I sometimes sit and think about how strange a time it is to be alive. In the world of technology, more has changed in the last 200 years than in all the time leading up to it. That’s pretty incredible. It means we have to be willing to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Even though there may be things that were true of the human experience for a very long time, they may very well not be true any more.

I was thinking especially about cameras. They’re less than 200 years old. In terms of an art medium, this is one that is extremely young. Even though we’d have difficulty imagining life without them. Which makes me wonder what kind of affect the advent of cameras has had on growing up.

It wasn’t until 1900 that the first camera was mass produced, and shortly after that it became something of a household staple. Regular families started having pictures of their kids. It wasn’t long before they started having pictures of their vacations, too.

What was it like for the parents seeing their children grow up with this crazy device that freezes a moment in time and saves it forever? It must have been fascinating.

The advent of personal video cameras, I’m sure, was a similar experience. When I was growing up, my family didn’t own a camcorder, but I was fascinated by them. I imagine that it would be a surreal experience for me to watch a preteen version of myself on screen. Yet millions of people now have that experience and don’t think twice about it. It just is the way it is.

Now it seems like something similar is happening again with the introduction of social media. Search YouTube and you will find millions of videos people’s children. There’s practically an entire generation of children that are growing up on YouTube. That’s bizarre.

It seems impossible to predict the effects of a rapidly mutating social and technological culture on Children. But part of me wishes I could start right now and experience it for myself.

A woman in Massachusetts is being charged on murder and manslaughter claims of two children. Both were stabbed to death. That’s pretty hard to read. It’s pretty hard to write too.

Well, today was the annual March for Life in Washington DC where prolife supporters from all over the country come and show their disgust for the brutal legislation.

What does that have to do with a murderous mother of two deceased children? One of those children wasn’t even born yet!

What kind of a ridiculous double standard is this? A woman can walk into a doctors office and have her child dismembered and vacuumed out of her body. In a lot of places, your tax dollars will even help her do it. But, if she walked into her bathroom and plunged a blade through her abdomen into the child, she’d be convicted as a murderer.

Is there a reason our country doesn’t see the double standard? Ridiculous.

The public schools in our area are closed today, so my ten year old niece was home. We ate lunch at McDonalds this afternoon, along with my mother. At the restaurant, my niece ran into a classmate who also happened to be out with his family.

The boy wasn’t someone that my niece was really friends with. Just acquaintances from school. But within seconds of seeing him in the restaurant, she had struck up a conversation and staked out a seat for us next to him and his family. By the end of the meal, she’d asked to invite him over to play for the afternoon.

I spent most of the time amazed at how safe the two of them felt building a friendship with one another. It struck me that that kind of social confidence isn’t something you find very often in adults. We’ve all usually had too many bad experiences, so we keep virtually everyone at arms length until they can prove, in some respect, that being in an actual friendship with them is safe.

It makes me wonder what our personal and corporate ministry endeavors would look like if we threw caution to the wind and simply pursued relationships with one another regardless of the risk.

Because, it seems to me, that ministry and evangelism and discipleship happen both in and out of this kind of relational caution. But when we have our guard up and aren’t honest about it, I think we do a lot more damage than good. It could be argued that it’s from that kind of fear that the church got the holier-than-thou reputation. In an attempt to defend themselves from being hurt by other people, they put on whatever costume is necessary—and it’s totally inauthentic and thus, ultimately ineffective.

Although I’m far from being the one confident enough to lead this charge, I must wonder what it would look like for a small community to decide together that the risk of being hurt is less than the benefit of authentic ministry.

1. The Pace Car

You know, when there are three lanes of traffic, the left most lane usually being the “fast” lane for passing? But for some dumbfounding reason there are three cars driving side by side with no one passing anyone else. The car on the left is the pace car. He drives me crazy.

