex. There are life transformations happening here, and it’s incredible. Thirty-five people’s lives were changed forever. They were saved from an eternity of burning in hell. “I’m sorry the peanut butter was offensive.”
Yeah, want to read more on pragmatism and “ends justifying the means”? (as always I don’t agree with every single letter, but there’s a lot of good stuff in these two articles)
Don’t Judge Us: The Ends Justify the Means by Jim Bublitz of Old Truth
But, does it work? Truth vs. Technique by John Macarthur of Grace to You
soli deo gloria,
Logan Paschke
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