Listen to Your Elders, Not the Experts
It is not age-old wisdom, but credentialed expertise that engenders our trust nowadays. We take our cue not from grandpa and grandma and their advice of “a little bourbon on the gums,” but from experts in psychology and sociology penning peer-reviewed studies that tell us obvious, common-sense verities.
Several years ago my wife and I attended a party composed mostly of DINK (dual incomes, no kids) urbanites. We acknowledged to a pregnant woman and her husband that we had two children at home under the age of three. The wife, an expectant first-time mother, expressed her grave fears about crying babies, and confessed that she had spent hours searching for all the right videos she could show her newborn on her iPad to entertain or distract. Jokingly, I responded: “Well, what else can one do?” She, misunderstanding, nodded in solemn agreement.
Call me late to the party, but I just got around to reading Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 best-seller The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, based on the authors’ viral 2015 Atlantic article. It is a decent book, identifying three terrible ideas popular among young Americans: we are fragile human beings who need to be protected from all pain or discomfort; that we should unequivocally trust our emotions; and that life is a battle between categorically good and evil people. Lukianoff and Haidt even offer some solid practical solutions to address these problems.
But as I read Coddling of the American Mind, I kept thinking of that nervous millennial couple clutching their electronic devices, trusting that technology and technocratic expertise, and not inherited wisdom, was the key to perfect parenting. Lukianoff and Haidt identify trends among American youth stemming from that parental faith in technology as something that can protect their children from harm, or, heaven forbid, anything that might curb future academic and professional success.
“On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver’s license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations,” they write. Smartphones and social media have in turn dramatically altered the way American children spend their time and the types of physical and social experiences that guide their development (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The results are alarming, to say the least. “Children deprived of free play are likely to be less competent — physically and socially — as adults. They are likely to be less tolerant of risk, and more prone to anxiety disorders.”
Members of iGen have far higher rates of anxiety and depression, and the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007. Many experts claim frequent use of smartphones and other electronic devices are the primary cause of that increase in mental illness. Add to that paranoid helicopter parenting (“safetyism”) that restricts children’s exposure to danger or ability to “develop their intrinsic antifragility,” and it is little wonder our universities have descended into hotbeds of emotive, activist outrage, prone to violent hysterics when confronted with any perceived threats to students’ well-being.
Lukianoff and Haidt offer many practical solutions for modern parents, most of which are aimed at restraining their protectionist tendencies and letting kids explore the world, encounter ideas different than their own, and even (gasp!) fail.
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The Double-Edged Sword of Ministry Stress
Don’t be a pastor if you want a low-stress job. Remember the doctrine of providence. In addition to this being par for the pastoral course, they aren’t random sand traps. Nothing is outside of God’s sovereign control. God in his infinite power upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures and things.” (2LCF 5:1) The trials are not merely permitted; they are ordained, for our good and his glory (James 1:2–3; Rom. 8:28). Far from being accidental, random, or pointless—they are, like everything else, according to the counsel of his will, to the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:11–12).
[Note: this post is part of the series on enduring in ministry. Other posts can be found here]
It’s early morning, and you wake up with a knot in your stomach. Thinking about the difficult conversations from the day before has you reeling. You head over to make a cup of coffee and check your phone. Attempting to resist the inbox and get your mind on something else, you check the news for a few minutes. But soon enough, you give in and check your email. Two messages in there get your attention. The first is a cryptic request for a meeting from a person with whom you suspect there is trouble. And the other a summary of the giving trend, reflecting a substantial deficit for the year. You take a sip of coffee and wince. You want to return to bed, and the day hasn’t started.
And right here, you have a choice to make. You may not realize it, but it’s an important decision. How are you going to respond to this?
What’s going on? You’re experiencing the stress of pastoral ministry. If you want to endure long-term, you have to be able to identify if and properly deal with it.
A Description of the Problem
Stress is our body’s response to difficulty. These are often undesirable circumstances. And if you think about it for a minute, pastoral ministry has many of these types of situations.
Any of the following would be considered normal or routine in a 6–12 month span of ministry:Seeing a church member fall into sin leading him away from Christ.
Watching a marriage implode over sin.
Trying to bring healing after abuse.
Counseling a grieving family after the death of a loved one.
Having key families leave your church.