2. Children’s Television Programming

Yeah, like I need to write more on this topic. Want to know how I feel about Children’s TV, here are a few other posts:

I Loath Children’s Television
Miley Cyrus, MySpace and Our Moral Decline
Sex is Getting Younger

3. Expectations

I think that in a way, expectations are the great ruiner of all things that could be enjoyed. I like chocolate ice cream and I like vanilla ice cream, but if I get vanilla when I was expecting chocolate I would not enjoy it. I don’t think life on a cosmic level is too much different.

I could do without expectations.

This is a topic I would very much like to write about in length. Unfortunately, I haven’t collected all my thoughts about it in a concise enough manner yet. So, I’ll just spend a few minutes introducing my hatred of children’s television.

A few years back, I worked for an organization who made it their responsibility to monitor and review television content. When I arrived on the scene, my first responsibility was a children’s programming study. It mostly focused on programming that aired on networks geared for Children (i.e., Cartoon Network, Disney, Nickelodeon, etc). It also focused on Saturday morning, and after school programming on network television.

The official results of the study were unsettling. The violence content was staggering. The sexual innuendo was, not only present, but prevalent on networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Even foul language made it’s way in quite a bit. Spongebob Square Pants had an entire episode devoted to learning to “talk like a sailor”, in which they bleeped to F word somewhere around 40 times, if I remember correctly.

But, to tell you the truth, it isn’t the overt content that bothers me the most. It’s the subtle luring from “harmless” children’s programming into adult themed programming. If you’d like an example of what I mean–consider Brittany Spears, Justin Timberlake and soon, Miley Cirus. These are sex icons, and soon my nine year old niece’s role model will be one too.

What makes this so much worse, is that a parent can easily overlook the dangers in allowing their children to watch more than small doses of television, because in much of the content there isn’t anything obviously dangerous. The child may not immediately exhibit obvious signs of the television’s negative influence. So, parents may go on assuming that their kids aren’t being affected as predicted. However, it’s not the immediate affects that are dangerous, it’s the long term effects.

For example, seeing a cartoon character catch on fire for laughs likely won’t lead to the child lighting someone on fire. However, after three years of becoming attached the Drake & Josh on Nickelodeon, Josh’s sexual promiscuity–and eventual appearance on People Magazine’s monthly cover–will probably ring much louder in their memory than mom’s warning against premarital sex. Unfortunately by that time, it’s too late.

Here are a few statistics concerning children and sexual activity I’ve found as I’ve been doing my research. This came from a study at the University of Michigan.

• Most parents don’t talk to their kids about sex and relationships, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Most schools do not offer complete sex education programs. So kids get much of their information about sex from TV.
• Kids are probably not learning what their parents would like them to learn about sex from TV.
• Sexual content is a real presence on TV.  Soap operas, music videos, prime time shows and advertisements all contain lots of sexual content, but usually nothing about contraception or safer sex.
• The number of sex scenes on TV has nearly doubled since 1998, with 70% of the top 20 most-watched shows by teens including sexual content.  Fifteen percent of scenes with sexual intercourse depict characters that have just met having sex.  Of the shows with sexual content, an average of five scenes per hour involve sex.
• Watching sex on TV increases the chances a teen will have sex, and may cause teens to start having sex at younger ages.  Even viewing shows with characters talking about sex increases the risk of sexual initiation

I’m going to write more about this in the future and something parents have every reason to be concerned about.

I was hanging out with a friend of mine this morning for some unofficial bible study. We ended up in James and inevitably we ended up talking about the condition of the church—something we both agree is not in good shape. During the discussion, I got to wondering what kinds of complaints our kids have for the church we, by then, will foster.

Without a doubt, the church in the coming generation will look different than it did in the last generation. People, especially young people, are leaving the church in exodus—not the faith, the church. So, assuming that God makes good on his promises to keep his own, in 40 years, us young people will be in our parent’s position. We will deciding on how things are structured and how they are executed. And just like our parents we’ll probably be taking some things too far and missing the heart of the matter in some ways.

