Is your church a safe place for anyone in the community to come?
I know that’s a loaded question… “Adam, safe for whom?” In this case, I mean is your church a safe place to come regardless of immigration status? As a San Diego resident living in Mid-City you might imagine this is highly relevant as we live in a community of documented and undocumented immigrants and refugees.
On Tuesday, our family of five returned from a 10-day trip to Mexico City. We had a great time going places none of us had ever been before. We stayed in a beautiful apartment 8-stories above a busy Centro Historico street. We went to museums. We got lost looking for an ATM. We toured pyramids. We went to the zoo. We ate expensive food in restaurants that was bad and cheap street food that was amazing. Our 6-year old won too many games of Uno. In a frenzy we put together a puzzle before we caught our flight.
Like everyone else I was shocked by the news that Hobby Lobby, a privately owned company whose owners successfully challenged the Affordable Care Act mandate that their health insurance cover birth control on grounds that they are a closely held owned company driven by Christian morality, got caught smuggling Iraqi antiquities into the United States.
Earlier this week I wrote about the journey we are on in our household to bring a dead place back to life.
Want to know a crazy by-product of this process? A dramatic decrease in waste.
We bought our house about 18 months ago. But the house wasn’t new to us since we’d lived across the street for 7 years prior to buying it.
It’d been a rental for about 20 years prior to our buying it. And for 7 years we watched as people moved in, people moved out, sometimes they’d stay for 6 months and sometimes they’d stay a couple years. Some we were friends with but most we barely got to know their names before they moved out.
Like [apparently] everyone else I watched the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why last week.
I actually started watching it a couple weeks back but stopped after the first episode, it just wasn’t for me. But I watched the other 12 episodes in two days as I was traveling to New Jersey.
It was an intense couple of days.
With that in mind…
By now you’ve seen the video a million times. A United Airline customer is forcibly removed from his seat. Bloodied and confused he later wandered up and down the aisle repeating that he just wanted to go home.
As bad as the actual moment was for the passenger and fellow passengers on the plane it all got 1 million times worse online 24 hours later. The CEO issued a poorly worded press release followed by an internal memo which seemed sympathetic to the airline employees rather than the situation itself. This lead to a $1.4 billion selloff on Wall Street, followed by days and days of ad nauseam debate about the facts of what happened.
A few weeks back my church hosted a screening of the film, Screenagers. Afterwards I was part of a panel that helped parents process the movie plus answer questions about social media use in the home.
The crux of the entire documentary was this exchange between the mom and her teenage daughter:
Mom: “How can you convince me to get a smartphone?”
Daughter: “I’d look cool.”
Historically, youth ministry has always been a young adults game. For many their first foray into working on staff at a church/parachurch, or even a first real professional job of any kind, comes with a call to youth ministry.
As I’ve gone to youth ministry conferences and youth pastor meet-ups over the years they always seem dominated by folks in their 20s and 30s.