Enduring uncharitable and untrue characterizations of your motives.
Watching church members argue about peripheral matters.
Receiving the estimate for the repair project in the church.
Looking at the calendar and seeing Sunday getting closer.This is the pastor’s life, week after week, month after month, year after year. Like waves bringing debris from the sea, the pastor’s life is a steady wave of the residue from the fall.
Any one of these, by themselves, gets our attention. But what if you get them in pairs or triplets or more?
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3 Things You Should Know about Jeremiah
Written by Matthew H. Patton |
Thursday, February 29, 2024
The book of Jeremiah, therefore, was given to help Judah navigate this dire and climactic end to their story. Even as their nation was uprooted at every level (king, temple, land, covenant), Jeremiah shows that the Lord had a redemptive purpose. He removed these shadowy gifts to prepare the way for ultimate, eschatological gifts that will never pass away. The real end of Israel’s story will not ultimately be wrath, but grace and glory.Jeremiah is one of the most daunting books of the Bible. In terms of word count, it is the longest in the whole Bible. It flits between poetic images and narratives, often with little warning, and it does not follow a chronological order. Most of its content is about grim judgment and dire sin, with few glimmers of hope. People often feel perplexed when they try to read it.
But God gave us this book for our encouragement (Rom. 15:4). If we keep three things in mind as we read, we will begin to understand God’s genius and love in giving us this challenging book.
1. The book’s theme is judgment unto restoration.
For all its complexity, the whole book of Jeremiah expounds two basic themes: judgment and restoration. The theme verse highlights these two themes: the Lord set Jeremiah “over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:10). The first four verbs are about judgment (plucking up, breaking down, destroying, and overthrowing). The latter two are about restoration (building and planting).
The judgment texts refer primarily to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BC. The Lord is keen to establish that this dreadful event was the just consequence for Judah’s awful sin. The many allusions to the covenant curses in Deuteronomy 28 show that the Lord is being faithful to what He said He would do when His people betray Him. Indeed, He has been more than patient.
During Jeremiah’s ministry, Judah’s fall became an inevitable event. No amount of repentance or prayer could avert it. That is why the Lord forbids Jeremiah to pray for the people (Jer. 7:16; 11:14). Thus, the only way forward for Judah was to accept judgment, including exile from the land of promise (Jer. 21:8–10).
But the most amazing part of Jeremiah’s message is that the Lord—the same God who brought severe judgment on them—also intends to reverse the curse (Jer. 31:28) and heal His people (Jer. 30:12–17; cf. Deut. 32:39). He will do more than simply returning Judah to the pre-exile status quo.
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Poor Richard’s Christianity
Dawkins’ conundrum, of course, is that all the nice culturally Christian things he enjoys have been brought to him courtesy of “bad” Christians—those dreaded orthodox types who actually took the Bible seriously when it said, for instance, that man is made in the image of God. Dawkins likes the idea of human rights, but he has also decried “speciesism,” which leads him to conclude some humans (like the unborn or the mentally disabled) have fewer rights than others. But why stop there? Why assume Richard Dawkins has any rights?
Breaking news: Area Englishman announces he enjoys eating but is still glad that all the farms and gardens are dying. Oh wait, actually it’s Richard Dawkins, explaining that he considers himself a “cultural Christian,” even though he’s glad that fewer and fewer Westerners consider themselves “believing Christians.” In the full interview, he expresses shock and dismay at the display of a Ramadan message at the terminus in London’s King’s Cross station. Christianity as a belief system may still be “all nonsense,” but if it’s between a Muslim culture and a Christian culture, Dawkins says he will vote “team Christian” every time.
This isn’t exactly a new sentiment for the former New Atheist rock star. Some of us remember the small tweetstorm he impishly ignited back in 2018, when he said he much preferred the lovely bells of Winchester Cathedral to the “aggressive-sounding” cry of “Allahu Akbar!” His love for the King James Bible is also well known—though he once urged his atheist friends to make sure “religion” isn’t allowed to “hijack” that great “cultural resource.” One wonders exactly what kind of “resource” Dawkins thinks the Bible is. A collection of aphorisms? Ten rules for life? The best fairy tales ever?
Whatever it is, Dawkins thinks it’s sort of, well, nice, and he thinks Christianity is “a fundamentally decent religion” by comparison with Islam.
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