We face several large obstacles to overcome the fun-ethic…our church cultures simply takes it for granted. It is the way we do things. Therefore, to question it is to disturb the way the machine runs. Object to the fun-machinery of modern ministry and you’re just a troubler of Israel who doesn’t know how to lighten up and have fun.

“Did you have fun?” smiles the parent as the child arrives from the Sunday School class. I wonder if Hebrew parents asked their children that question after watching the slaughter of the Yom Kipper goat on the Day of Atonement.
Fun, fun, fun. Fun is seemingly the unquestioned, undisputed right of children. Learning at school must be fun, and curricula are now judged on how much fun they make the learning process. School vacations must be fun, and a veritable industry of vacation activities and entertainments now exists. Sports must be fun, and it is the supposed inherent fun of beating others at games that I suppose makes sports so central to our culture. Eating breakfast must have fun pictures on the box, fun toys inside and fun sugary food to boot. Observe the mountain of toys in the average Western child’s bedroom. What he or she needs most is fun, and Mom and Dad will buy it. Brushing our teeth must be done with fun-shaped toothbrushes, and fun-tasting toothpaste. Bathing must include toys, so that fun may be had in the act of cleaning oneself. Pajamas must have fun pictures on them, and so must the blankets. And at the top of this fun-list is television and console games. Television producers and game developers have been masters at satisfying and creating the appetite for fun. Immediate, interesting, amusing, startling, comical, rambunctious images keep the fun going. And a child without a steady diet of TV or games has no fun, you see.
Perhaps I am not exaggerating when I say that our culture regards fun as the greatest good when it comes to children. Fun is the supreme goal for children.
I am not sure at what point this supreme value loses its centrality, but at some point, an abrupt course change is made. The bored young humans are heartlessly introduced to the truth, “Life’s not all about fun, you know!” This cynical statement is a rather cruel and violent encounter to reality, since nothing in all the child’s prior existence could have revealed this fact. From the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, the child is to have fun.
I don’t know all the origins of this fun-as-supreme-value ethic. I suspect much of it began with Romanticism’s idealizing of the child as the paragon of innocence and virtue, and therefore thinking it deserving of a childhood of uncomplicated play. Perhaps it is just the machinery of affluence: too much money, and too much spare time.
As a parent and pastor, I am concerned with how this idea will shape the religious imagination of my children, and the children in my congregation. I’m worried about how teaching our children to love fun above all else will become a major stumbling-block to their worship. Because the fun-ethic has not escaped church life.
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The believer who puts God first and is not afraid to lose the honor of this world to glorify his God will enjoy him forever. They will receive a Kingdom that cannot be shaken and find their glory in Jesus Christ—the greatest glory known to man.

We have all likely learned lessons by considering Israel’s defeat at Ai in Joshua chapter 7. However, a small detail in their eventual victory over the city in chapter 8 sheds light on two important truths. When the people went against Jericho, they were to take no spoil. Everything was to be destroyed except the gold and silver, which were to go into the treasury of the Lord. This requirement was the very command that Achan violated, which got 36 men killed at Ai and eventually himself.
Achan took the things devoted to destruction in Jericho, which made Israel devoted to destruction themselves, but once Achan was put to death and sin’s just penalty was met, the Lord was with Israel once again. They had been consecrated, and he would go with them and hand Ai over to them.
Here is one of the most instructive things about the defeat of Ai concerning Achan’s sin. When the Lord gives victory to Israel over Ai, the Lord permits them to take spoil for themselves (Joshua 8:2). It makes Achan’s sin even more tragic to think that if he had been patient, not only would he have gotten the spoil he desired, but more of it than he stole from Jericho. There are at least two lessons to learn from this.
The first lesson is that the first-fruits belong to the Lord. This theme of first-fruits runs throughout scripture.
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Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.

Human mastery over nature, exercised technologically, is how human beings experience “progress.” Better medical care to extend life. Cars that prevent crashes and protect us from their effects. More market opportunity for all. We rarely think of how the sweetness of progress comes with corresponding bitter costs—and what that fact teaches about the human condition.
Modern feminism expresses this dilemma of progress. On one hand, women have more schooling and degrees today than ever before; more political and economic rights; and more liberation from unchosen roles. On the other, we no longer really know what a woman is and how other beings (call them men) should relate to women. Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.
For Harrington, feminism rides the wave of deeper movements like industrialization and technological thinking. In the beginning, families were communities, truly the basic units of society. They were economic units where husbands and wives produced what families needed together. These conditions coincided with patriarchal legal and cultural arrangements, but all was softened by the fact that teamwork was essential. Then came “the transition to industrial society,” which took men from the home and created “separate spheres” for men and women. The social and economic conditions for communal marriage vanished, so social mystiques like the “cult of domesticity” were needed to prop up marriage. “Big Romance,” as Harrington calls it, emerged, all the better to encourage women to love their chains. Soon the contradiction was unsustainable.
The first feminism—the good one, as Harrington sees it—defined a woman’s maternal value amidst this mismatch between the mode of production and family form. Such early feminists “valued maternity, care and interdependence alongside just measures of economic and political agency and individual freedom.”
That first feminism did not last, by Harrington’s account, mostly because the market continued to liquify, commodify and alienate and to reduce all human understanding to variations on the pricing mechanism. The result was second-wave feminism, an extreme version of the market mentality, where the male model of market success became the model for everyone. Women could only find their meaning outside the home in paid work, while housework was pawned off on domestics. Sex became transactional. The promise of liberation—indeed, the promise of progress itself— colonized human life through the market mentality.
As a result, as Harrington catalogs, we live in a time when relationships are more difficult to form, when motherhood is neither honored nor aspired to, and female bodies are thought to be the playthings of transgendered technological innovation. Upper-class women can buy some immunity from liquid modernity, but working-class women cannot.
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