In fact, we’ll probably be doing some things that we don’t even remember why we started doing them in the first place—or at least why we continue to do them. And, like the generation before us, the new eyes reading the scriptures will see the errors that have become invisible to us.

Therein was my question born. When that day comes, what complaints will our children have, what errors will our children see, what reform will they demand? My friend answered clearly in one short little sentence. It hit me hard—almost like he’d actually hit me with something.

He said this: “Why are you so angry?”

Today, perhaps our generation’s frustration and anger with the current church culture is justified, maybe even a righteous anger. But, will we be able to see the errors corrected, then move on in grace and peace? Or will we, like many generations before us, make the good reform a detriment to ourselves.

Perhaps by the grace of God, perhaps through the word,  perhaps by prayer, their question won’t be such a painful one.

I’m an uncle twice over. Once of a nine year old girl and once of a nine month old boy. I’m not a father, but my family is close and being an uncle gives me a small glimpse into what it must feel like to worry about a child.

Girls are becoming women faster. Boys are becoming men faster. Well, at least in terms of independence and sexuality. The culture seems to gear nearly everything toward sexual value. Girls are made valuable by being counted as sexually desirable, while boys are made so by being able to successfully solicit sex (see American Pie, Sex and the City, the 40 Year Old Virgin and just about anything on MTV).

This is unsettling, to say the very least.

A couple of years back I worked for a not-for-profit company as an entertainment analyst. My first assignment was to watch and document children’s television. I spent nearly eight hours every day for several months watching Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel and others. What I learned was startling.

Children’s television was once a tool for teaching (see Sesame Street). Today it’s a babysitter, which the media is using very strategically. The goal, perhaps not directly, and I’m sure for many of the writers not intentionally, is to condition children. The earlier people think sexually, the earlier they are spending money on sexually minded or oriented products.

It sounds like a wild conspiracy theory. I thought so too before I got to see it first hand in a highly concentrated environment.

Consider this: Nickelodeon is owned by MTV. During afternoon programming (i.e., as kids are coming home from school) on Nickelodeon, it’s not at all uncommon to see advertisements for programming on the parent network MTV or MTV2 along side advertisements for toys and music. MTV’s afternoon programming includes some of the raunchiest entertainment on television (see the dating show Next on MTV; you’ll only need to watch about 2 minutes. Take note of how young the participants on this show are).

The Disney Channel, which in its basic programming appears harmless, doesn’t have the best track record for producing respectable men and women as roll models (see Brittany Spears and Justin Timberlake). The Disney Channel is a cycle. Yesterday I saw Hannah Montana on the cover of a tabloid.

Some days of the week the Cartoon Network has been known to play it’s night time adult programming during the day (see Aqua Teen Hunger Force).

Why do the Bratz dress like that? Why do Barbies have such huge breasts?

Here’s my problem. Here’s what I want to know: why must my nine year old niece wear a bikini? Why is she asking to shave her legs already? Why do her skirts keep getting shorter and shorter? Why do all her favorite songs (sold on kids CD’s) all seem to have sexual overtones? She doesn’t understand these things yet. But she will soon and someone stands to make a killing on her sexually dependant subconscious.

It kills me to think my niece might one day view her own value through her sex appeal. Consider Victoria’s Secret. Why make sexy ads for women, unless the ad is designed to stimulate a woman’s perceived value as seen sexually by men? It kills me to think one day my nephew may be a man helping to drive women in that direction through his own sexual perceptions and standards.

It isn’t about ruining children, it’s about making money and there’s tons of money in sex. So that’s the question. How do you protect a child from a system and industry that begins with Kidz Bop and ends with the Pussycat Dolls? That begins with the Disney Channel and ends with pornography? How do you protect children without sheltering them from the realities of the world? How do you help make them wise, discerning, self-respecting, God fearing?

I have no idea. I’m not sure anyone does.