The Mileses

Paul and Olena Miles with Grace Abroad Ministries

missiology

Changing the Conversation about College

Churches should want their kids to believe in Christ and live ethical lives, but we tend to stop short. Often we just want a kid to confess Christ at some point while he is young and then refrain from certain sins while he lives with his parents, but we often make no real long-term investment in his spiritual well-being. Of course, when he becomes a complete apostate by the time he’s 20, we sit back and says things like, “Yea, he never really believed in the first place” or “These young’ns just don’t know how good they have it” or “College is so expensive, he’ll never pay it off.” So, I have been wondering, is there a better way to love our churches’ students than this?

I have been thinking about the apostasy epidemic for a while, and I have thought of a change in conversation that we could be having with High Schoolers who are thinking about what to do after graduation. Here it is:

Don’t just ask: “Where will you go to college?”
Instead ask: “Where will you go to church?”

Pretty simple, right? As simple as it is, I think that this conversation could change lives.

The college search often starts with questions like majors, scholarships, campus size/activities, and which colleges will accept the applicant. A high schooler might consider a host of factors, then narrow it down and pick his favorite. Then he moves out there and gets thrown into the world of class, clubs, friends, newfound freedom, etc. and has to navigate around all of this while searching for a church. All of this is done with the assumption that there will be a good church near the college to take him in — an assumption that I seriously encourage you to question!

But if we start by looking for a church first, then things line up a bit differently. There are several good churches around America and there are good church lists that you can go to and find one. Most universities do not have a good church nearby, but many if not most good churches are within a reasonable distance of a university.

Start there.

If you are talking with someone who wants to go to college, but he does not know where, then encourage him first to find a good church and even offer to help him find one. The Dallas/Fort Worth area is a good starting place. When I was a student at the University of Texas at Arlington, I actually had several good churches within a commutable distance. The DFW area is a hot spot for solid churches and there are several colleges and universities scattered throughout. Pastor conferences are another good opportunity for networking, though it may be difficult for a High Schooler to skip school for a week (it could be a great option for homeschoolers, though!). If the student can find a couple of pastors that he likes, then it’s a matter of looking at the schools in those areas, finding which ones have the right majors, campuses, clubs, etc. and narrowing down the options from there.

This is not the only solution to the mass exodus of the young, but it is certainly a good start.

Book Review: Reproducing Grace

“Anyone can start a Free Grace Movement in their region with little to no money. I am here to walk with you through the process.”

This is the opening to Joe Filer’s new book, Reproducing Grace: Starting a Free Grace Movement in Your Region. It is also an introduction to verbiage and perhaps even a new mindset that could be pivotal in bringing positive change to a movement. Note that Filer does not speak of “the Free Grace Movement” as a greater movement that either does or does not have a presence in your locality, but rather he speaks of “a Free Grace Movement” as something that could potentially begin anywhere. ­But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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The (Often) One-Way Street of Ageism

I have recently stumbled upon some short videos that I thought were worth sharing. In the greater context, I have been thinking much about the topic of ageism in the Church lately, and these two videos strike a chord.

The first video is this hilarious and timeless “Four Yorkshiremen Sketch” from At Last the 1948 Show (which, was aired in 1967 and has nothing to do with the year, 1948):

The second is this heartwarming video of teenagers trying a Nintendo Entertainment System (a Japanese gaming system that was launched in North America in 1986):

The first video features four rich men gathered around drinking Château de Chasselas and talking about the old days when they were poor. They start with how they used to be lucky to drink tea, then they one-up each other with more ridiculous stories of how hard their childhoods were, to the point where John Cleese’s character claims, “We used to get up in morning at half past ten at night, half an hour before we’d gone to bed, eat a lump of poison, work twenty-nine hours a day at mill for a penny a lifetime, come home and each night Dad would strangle us and dance about on our graves.” Then Marty Feldman’s character follows, “Aye, you try and tell that to the young people of today. Will they believe ya?” To which everyone responds in unison, “No!”

The second video has a completely different feel. As opposed to the grumpy comedians in the first video, this video has teenagers that are genuinely excited about the opportunity to play with an NES. Their eyes light up when they’re asked if they want to play and they laugh at themselves as the figure out how to turn it on and blow on the cartridge. Toward the end of the clip, the teens give reviews that include the phrases, “It’s a shame that kids miss out on this, really” and “Honestly, even today, if you had one, you’d be the coolest person out of your friends.” They were so respectful to Millennials and GenXers who grew up with the NES.

These two seemingly unrelated videos illustrate something that I have been noticing lately: that ageism is often a one-way street. By that, I mean that most generational angst comes from the older generation and is pointed at the younger. Granted, there plenty of examples of young anger pointed at the old. The Baby Boomer motto, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” comes to mind. But it seems to me that the fallen human nature cultivates an ageism that is typically more rooted in the older generation. I bring up the “Four Yorkshiremen Sketch,” because it is performed by an older generation in the 60s and has been performed many times since and it always carries the same punch. Regardless of when you tell this joke, it is always funny because you always have that stereotype of the older people glorifying in their hardships while looking down on the youngsters who would never believe it.

This ageism was certainly a problem in Paul’s day, as he tells Timothy, “Let nobody disesteem your youth” (1 Tim. 4:12). I wrote about that in another post, which received mostly positive reviews, save one Baby Boomer on Facebook who insisted that the word, Boomer, is worse than the N-Word… I assure you it is not!

God told Samuel, “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). Granted, we do not have insight to a man’s heart like God does, but if we look at a person and only see his age, then we are probably looking at the wrong thing.

Works do not save and neither does faith: Toward a better FG/LS Dialogue

It is no secret that I hold to a doctrinal position that is called, “Free Grace,” which advocates for a gospel of salvation that is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Free Grace is often contrasted to systems that suppose faith alone in Christ alone to be insufficient. It can also be contrasted to those positions that say faith alone in Christ alone is unnecessary, but while my experience has been that most people under the umbrella of Christendom are on the “unnecessary” side the pendulum, Free Gracers are more comfortable engaging those on the “insufficient” side.
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